STEPANAKERT, NAGORNO-KARABAKH — It took my taxi driver and me an hour to get out of Yerevan. Most of it was spent waiting in line to fill up his gas tank. Not with gasoline. No, it was the kind of…

All these years, I’ve been wondering to myself, “What’s wrong with Russians? What’s with their strange Byzantine ways? And what the fuck is the deal with that murse thing?” “Murse?” you ask. The stubby little word may sound unfamiliar, but…

Editorial pages on both sides of the Atlantic have been calling more and more aggressively for the expulsion of a former superpower from the G8 group of leading industrial democracies. For once, we here at the eXile couldn’t agree with…

Currently, there are somewhere between 5 and 7 million children in America diagnosed with ADD, or Attention Deficit Disorder. Some of them have been fed small doses of amphetamine since they four or five years old. And that’s freaking out…

In much the same way as the War Nerd gets a boner from cataloging exotic and bloody conflicts, I get my stiffies from closely following the progress of the world’s most cunning and devious infectious diseases. I dunno — maybe…

First, a public confession: as several readers pointed out, I made a disgraceful error in my article “Frey’s Fall” (eXile #230), when I mis-identified Ralph Wiggum as “Ralph Wiggins.” There is, of course, no “Wiggins” in the Simpsons. There can…

A year ago I wrote a poem, concerning nineties. I will translate it from my excellent Russian to my broken English as best, as I can. The Nineties I drunked “Rakia” I have fucked Maria I had my happiness accented…

Christopher Hitchens is out to save America. He’s brought the cross of St. George–Orwell, that is–along on the crusade. He’s everywhere in the American media lately, lending his accent and vast self-importance to the cause of Freedom. You might wonder…

This article was first published in The eXile in September 2005. A funny thing happened while I was surfing rightwing sites like Free Republic and Little Green Footballs this week: I discovered that Mark Steyn, the world’s only warmongering Canadian journalist,…

“My Friend Leonard” James Frey Riverhead Hardcover 2005 $24.95 See it on Amazon.com… James Frey is a liar. A bad one. And hugely successful. You can discover just how bad a liar he is by reading his second novel, My…

“Mao: the Unknown Story” by Jung Chang and Jon Halliday Random House 2005 See it on Amazon.com… When I watched the second Addams Family movie, I knew there’d be a “blockbuster biography” of Mao coming soon. The key scene comes…

“A Million Little Pieces” by James Frey. Doubleday 2003, $22.95 *** This is the worst thing I’ve ever read. A Million Little Pieces is the dregs of a degraded genre, the rehab memoir. Rehab stories provide a way for pampered…

Our friend,the Roundworm Today we’ll introduce you to the Intestinal Roundworm, a hideous parasite which infects one out of every four people in the world. That’s not a misprint: one out of four. More than one and a half BILLION…

Cyst (left) in child’s brain. Everybody knows a few of the more overhyped parasites who infest this great rotting corpse we call Earth, but most people don’t realize how many of them there are, and how resourceful they are in finding…

“Aging is a process which we know will go from bad to worse, until it comes to the worst of all.” – Arthur Schopenhauer In Schopenhauer’s world, you’re not allowed to die quickly, the way people die in movies. You’re…

This book is a four-hundred page testimonial to the intellectual and moral bankruptcy of the American Russia-watching mafia. In its pages, Michael McFaul condemns himself again and again with staggering non-sequiturs, self-serving lies, crude misrepresentations of his own past and the recent history of Russia, and repeated failures to meet even the most basic standards of academic rigor.

No, we’ve been censored, by, of all people, David Johnson, a squeamish Quaker who runs the once-highly-influential Johnson’s Russia List… acting on the orders of his sponsor, a Democrat Party wonk and Stanford professor whose dedication to promoting democracy in the former Soviet Union is matched only by his relentless four-year campaign to censor and marginalize the eXile.

It was a week for do-it-yourselfers in the war world. A little lesson for us all, that you don’t need a lot of hardware to make war. All you need is the old standbys: hunting rifles, blasting caps, and trucks…

The Europeans have turned against America in the War On Terror. They believe that Americans don’t understand a thing about the world. That Americans are ignorant, shallow and drunk with military might. In such a people’s hands, all that weaponry…

Let’s see how well you know your military history. Give the date and place of this comminique: “Our Victorious Forces Liberate Zalambessa!! Our victorious and heroic air and ground forces have liberated the town of Zalambessa after completely annihilating the…

They asked me to think about how war would change over the next 150 years for the eXile’s anniversary issue. Weird to think about it: wars going on when you’re dead. My doctor told me it’s maybe 15 more years…

Last column I asked readers to suggest wars that’d be more fun for the US to get involved in than Colombia. I got some great answers — and thanks everybody who wrote in — but when I looked into the…

Every day America gets deeper into the shit in Colombia. We’re dumping planeloads of cash on the Colombian army — $1.5 billion is what Rumsfeld’ll admit, so you gotta assume it’s more like ten billion with the rest squeezed through…

This year’s Oscar for best military comedy has to go to the island-claiming “war” between those great military powers, Spain and Morocco. It was a sidesplitter from beginning to end. Just imagine the battle of Iwo Jima turned into a…

Waiting for Dubya and his Texas cronies to decide whether to hit Iraq is like waiting for Christ. It’s so goddamn slow, and you start kinda doubting it’s gonna happen at all. American tv reminds me of Sunday school teachers…