(a.k.a. Yakov Borisovich Levandovsky) I came back from vacation this week and found myself urgently in need of a warm winter shapka. I lost my last one after I gave it to some guy in exchange for a bottle of…
January 14th, 2008 | Comments (1)
ST. PETERSBURG — The morning air was icy and the mood tense as people gathered for Other Russia’s pre-protest press conference outside the Yabloko office and it was obvious that something was going to go down, and soon…
December 11th, 2007 | Leave Comment
This article was first published on November 21, 2007 in The eXile. It was just after 1 a.m. on Monday morning when I pulled my rental car up to my apartment building. I’d just spent the last 48 hours working as…
November 21st, 2007 | Comments Off on Taxi Driver: Gypsy Cab Confessions in Moscow
They get in your mind… They make you do things! – General Owen referring to the Brain Bug in Starship Troopers. This isn’t a movie, kids. The Brain Bug is real. It doesn’t look anything like those big fat brain worms…
August 21st, 2007 | Comments Off on Toxoplasma: The Obscure Cat-Shit Parasite That Explains Europe
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…
August 11th, 2006 | Comments (2)
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…
December 2nd, 2005 | Leave Comment
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…
October 21st, 2005 | Comments (43)
Listen to the Radio War Nerd podcast [subscribe here] with guest Gunnar Hrafn Jonsson of Iceland Public Radio on the massacre in Orlando and how online Islamic State jihadis are dealing with battlefield defeats and the shrinking caliphate. Subscribe to Radio War Nerd through the show’s Patreon page.
Last Sunday I was grumbling about how there are so many great books about war and not that many great war movies. That got a lot of readers lobbing in their suggestions for good war movies. One reminded me that…
Today’s Civil War Caturday (by the way, that’s pronounced “Kivil War Katurday”), right in the middle of Easter. Got me thinking about my religion, if I have one now, and I realized I do, kind of: The Monitor and the…
Seems like I ought to do something religious today, so I picked a battle from the the ultimate military expression of religious devotion: The Thirty Years War (1618-1648), Europe’s way of debating the Catholic vs. Protestant thing by counting corpses.
Somebody with a face finally died in Libya. His name was Tim Hetherington, an Oxford literature graduate who made that documentary Restrepo about an Afghan base.
Stories about the riots in Northern Nigeria are starting to come in, full of amazing details and ridiculous lies. The lies are the first thing you notice.
One of the strange things about this war in Libya is how slowly it’s moving.
Today we’ve got election riots in Northern Nigeria, a military mutiny in Burkina Faso, and massacres in Ivory Coast. They look like separate stories, but they’re not. It’s all one story, a long, slow war between the coastal christianized people…
