Fragments of a blog
Fragments of a blog
Observer.com, formerly the New York Observer, reports from Russia: Thursday morning in a Moscow courtroom, YouTuber Ruslan Sokolovsky was sentenced to three and a half years probation for an August stunt in which he filmed himself playing Pokémon Go in…
Prompted by Language Hat’s latest post on Ivan Goncharov’s Oblomov, I wondered if its protagonist could be described as “fine-souled” and ran a Google search for the expression. The second link on the results page brought me this: Here the sensitive and…
…when you’re looking through a depressingly serious, heart-rending, gut-wrenching piece and suddenly a minor detail sends you into a fit of liberating laughter: Over dinner—Dreher, who was observing Lent, confined himself to oysters and crab cakes—I learned what happened when…
This is not fake news: The truckers went on strike this time after the Russian government announced it would double the Platon [toll-collection system] tariff as of April 15… [The] government softened that blow in March, temporarily raising the fee by a…
Peter Pomerantsev, writing about the Belarus Free Theater on the LRB blog: The journey took me out of the unspoilt Stalinist centre of the city. (The architecture is known as ampir in Russian, which sounds like, though doesn’t mean, ‘empire’, and…
Three headlines, all about Bill O’Reilly’s getting fired from Fox News. All translations are mine. The BBC Russian Service: The Fox host who called Putin a killer has been fired because of a sex scandal. RT news in Russian: The…
Christianity Today reports from Moscow: It’s official. Jehovah’s Witnesses can no longer practice their faith freely in Russia, where the Supreme Court on Thursday declared the pacifist religious organization an “extremist group” and banned all of its activity. The judge ordered…
This reads like a good summary of what I’ve read in Vedomosti: Russia has drafted a bill that blocks anonymous proxies and VPN services that refuse to prohibit access to forbidden websites… According to the bill, anonymizers and VPN services will be required…
The Kremlin has called the ECHR’s ruling on the 2004 Beslan attack “absolutely unacceptable.” And yet, unless Russia wins a reversal, it will have to accept it. After all, what did it expect? Everyone who has been paying attention knows that Russia bungled…
More details in the curious case of Turovsky & Meduza vs. Kramer & the Gray Lady, by RuNet Echo at Global Voices. “Take one text by Turovsky on Meduza, then take a second text by Turovsky on Meduza, stir, stir, and…
The New York Times won three Pulitzer prizes yesterday, one awarded… …for international reporting for a series on Russia’s surreptitious assertion of power. The series, a collaboration among The Times’s international, Washington and investigative teams, explored how Russia was expanding its influence at home…
Christopher Caldwell’s speech at Hillsdale College, How to Think About Vladimir Putin, suggests an angle and a point of view symptomatic of a certain strain of thought on the American right. I believe it rests on error. No matter what…