Fragments of a blog
Fragments of a blog
It has been reported that hundreds of thousands, perhaps a million people have taken to the streets in Hong Kong to protest against a law that would make the city’s residents extraditable to China. A huge turnout for a city…
Via LanguageHat, the latest post on Maciej Cegłowski’s Idle Words blog. Gluten Free Antarctica seems to be the third installment of Cegłowski’s wonderful reminiscences of a voyage to “the only continent without a Michelin star.” The ship in question is Akademik Shokalsky (also spelled Shokalskiy), apparently…
Having moved to the US in 1974, Alexander Yanov published The Russian New Right: Right-Wing Ideologies in the Contemporary USSR in 1978. John C. Campbell summarized it in Foreign Policy: Yanov, one of the most perceptive and stimulating Russian political…
From A fire in the system: Social implications of the tragedy in Kemerovo by Alexander Firsov in Forbes Russia: the disaster, he writes, will confirm… …a sense of profound moral and managerial corrosion underlying the system, which [corrosion] cannot be…
One of the memorable works at last year’s Someone 1917 exhibition in Moscow was this 1917 painting (alternative links: 1, 2) by Vladimir A. Kuznetsov (1877-1960). Its title can be translated as God’s People or Godly Folk. These are Old Believers praying…
Ivan Bunin, the first Russian author to win the Nobel prize in literature, was prone to grumbling about fellow writers’ and poets’ follies. His bitter shots hit the mark most of the time, but occasionally he missed and got hit…
The organizers of Revolution: Russian Art 1917–1932 – the London show mentioned in this post – seem to believe that Russian arts burst into dazzling blossom in 1917 as the revolutionary spring ushered in a kingdom of liberty: …we will mark the historic centenary by…
Unexpectedly, reading Namara Smith’s review of Edmund Gordon’s biography of Angela Carter was so rewarding that I keep coming back to the piece. This bit in particular made my day, more than one in fact: Carter was enthralled by fashion,…
I read a brief excerpt from Amos Oz’s latest novel, Judas, this morning, then looked for reviews of the book and the author’s recent interviews. Here’s one from September 2016: But as much as the young Oz was enthralled by Jesus,…
The Moscow Times reports: A new bill banning anonymous users from using online messenger apps has been submitted to the Russian parliament. The plans would require users of apps such as WhatsApp and Telegram to identify themselves with their cell phone…
David Dayen in The New Republic: Michael Froman, who is now U.S. trade representative but at the time was an executive at Citigroup, wrote an email to Podesta on October 6, 2008, with the subject “Lists.” Froman used a Citigroup…
According to the cybersecurity specialist Crowdstrike and The Guardian, at least two groups of Russian hackers have “been lurking” in the computer systems of the Democrat National Committee (DNC) “since at least last summer.” However the DNC’s Trump dossier was only leaked…