Fragments of a blog
Fragments of a blog
I didn’t expect to ever agree with Masha Gessen again on anything but her conclusions in this piece make sense to me. She asks, among other questions: Is there any reason, at this point, to think that a tiny drop in…
Masha Gessen wrote in The New Yorker three weeks ago: A Belarusian-language literature has been developing, and Alexievich has expressed regret that she cannot write in the language of her country. At present, the language of Belarus appears to be…
In Slate, Masha Gessen writes about the death of Ibragim Todashev, a presumed associate of the elder Tsarnaev, who was shot by an FBI agent during an interrogation. But central to Gessen’s piece is another story, that of a middle-aged Russian woman…
I have recently posted notes on prof. Borenstein’s piece, helpful as far as Russia is concerned but not much relevant to the Tsarnaev case. Now, moving on to Masha Gessen writing in The New Yorker: While Tsarnaev may look white,…
The Russian government has found a pretext to cancel FLEX, an exchange program that let Russian teenagers spend several months with American host families and go to a local school. Masha Gessen comments on the deceptive framing of the story…
Masha Gessen’s new book (via Languor Management) It’s titled Two Babushkas: How My Grandmothers Survived Hitler’s War and Stalin’s Peace. The Guardian reviewer, Virginia Rounding, is “captivated” by Gessen’s account. I’m not–this kind of storyline is typical of a generation,…