Fragments of a blog
Fragments of a blog
Yesterday’s World Cup final was interesting in more ways than one: Protest group Pussy Riot, long a thorn in Vladimir Putin’s side, claimed responsibility Sunday for four people who brought the World Cup final to a brief halt by running…
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…
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…
NYC artist Molly Crabapple complains that American “dissidents” are being ignored by American supporters of dissidents worldwide. I suspect that the author has succumbed to an optical illusion. Molly Crabapple was a close and sympathetic observer of the Occupy movement…
Nadezhda Tolokonnikova’s prison letters documenting abuse and exploitation of her fellow inmates by the labor camp administration were met with vicious ridicule in the comments section. This is not what one would expect from the Guardian crowd. One can be…
While debating the Meredith Kercher murder case on discussion boards and in comments sections, I came to believe that most pro-guilt, anti-Knox posters were arguing in bad faith. Rather, they are propagandists using a variety of tools: lies, half-truths, misconceptions,…
Russia has announced that it will be replacing the original piracy charges against the Greenpeace 30 with hooliganism and, for some, resistance to lawful authorities. Hooliganism is becoming a one size fits all charge – unexpectedly linking Pussy Riot and…
“It’s the Prison Industrial Complex à la Russe,” I replied to someone in the comment section of the Guardian, which printed Nadezhda Tolokonnikova’s letter from the forced labor camp in Mordovia. Sean has more on this in “Russia’s Prisoners Labor…
The letter has worked, in a way: several member of the presidential human rights commission have visited the IK-14 penal colony where Nadezhda Tolokonnikova of Pussy Riot is serving her two-year term. One of them, Ilya Shablinsky – a professor of…
Nadezhda Tolokonnikova’s letter from a Gulag-like labor camp in Mordovia.