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To improve the perception of the Russian language, we should elucidate our mentality, the view of the world through the optics of our language. There are stunning ideals intrinsic to our view of the world: unselfishness, truth, conscience… In the Russian language, there is a formula of acquisition, a formula of possession, that has no counterparts in any […]
Read moreThe day after a famous politician is assassinated life seems as though it will never be the same again. But this feeling always fades. It is much later that we realize that life has indeed changed. It took me a year after the murder of Boris Nemtsov to figure this out.The Greeks called a citizen who was not involved in the life of polis an idiotes. Thus, […]
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The art of persuasion, achieving with words one’s desired effect, is at least as old as Aristotle with his rhetoric. Among the world champions of this art, there are two Odessites—the first, of course, was the inimitable Ostap Bender with his fictional ability to conjure up hitherto unseen horizons of possibilities, and not only for the benefit of the […]
Read moreCut open the belly of a well cleaned piglet, cut its head off and take out all its bones, so that the meat remains attached only to the skin.Wash a piglet, poke its eyes out and rub it with salt and pepper.Skin the hare, chop its head and tail off and cut its belly lengthwise.With a sharp knife, cut the necks off the birds.Pluck the snipe, poke their eyes […]
Read moreI came out of Gefter’s funeral in 1995 to become a political technologist but he came back to me after I left the Kremlin. It was not the first time that we met again at a pivotal moment of my biography. Every encounter with Gefter changed the way I looked at the world and myself.Our conversations started towards the end of the Novy Mir era when […]
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Through an accident of birth, Socrates and Fran Lebowitz never actually met, which is sad, because they would have enjoyed each other enormously. The two of them practice a similar type of rationality and share a passionate commitment to applying it to any and all subject matter. Perhaps wit, at least in the case of Socrates and Fran, consists at least […]
Read moreThe events of this week have provoked a great number of feelings, opinions and considerations. It is only natural. It would be difficult to ask for any serious processing or comprehension of the terrible events in New York and Washington after such a short time. What is surprising is something else: I have heard several dozen people from different walks of […]
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