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Ukraine’s Tarantino Goes to the Gulag
Few filmmakers achieve the meteoric success of Oleg Sentsov. After self-funding his first feature, Gamer, shot for $20,000, he received wide acclaim at the film’s premiere at the Rotterdam International Film Festival in 2012. The story is a raw, realistic portrayal of the isolation and glory dreams of a young video game player stuck in…
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Putin’s Fabricated Claim Of A Fascist Threat In Ukraine
In February, Ruslana, the pop star at the heart of Ukraine’s pro-democracy movement, stood on the stage in Kyiv’s Maidan—Independence Square—and witnessed snipers pick-off un-armed men in a sea of protesters. In a recent conversation, she described to me how the riot police beat people as though “intoxicated with hate.” President Obama’s sanctions are strong,…
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70th Anniversary Of End Of World War II Marked By Fascism In Russia
Reggie Yates is clearly fearless. The black British reporter traveled to Russia for the BBC to understand the recent rise of fascism. In addition to discovering a mini Comic-Con glorifying Putin, he was also harassed for being black at a nationalist march founded by the president and was calmly informed in one interview that the…
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One Year Later In Crimea: Polls Don’t Tell The Whole Story
Oleg Sentsov is the face of Crimea today. A year ago, the Ukrainian filmmaker put his next film on hold to participate in AutoMaidan, bringing food to Ukrainian soldiers under siege during Russia’s take-over of the peninsula. Soon after, he was kidnapped by FSB agents and brought to Moscow. Following a practice prevalent during Stalin’s…
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How to Explain What’s Happening in Ukraine The conflict that we are seeing today stems from a deadly famine that Stalin engineered back in 1932.
In Ukraine, the nationalistic West is Ukrainian-speaking and welcomes the E.U., while the Russian-speaking East, where current President Victor Yanukovcyh rose to power, sees the Kremlin as an indispensable ally and wants to remain outside the E.U. This has given rise to massive demonstrations vowing to overthrow the government, police brutality, and the President’s urgent…
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Tips On Finding And Dating French Folks In New York City
This essay originally appeared on The Huffington Post for the launch of the New York section and was recorded by WFUV for the award-winning “Cityscape” program. You can find a recording of me reading it for the July 11, 2009 show here! Merci! When I went to France one summer, I came back with a…
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Molly Crabapple’s DIY Empire: A How To
Over four years ago, Molly Crabapple dropped out of New York’s Fashion Institute of Technology to become a full time artist. This meant modeling for a hundred dollars here and there, often nude, to raise enough money to print and mail postcards of her illustrations to the New York Times, in the hopes of being…
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“MTV HIRED”: New Docu-Series on Landing That Dream Job
MTV has gone from “My Super Sweet Sixteen”–a reality show on 16-year olds’ birthday parties that rivaled the Oscars–so Old Economy–to “MTV Hired,” an incredibly good docu-series about young people competing for dream… entry-level jobs. “The idea was how do we come up with something that talks about today’s market but not be all doom…
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Burning Man: The Leader Incubator
How do you get Google CEO Eric Schmidt to pose for a picture in Times Square? Tell him you love Burning Man! (I took this iPhone photo yesterday evening. He’s a nice guy.) Schmidt got his job because he was the only candidate who had been to Burning Man, a favorite destination of Google founders…