Sometimes I just get the uneasy feeling that we do all the small things we do to distract ourselves from doing really big things. Master new ways of preparing beets, read novels we never got around to in college, run races, start a blog on the politics of the North Caucasus. Knit hats for our friends. Learn to sing in a Balkan style. Compose and ( Read more... )

Stupidity usually isn't that hard to figure out. When people make poor choices, they usually do so for reasons that seem good to them, and those reasons are often more or less clear. But one thing I can't understand is bicyclists who ride in the street but don't obey traffic laws ( Read more... )

I'm not superstitious, except really I secretly am superstitious. Maybe this makes me loony tunes or gullible (I think we all know that I'm gullible), but I think it's pretty prudent to accept that there may be phenomena that science can't explain. Or hasn't explained yet ( Read more... )

In the New York Times ( Read more... )

While procrastinating on my paper, I noticed that in iTunes, I have two songs called "Я и ты" and one called "Ты и я", but no songs called "Me and You" or "You and Me". (However, I do have a "You" - Radiohead, and a "Me" - Paula Cole. I do not have a straight-up "Я" or "Ты ( Read more... )

I'm transcribing interviews for the professor I research assist. They're tapes of her interviewing Russians in English. I'm noticing that even though she speaks much faster than her interviewees, I do better at listening and typing at the same time when she's talking than when they are. The reason for this, I think, is that they speak ( Read more... )

I just learned how they say "From each according to his abilities; to each according to his needs" in Russian ( Read more... )

One of the great things about Fulbright was that I could love Russia without feeling trapped there. In fact, much of my love for the experience was contingent on the fact that I wasn't trapped there. So, wouldn't it be great if Fulbright offered grants not just to study in different countries, but in different times? There are a lot of parts of ( Read more... )

This morning in class my Turkish teacher asked us who we were voting for. She wrote some voting vocabulary on the board, then wrote the Turkish for "Who are you voting for?" and two columns, O and Mc ( Read more... )

For as long as I've identified as midwestern, I've done so mostly out of a symbolic solidarity and a sort of geographic pride. That is, without feeling that midwesternness really marked my identity in any meaningful way. Does my being from Ohio make me inherently different from a Long Islander? I don't think I ever really bought that it did ( Read more... )