Ukraine’s Vigilante Peacemakers The revolutionary dream lives on among Maidan supporters in Odessa, despite their disappointment with the government in Kiev and the threat of Russia’s sinister machinations.
How Fascist is Ukraine’s Svoboda? Not at all, says its members. Just a little, well, ’emotional’…
Putin’s Imaginary Nazis On the Vladimir Putin’s conjuration of “fascism” in Ukraine
Germany's War on Barbie ‘I embrace Barbie because I’m not threatened by her,’ says my friend Pippa, an early 40-ish antiques dealer from London who lives in Berlin. We are standing inside the ‘Barbie Dreamhouse Experience’, a 2,500-square metre Barbie museum; a pink monstrosity erected last month in a parking lot near Alexanderplatz. Inside, one can bake imaginary cupcakes,...
A German Holocaust Survivor Steps Into the Box “My friend asked me whether I would like to sit in that box when I’m in Berlin.” Thus began an email from Marion House, a 90-year-old, German-born Holocaust survivor. Marion, who lives in New York City, is a friend of a friend of my grandmother, and she was writing in reference to an article I...
The Monster at the Bar To the British tabloids, he was ‘the Pied Piper of paedophiles’, the UK’s ‘most wanted child abuser’. But we all knew him as Willem: the fat, jolly, occasionally lecherous Dutchman who was a mainstay of Prague’s expatriate gay community. If you visited one of the city’s same-sex watering holes before last August, when Czech police...
Being the Jew in a Box It’s not often that someone compares you to the Hottentot Venus, Tilda Swinton, and Adolf Eichmann, all in the same hour.
Blindsided Jeremy Rosner looked ashen. The American pollster, a veteran of the Clinton White House, had just learned that the United National Movement (UNM) of President Mikheil Saakashvili had lost the country’s October 1 parliamentary elections in an upset to the Georgian Dream (GD) coalition led by billionaire Bidzina Ivanishvili. Rosner, an executive vice president of...