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New York on a whim

April 30, 2012

This weekend, I was in search of a couch. Well, I’ve been in search of a couch since January but this weekend is the first weekend life’s slowed down enough for me to be able to focus on the house again. We want to create a reading/TV-watching nook in our office/library  on the third floor, and we need a really comfortable couch to put up there. American furniture is 100% ugly, and Russian furniture is 98% ugly, AND Mr. B ...

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How writers lie (or, eel-hunting)

April 27, 2012

Carnival Duet 2, Andrei Shwidiky   Elif Batuman, one of my favorite writers (who else has the Twitter handle Banana Karenina?), wrote in semi-defense of Mike Daisey‘s blatant lying of his portrayal of his investigation at the Foxconn Apple factory in China last month.  Since she herself wrote a memoir about the quirks of being in a Russian Studies graduate progrma that was beautiful and odd precisely because it was true, she had some thoughts about Daisey’s lie: But I ...

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Philly’s Women in Tech Summit at Wharton: Better than expected!

April 25, 2012

  I hate women-only conferences and networking groups. The reason is that while all the women are together at one conference, all the men that make decisions are at another, and the women don’t have acces to them.  You also start to get scope creep, like where you have panels called “Social Media Magic: A Woman’s Touch.” Then,  women start talking to other women about clothes instead of their industry. So it was with hesitation that I signed up for ...

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I found another Russian thing that is terrible for everyone: Russian children’s books

April 23, 2012

So, the other week, Mr. B and I were trolling around in the local Russian bookstore. It’s actually very cute because it’s called “Knizhnik,” which loosely translates to “Booker,”  from the word for book, knizhka. It’s named after the owner, whose last name IS actually Knizhnik.  With a last name like that, I can only imagine you’re destined either for book store ownership or tax evasion. Anyway, none of that was  relevant to the picture I’m about to show you. Brace ...

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Friday Links, now engineered to make you appear witty and urbane to others.

April 20, 2012

Can I just gloat for a second that the most-read article in The Economist this week was on my beloved Shotlandia (which would be an excellent name for a vodka, by the way)? So if you are buying my book, which contains a brief but maybe kind of inaccurate history of the issue, you will be all the hotness at your suave cocktail parties this year as you wow people with your expertise. “Did you know, Mittsy,” you’ll say to ...

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