Dear readers, I got a promotion ( Read more... )

Berlin gentrifies faster than any other place I've been. Since Berlin in the center of much Internet Freedom activity, I come through there about twice a year. The first time I went, Prenzlaurberg was the hip place to be and Potsdammer Platz was the world's largest construction site (soon to be overtaken by...well...everything in China)--which made ( Read more... )

Rio is a party town. It's beaches and tourists and don't-look-at-the-favelas. Rio is not a place where anyone works, presumably because all of the work in Brazil is done in the considerably less picturesque city of Sao Paolo. There are 18 million people in Sao Paolo, living in a sort of endless maze of high-rise buildings--downtown without end. Sao ( Read more... )

Being Carmen San Diego is complicated. It means that I can and I cannot talk about my job. Sometimes it means that I have to be so vague it's not worth talking about at all--I don't think that I ended up writing much about Moscow, for example. There's just this big blank space in my calendar and a lot of worrying about my opsec. I didn't travel ( Read more... )

I never get over being picked up at the airport by a driver with a sign. My Moscow driver is young and his name is Alexei and I am about to get to know him very well because it will take us nearly two hours to get to my hotel in the center of the city. Traffic is murderously slow on a Sunday evening, when everyone is coming back from their dachas, ( Read more... )

When two things happen at the same time, it's easy to get them all mixed up. You enter a fugue state where the issues interpolate and you're sure there are connections--and why hasn't anyone written a thesis about this ( Read more... )

When I am quiet for a long time, I feel like I must apologize for not having written. I have to make a sheepish list of all of the places I've been that I haven't written about: LA, Philadelphia, Toronto, Detroit, Washington DC. I have seen great shows, including Godflesh and Kraftwerk. I have read interesting books, including Palimpsest (by ( Read more... )

I'm not going to lie to you, my largely theoretical readers--I have suspected for quite some time that being Carmen San Diego is not good for me. For a long time, I thought that I had bigger problems. My eye exploded. J and I spent most of a very stressful year gutting and remodeling Bunker 3. Then I traveled. And I traveled. And I traveled. In ( Read more... )

My relationship to Israel is complicated--very complicated. I don't have any relatives left in any part of the former Soviet Union. They all live in Israel--my terrifying grandmother who fought the Nazis, my Aunt and Uncle, their three kids, my grandfather's seven siblings and all of their children. Israel is where my relatives are Ambassadors and ( Read more... )

The day before I left for Kiev, I had the following conversation with my mother:

Mother: Child, do not go to the Ukraine. It's too dangerous.

Me: Mom, you remember that we vacationed in Israel through two Intifadas, right ( Read more... )