Note: this is the second time (!) something like this has happened. As before, I was approached to write a commentary for a non peer-reviewed expert journal – a different one this time. As before, and I still have no idea why, the editor never wrote back after commissioning and receiving the piece. Did I write to check in? Of course. Has there been any response? Not the slightest. Rather bad form. I don’t let it ruin my day, but…
I’ve been attacked from all sides for making comments about contemporary Russia and Russian politics. I’ve been told that I’m in the pocket of Putin, or at the very least a naive “useful idiot”. Simultaneously, that same comment led others to tell me that I am Russophobic, a blind westerner who does not understand anything, and that I am contributing to anti-Russian views. One of the biggest challenges I have is to criticize what I think needs to be criticized,…
I’m extremely happy with this one. This came to life from a rough paper I presented at University College London’s Urban Lab, but it really took shape through the peer review process at Antipode. I’m going to be honest here: there was a lot of tough feedback, and it definitely threw me for a loop. It took a bit of time for me to recover composure enough to start thinking about how to address the problems and improve. The reason…
This was a highlight of my year. I’ve long admired the work on soft power and mega-events by Jonathan Grix and friends, and I had some ideas on soft power myself. But I intended these ideas as a refinement of the notion of soft power, not as a criticism per se of Grix et al. I wanted to suggest that there were a few ways that we could augment our traditional understandings of soft power in order to account for…
This booklet is a rarity. Shipped all the way to Zurich from a legendary leftist bookstore in San Francisco (“fighting commodity fetishism with commodity fetishism since 1981”), this is a Soviet broadside against Reagan’s America, seen through the lens of the 1984 Summer Olympics. Back when I was living in Russia, a good friend once shared his secret for detecting nationalist media bias. I was complaining about the difficulties in writing critically about Russia because I was worried about playing…
Note: this was originally slated to be a commentary piece for a non peer-reviewed expert journal that shall remain nameless. For reasons I still don’t understand, the editor never wrote me back after commissioning and receiving the piece. I found it again recently during some computer cleanup, and given that it’s over a year past the date they said they would publish – it was aimed for before the 2018 World Cup – I’m going to share the draft here….
There is something fascinating happening in Russia that, I think, also has applications on how we can interpret current affairs in the USA. A quick summary: On August 23, Alexey Navalny publishes an analysis of corruption in the procurement of foodstuffs for the Russian National Guard. It’s impressively detailed, meticulously sourced, brilliantly presented (they even included good English CC:subtitles for those who don’t speak Russian). In a normal system, this level of well-researched accusation would require some sort of response. At least…
In April this year I had the opportunity to give a talk at Smith College with Martin Müller and Chris Gaffney. The event was called Sport Mega Events and Urban Development: Cases of Brazil 2014, Rio 2016, Sochi 2014, Russia 2018, and it was hosted by Andrew Zimbalist. If you don’t know him, Andrew is a sports economist, hugely accomplished, a very friendly man and admirably prolific. After the talk, Andrew took us out for dinner. And over beers he started…