[Selected Writings]

Culture

Reviews for The Nation 

Reviews for The New Republic

"A Poet Reflects on Europe's Last Dictatorship" (The New Yorker)

"In Old Hollywood, Postal Workers Were Heartthrobs...Until They Got Labor Protections" (Slate)

​"False Grit" (Art in America)

"The Danielle Steel of Communism" (Lapham's Quarterly) 

"Leo Tolstoy vs. The Police" (The New York Times)

"On the Real Life Cross-Dressing Balls That Inspired HBO's Catherine the Great" (Vogue)

"In Russia, the Ultimate Scary Story is About Losing Your Coat" (The Paris Review)

"Artist Yevgeniy Fiks Photographs the Gay Cruising Sites of Soviet Moscow" (Frieze Magazine)

"What Inspired Lolita" (The Nation)

"From the Battlefield to Little Women" (New York Review of Books)

​"The Joys (and Pains) of Not Traveling Alone" (Outside Magazine)

"What does it Mean to Be Moved?" (Longreads)​ 

"Svetlana Alexievich's Child's-Eye View" (The New Republic)
 
"The Ideal Place to Disappear: An Interview with Julia Phillips" (The Paris Review)

 "How to Think Freely" (The New Republic)
 
"Ukraine Elected a Sitcom Star President. His Show Tells Us What to Expect" (Slate) 

"The Beauty of Invisibility" (The Paris Review)

"Burning Ambition: Susan Orlean's Tale of Arson and Unfulfilled Hopes in Los Angeles" (The Nation)

"The Trouble With Netflix's New Cold War Drama" (The New Republic)

"Nabokov's Last Novel in Russian and What it Means to Say Goodbye to a Language" (Ploughshares) 

"The Romanoffs' Missed Opportunity" (The New Republic)

"Making it in Capitalist Moscow" (The New Republic)

"How Dostoevsky Predicted Today's 'True Crime' Craze" (The New York Times)

"The Soviet Anthology of 'Negro' Poetry" (The Paris Review)

​"Floating in the Air: The Ideas that Made Crime & Punishment" (The Nation)

"The Cornel West/Ta-Nehisi Coates Feud Explained Through Russian Writers" (The Paris Review)

"When Oscar Wilde Colluded With the Russians" (The Paris Review)

"When the Harlem Renaissance Went to Communist Moscow" (The New York Times)

"A Forgotten Novel Reveals a Forgotten Harlem" (The Atlantic) 

"The Unlikely History of Tolstoy College" (The New Yorker)

"Was Lolita About Race?: Vladimir Nabokov on Race in the United States" (Los Angeles Review of Books)

"The Art of the Communist Museum: The Leon Trotsky House in Coyoacan" (Public Books)

“Lore and Peace: What Tolstoy Can Teach Us About Bowe Bergdahl” (Fullstop Magazine)

Politics

“White Flight: The Shifting Grounds of Polish Racial Identity in Contemporary Europe” (World Policy Journal)

“A history of America and Russia’s mutual meddling” (The Guardian)

“Obama banana 'jokes' show Soviet-era racism remains alive in Russia” (The Guardian)

Interviews 

(Audio) “How Red Russia Broke New Ground in the Portrayal of Black Americans” (Public Radio International - BBC), August 31, 2017.