So, how do you like him now?

  The people knew nothing about Putin. And in three months he became president. Of course, we thought it was cool. We thought we’d saved the country from the Communists, from Primakov and Luzhkov. But now it’s not clear which outcome would have been worse. —Former Kremlin banker Sergei Pugachev, quoted in Putin’s People: How the KGB Took Back Russia and Then Took on The West, by Catherine Belton (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2020)  …

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After the Asshole Apocalypse

  When American author Edmund White finally published his much-anticipated biography of Jean Genet in 1993, not all of his peers were impressed. Playwright and activist Larry Kramer, for one, wanted to know: at the height of a global AIDS crisis what was White doing, spending seven years in Paris writing about a decadent, bohemian artist/outlaw while gay men by the thousands were dying in the prime of their lives? During a plague, was it…

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