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Nifty, Depressing “Approval Matrix” of Russia’s Media

We know that Russia Today aka “RT” is a ridiculous front for Kremlin propaganda. We know about Putin’s massive crackdown across the Russian media landscape. What’s left? Calvert Journal has published a comprehensive “media compass” in the style of New York Magazine’s approval matrix, ranking the left-over outlets from lowbrow to highbrow and state-controlled to independent. Turns […]

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Sochi Environmental Activist Jailed for Three Years for Spray Painting
a Fence

Yevgeny Vitishko, geologist and outspoken critic of the Sochi Winter Olympics’ devastating impact on the region’s environment and biodiversity, is being jailed for three years in a penal colony. In 2012, the 40-year-old environmental activist spray-painted ‘The forest is for everybody” on a corrugated metal fence around an illegal construction zone inside Sochi’s national park. Behind […]

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Zoom In: Minimalist MTA Icons

ANIMAL loves minimalist icons, but before their various uses on the internet, this iconography served purely utilitarian purposes. The MTA uses tons of minimalist icons to show daily commuters where not to go, what not to do with the doors and where the rats and pesticide are. Let’s take a minute and admire them purely for their […]

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Gay? Go to Russia, Go to Jail

If you’re planning to go to Russia — say, for the 2014 Winter-clusterfuck Olympics in Sochi — don’t. If you do, don’t be gay. Try not to do anything gay either. No rainbow flags. No holding hands. If you do pull any public gay, lesbian or “pro-gay”/gay-affirming/non-homophobic faggotry of any sort, you can be detained by the police and […]

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Russian Gallerist Investigated for “Extremism” Over Stalin Anti-Olympics Art

They got Marat Guelman. Unbelievable. Marat Guelman — one of Russia’s most forward-thinking high-ranking art figures with vast experience in pushing Kremlin’s sensitive buttons, has been fired as the director of the vital  Perm Museum of Contemporary Art, which he created in 2008. In an Ai Weiwei-style manhunt, Guelman’s finances are being “looked into” and the galerist […]

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