I won’t miss the late-night debates in which you find yourself falling down an epistemological black hole. Down there, nothing is provable and nothing is knowable, except for your sparring partner’s increasingly bizarre pronouncements. In Moscow, I have debated the following topics: whether or not the archived kill-lists with Stalin’s signature are forgeries; the allegation that I am naïve for thinking that American traffic cops generally don’t take bribes; that I am a C.I.A. spy; and the reason America is a more successful country than Somalia (hint: it wasn’t founded by black people). I’ve also been asked to prove how smoking causes lung cancer.
Julia Ioffe in her sharp, poetic farewell to Moscow. There are a lot of really wonderful things about this piece, many of which we’d like to discuss in further detail, but for now it’s enough to appreciate this piece as a beautifully-written ode to a complicated city.
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