emily l
@laskin
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Books editor at @meduza_en; erstwhile academic; all of my opinions belong to you (not to my employer)
Joined August 2008
Been translating the Russian news all day and here’s what it looks like to me: 261,000 men have fled since Wednesday; Putin expected to close the borders in coming days; dozens of enlistment centers set on fire; violent protests + brutal arrests in Dagestan and other republics 👀.
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Not to mention that Zelenskyy went on TV and said in Russian “Now is the time to decide whether your life will end. It’s better to refuse a summons than to die a war criminal on foreign soil.”.
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I loved translating this fascinating, heartbreaking piece. It's about Tuvan conscripts dying in Russia's war in Ukraine, and the monks, shamans, and activists trying to protect them. Beautiful reporting by Vladimir Sevrinovsky, now in English on @meduza_en
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I’m sure this is the most heartbreaking translation I’ve ever done — the messages kids and teenagers scrawled on a basement wall in Mariupol while Russia destroyed their city.
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@lerachkajan Well I know you don’t think this, but it’s for academics who are not specialists in the region and I guess they feel we don’t need more views from the side of the colonizer (not what I was planning to do exactly but itself not a terrible point).
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If you’ve never been to Belarus it’s probably hard to imagine the extent of the repression there. I’m pretty good at compartmentalizing the war these days, but this tiny but brave protest in Minsk brought a tear to my eye.
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The Jews and the left, famously mutually exclusive categories.
Somewhere there’s a NYT style guide instructing reporters to pretend that anti-genocide, pro-Palestine Jews don’t exist.
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@_danielle_carr As someone raised by lapsed Catholics and atheist Jews who observed white Christians as an invisible outsider I gotta say this totally checks out.
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Meduza’s interview with @YudinGreg — on a year of full-scale war, Putin’s worldview, how Russians can resist, imperialism in Russian politics and culture — is fascinating, and now readable (slightly abridged) in English. Trans. yrs truly.
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On my last day as an affiliated academic, please enjoy this joke that I, a scholar of the symbolic significance of the steppe, have been waiting to tell since I first went on the job market four years ago:. I’M LEAVING THE FIELD
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This would not upset me and in fact I would be relieved to be given the space to say I’m an anti Zionist Jew. Among other reasons, it’s a thing people are entitled to know and to want to know.
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Good luck with verbs of motion, suckers! In five years you’ll be able to correctly express that you and your family relocated, one time, for good, by vehicle. Politically and socially I’m just you’ll be just fiiiiiine 🫡.
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California folks, call Newsom now. Tell him to empty detention centers before they become death camps. DM me for COVID-safe direct action info. #ReleaseThemNow #DetentionIsDeadly #FreeThemAll
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@meaganmday @NeverAgainActn Similar stuff is going down all over the country today. @NeverAgainSFbay caravaned to our governor’s house to ask him personally to empty detention centers
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In 2022 I got a great job! It is now my duty to announce to all humanities phds: you, too, will get a job that you feel is worth doing, and if you see threads on here or grifter newsletters saying your academic work is an albatross around your neck, screw ‘em and log off.
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I am nearly 20 years late in remarking on this but it is, I’m pretty sure, the best essay I’ve ever read.
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Ambivalent announcement: I did not embargo my PhD dissertation and so you can now read it if you have institutional library access. It’s called “Geopoetics and Geopolitics: Landscape, Empire and the Literary Imagination in the Great Game.” It’s…a dissertation.
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“a boreal floodplain filled with boglands” is such a pleasing phrase (as some know “boreal” is my favorite word). A+ form and content.
Just a scientist, standing above a boreal floodplain filled with boglands, asking you to respect and admire bogs. Keepers of carbon, cleaners of water, springboards of unique biodiversity - peatlands globally need our attention and protection.
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Hello, Monday, I’m looking for work! I’m a super skilled multilingual researcher; good at journalism, persuasive writing, info analysis, and very good at grant writing/getting you money; an experienced translator and editor; a Russia/Eurasia specialist. Interested in any leads!.
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For The Beet, I wrote about Kazakhstan’s deadly June wildfires and why they became a story about government corruption but not about climate change. My first original reporting for @meduza_en !.
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My first ever reported piece! About TV Rain, Russia’s last independent tv channel, getting kicked off Latvian cable. And about what the Russian opposition owes the places where Russian chauvinism still looms large.
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Special love to the left-leaning Russophone post-Soviet Jews in my life, keep on knowing that imperialism and ethnonationalism lead only to death and evil.
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NYC/tri-state folks! If you've ever wondered what you would've done during the holocaust, now's your chance to prove it. This action is not for Jews only. #FreeThemAll #DetentionIsDeadly #ReleaseThemNow.
🚨EMERGENCY - PLS RT🚨. Immigrants in a Newark detention center are begging to be released before COVID kills them. We can’t leave them to die. WHAT: COVID-safe car rally.WHEN: Starting @ 4.WHERE: 354 Doremus Ave, Newark.FB EVENT:
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TIL that Raqymjan Qosqarbaev, a 23 year old from the Kazakh SSR, was the first soldier to raise the Soviet flag on the Reichstag in 1945. He’s not the guy in the famous photo though.
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Luckily there are still blue states that still believe in human rights, phew! Too bad the median rent in them $4,000/month and buying a place to live is inaccessible even to families whose yearly income approaches a million dollars.
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.@CAgovernor @GavinNewsom These people risked going out during regional lockdown to beg you to release detained migrants before COVID makes detention into death camps. #ReleaseThemNow #FreeThemAll #DetentionIsDeadly @NeverAgainActn @NeverAgainSFbay
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On this, the 70th anniversary of Stalin’s death, you should:. 1. Watch The Death of Stalin.2. Read @meduza_en’s interview with Ronald Grigor Suny on revolution, terror, famine, Soviet imperialism, and one of the 20th century’s most brutal men.
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@DavidKlion lol her scare quotes. Israel, um, is a genocidal terrorist state. But also “what the students are calling tHe TaRp” is, um, a tarp?.
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If you can’t hear Palestinians implore the world to stop impending genocide, maybe you can hear the same message from an Israeli.
Veteran Haaretz journalist Amira Hass has reported from the Occupied Palestinian Territories for decades and says the Israeli public is "drunk with the will to take revenge" on Palestinians, spurred on by a far-right government dominated by "extreme fascist settlers."
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Should I be obnoxious and post the books I read in 2023? Here’s the first one.
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Ever seen a newspaper ask its readers to cancel donations? A testament to how dangerous it is for Russian nationals to support Meduza now that it’s been outlawed.
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Heading to sfo to protest #MuslimBan. FYI I speak Persian/Farsi/Dari and can interpret if necessary.
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I chose to learn Russian because one of my first really confusing memories is my grandmother’s totally inscrutable expression while watching the USSR crumble on tv in a US suburb. I wanted to know where the hell that side of my family came from. Also….
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YEAH NO IT'S NOT RUSSIA BUT IT USED TO BE IN THE SOVIET UNION, IT'S LIKE BETWEEN RUSSIA, CHINA, SOUTH ASIA, AND IRAN BUT YEAH, I MEAN THERE WERE POLITIES BUT THE SAME CONCEPT OF A TERRITORIALLY DEFINED NATION-STATE STATE DIDN'T REALLY OBTAIN FOR STEPPE NOMADIC-PASTORAL SOCIETIES
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Possibly braver than the note she left on Putin’s parents’ grave is what Irina Tsybaneva told the judge: “there was some news that made me…I just realized that everything is very frightening, everything is very sad, many people have been killed.” .
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Those of you who have spent time in the PNW: do you know what I mean when I say “it’s not wet rain?”.
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Nice! It took non-zero effort to track down this cool pamphlet and I’m pleased that it came from the @Reed_College_ library. As it is said: Communism, Atheism, Interlibrary Loan
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A rare glimpse into an increasingly closed state — the words and images of Russian photographers who stayed after their country went to war. Some equivocate about the war, some lament it. Not everyone is scared, but everyone is alienated.
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New job, time for a new Russian dictionary. With gratitude to this Katzner that I bought my sophomore year of college.
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G-d grant me enough academic appointments to go to the Ass’n for the Study of Persianate Societies conference in 2023 in Yerevan … the most elusive of all scholarly society conferences in the choicest locales ….
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Things I miss about academia: research library access; free subscription to the full adobe suite; talking to undergrads; the occasional brilliant how-did-anyone-think-of-that argument; the Central Asianists at the Slavic conferences 🏴☠️.
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It is really cool that a Turkic-speaking volunteer battalion named itself Turan.
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A new joint translation by me and @octopus_grigori is out from @sublunaryeds! Check it out for a glimpse of a Russia very different from the present one….
AT THE DOORS AND OTHER STORIES brings together a selection of Pilnyak's previously uncollected stories, including texts Broom and Transition. In addition, we've commissioned a fresh translation of “A Story About How Stories Are Composed” from @laskin and @octopus_grigori !.
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Reading this and then Labatut’s When We Cease To Understand the World back to back would be a perfect mini course in math for literature lovers
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Very excited to be part of this roundtable at ASEEES in Chicago! We'll be talking the Russia-oil-war nexus with humanists and social scientists @ASEEES_Enviro Unmasking the Petrostate
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I was desperate to please my mean/nice Ukrainian Jewish piano teacher who emigrated in 1993 and sometimes shouted things like “какой ужас” at me when I didn’t practice enough.
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Happy Hannukah, a holiday which commemorates the victory of a group of rebel warriors against an oppressive imperial power. You know what I’m gonna say. But to be perfectly clear: Free Palestine.
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This is disturbing but worth reading—a more nuanced view than Russian state TV offers. Those interested in regime change in Russia and an end to the unprovoked war on Ukraine would do well to consider people’s reasons, however misguided or self-serving, for supporting the war.
Meduza has opposed Russia’s senseless on Ukraine since the very start of the invasion, but some of our readers find cause to support it. We’ve collected and shared some of their thoughts, in hopes that this record will help those working to end the war.
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You'd think that humanities professors of all people could appreciate that different textual forms generate different reading publics and practices, and that people might be literate/fluent in scholarship AND tweets.
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I started a new project of history- and theory-informed deep dives into contemporary Russia, and I really hope people will read! The first installment is about the phrase “We can do it again,” a sort of sinister version of “Never again.”
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I hear IU’s summer language workshop is offering Chuvash and Azerbaijani for the first time this year (cool)! But they’re in danger of being canceled due to low enrollements (boo)! I’m sure some among you might consider signing up! .
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Like @BernieSanders, #IKnowWhereICameFrom. My great grandfather, a Jewish communist, cut off his own finger to avoid serving in the tsar's army, then fled pogroms and worked as a carpenter in the Bronx. (He's standing on the left, my dad sitting on the left.)
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Because of a long and boisterous lunch at a conference I’m helping to edit an anthology of modern Central Asian literature in translation. Not necessarily a personal gain, but I hope a real boon to teachers and students in the field (which I’ve now left).
Academics: Can you directly attribute a job, raise, collaborative relationship, or some professional benefit you wouldn't have otherwise gained to attending an academic conference? Other than good times w/pals, if you'd never attended conferences, would it have tangibly cost you?.
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Did you know that a Bengali man named Sheik Deen Muhammad introduced shampoo to Europe in. 1794? He wrote two books about it: Cases Cured by Sake Deen Mahomed, Shampooing Surgeon, and Inventor of the Indian Medicated Vapor and Sea-Water Bath (1820) and. .
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Love to dream in russian and have my subconscious get word stress wrong.
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This is a cool book I have: a Tajik edition of Omar Khayyam’s Rubaiyat
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For @meduza_en I translated this account of one survivor of Mariupol, Ukraine's most important port city, which has been under siege by Russian troops for more than three weeks.
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@graceelavery YES vicariously relieved and also HUGE YES to the wallet returners of NYC, it's a thing, i love them, i've made some friends that way.
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Doing one of my last academic tasks – reading an undergrad senior thesis on Afghan women’s narratives, the subaltern question, and the critique of empathy – I am reminded, once again, that undergrads are such cool, smart little punks.
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Famously no one has ever died under capitalism. As for free time, it’s well known to suck basically as much as getting killed.
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I want to go to CESS* in Tashkent. My usual crew can’t because they have jobs and children but I have neither and I *do* have research money to burn before postdoc ends. I’ve got 3 days to find a panel. Help a lady out!.
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Are you subscribed to The Beet, the @meduza_en newsletter on Central and Eastern Europe, the Caucasus, and Central Asia? Well you should be!! Sign up now and you’ll get to read my translation of a deep dive into Putinist rhetoric about terrorism.
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Periodic reminder that I’m a good academic editor and I’m very happy to help Ukrainian and Russian students/grad students/academics who are trying to line up US funding and appointments. I can make your documents sound American, which, unfortunately, matters. DMs open.
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After a short break the book deliveries are back in action (this is almost all of them)! This one came just in time for something I’m trying to finish writing this week (pray for me)
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One of the things that sucks about being Jewish rn is having to answer for Israel, I grant that. But you know whose fault that is? Israel’s, for being an ethnonationalist death cult and doing genocide while claiming to speak for us. What are you gonna do but shout back?.
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New theory just dropped.
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This mail day is getting better and better! I better, um, actually read these though (especially @AyseZarakol’s book which I am dying to get into)
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the fact is im willing to commit acts of utter barbarity, to inflict unfathomable suffering on others, if the alternative is something fucked up happening to my kids. common parental sentiment!. the contempt of the childless doesnt cow us. it just leaves us inclined to flense you.
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Welp, after basically two days of watching Russian Telegram I can say that I have learned some new derivations from the Russian language’s most productive verbal stem!.
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Sometimes I just have to sit back and admire Russian’s maximalist approach to punctuation. The sentence I’m currently trying to wrangle into English has a colon, an em dash in the phrase set off by the colon, and then another colon in the em dash aside.
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Ok fine, The New Yorker, I will read the article with all of my keywords in the head
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Reader, I have spent the research funds I meant to use to go to RGALI on a small personal library. Soon I will know everything about empire, geography (symbolic and physical), Russian orientalism, the steppe, etc etc!!!!.
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Sorry but also, you can solve the problem of course titling when you want to teach, eg, Gogol or Aitmatov alongside Pushkin by calling it “Russophone literature” if it’s all Russian lang., or “Multinational literatures of the Russian Empire/USSR” if it isn’t.
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For @meduza_en I translated this deep dive into the Donbas and regional separatist movements. A case study in how the Kremlin co-opts local grievances to sow discord and expand its ideological sphere of influence in other post-Soviet states.
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Last feature of this year. Four men who manage to avoid conscription in Russia, including one who stabbed himself in front of the draft board. This one is personally meaningful: my great grandfather chopped off his own finger to avoid fighting in the Russian (imperial) army.
Here’s what it takes to dodge the draft in Russia. One man was hospitalized after stabbing himself 20 times while standing in front of the draft board. Another was saved by his quick-thinking brother and a lawyer. A third just ran from authorities.
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It just sounds bizarre. Jews talk about Judaism and Jewishness all the time but ime never about faith. If faith even matters in Judaism (and for many, it just doesn’t), it doesn’t mean the same thing as Christian faith, which is how he’s using the word here.
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I love Russian emigre events bc I learn phrases like “Саш ты не хочешь аутсайд уайт?”.
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I'm always looking for scholarship on South Asia-Central Asia connections, and @RomanOsharov's recent contribution to @peripheralhist is a fascinating example.
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TIL that several Donbas cities were founded by British industrialists/coal barons. Something something capitalism and empire and extractive industry and social strife.
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Someone published a book about the actual exact topic of my dissertation (except none of it is about the steppe, sadly for them)
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In college someone offered to pay me to write a paper for them for a class we were both in and when I declined they said “oh, I thought you’d like the chance to make a second argument in your compulsive little way.” Withering.
What’s the most hauntingly specific insult you’ve ever received? I once made a joke about Dennis Waterman’s dentures and a man wrote to tell me I was “obviously lonely”.
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The really outrageous thing that the Penn/Rhodes case lays bare is: powerful institutions facilitate the transformation of trauma into access and capital WHEN that process benefits the institution, not necessarily students, and not justice in any structural sense of the term.
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The former academic inside me squeaking “that’s not what that phrase means”
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I think my ideal workspace would have one austere desk and one chaos desk.
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@tragedysatire @MissPavIichenko I agree with this, and you should still try! This current moment of being performatively anti Russian will pass and most ppl will forget about it again. Regional knowledge will still matter.
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On a park bench with a thermos of tea, slightly too warmly dressed, sitting on part of the NYRB because the bench is damp while reading @Shteyngart on @returnstosender on the Soviet Jew and also pondering how to most gently tell my grandmother some (good) news. A particular mood.
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I try to learn a new language every 4 years and 2023 is time! Which should I study? Or write in your suggestion.
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