Théâtres Sans Frontières

In late January, 1984, Soviet-backed Afghan MiGs crossed the border into Pakistan and bombed targets in the village of Angoor Adda, killing 42 people. After another series of cross-border raids in 1987, which reportedly killed 85, State Department spokesman Charles Redman made the following statement:
These deliberate attacks are brutal attempts to force a change in [...]

The surprise of Soviet language policy

It is almost always worth perusing the Times Literary Supplement’s “In Brief” section, which presents six or seven short reviews of books not quite important enough to have warranted a full-length review, if only because its very high message-to-text ratio means that interesting books are easier to spot. Case in point: the TLS’s April 11 [...]

The worst of the worst: a memorandum

In researching an upcoming post relating to Soviet language policy (oh stop rubbing your hands with such anticipation — it’s distracting), I came across a memo that casts a sadly familiar light on the current U.S. administration’s justifications of the use of torture. I’ll let the memo — and the identity of its author — [...]