When it comes to talking about now-shuttered newspaper The eXile, “controversial” is the hardest working item of vocabulary one can dig up.  It was never my cup tea per se, but I liked that it was around, and I like the conversations it produced, and was pretty outraged when it was unceremoniously raided, pressured, and shut down … you would think that the Kremlin would have recognized how useful the paper was for its attacks against opponents of the state.

At any rate, most people who can find their way to this blog already have their mind made up about it.  Vanity Fair recently published a detailed autopsy of the enterprise, containing some really great quotes:

“They took me on for using journalistic clichés, and at the end of the day I was like, ‘You know what? You’re right,'” says Colin McMahon, a former Moscow-bureau chief for the Chicago Tribune, adding, “I read it because it was good for story ideas, frankly. These guys were deeper into a subculture of Moscow than I could ever have allowed myself to be. I’d see something in The Exile and say, ‘How can I get this into a story without mainlining cocaine?'”