Recommended reading

Jonathan Schwarz has a great interview with Chris Floyd posted. Just so you know what you’re missing if you don’t go over there and read this interview, here’s Chris Floyd on Matt Taibbi (who I vote for as the subject for Jonathan’s next interview, if he can’t get JD Guckert.)

There were lots of people from the paper [The Moscow Times]during that period who you see now all over the place. Carlotta Gall, who’s in Afghanistan now for the New York Times. I used to take her dictation when she’d call on her satellite phone from Chechnya. Anne Barnard, who’s in Baghdad for the Boston Globe. Frank Brown, my roommate in Moscow, who writes for Newsweek now. Matt Taibbi was there.

Taibbi was a great reporter, a big, honking goon of a guy who’d ride with the police and get down in the real Moscow dirt. He used to make fun of me because I wore this black shirt with a pink tie—I had about four changes of clothes altogether while I was there, living out of a couple of suitcases—so he started calling me “Cheap Trick,” because he thought I looked like one of the singers from that old band. Which I suppose tells you something about his musical tastes.