You may remember the rather terrific Giant Russian Penis escapade, designed by the art agitprop outfit War, to torture the Russian Federal Security Service. Now (or as close to "now" as we can tell from the slow migration of news from Russian Livejournals), they are protesting supermarkets. The translation goes something like this: "Food in Europe became a privilege and not a right of every freeman. And we, War art-movement, are waging a war with this infernal system till the very last cog of the Capitalists machine will be torn out." Commenters at English Russia are torn on whether the protesters are "dirty smelly hippies," "fruits and nuts, weirdos and freakos," "attention whores," or just "suspiciously Jewish," so at least we learn that the Russian Internet is just like the American one: full of anonymous people ready to denounce anyone who stands out (but especially the Jews).

If there's one thing you should read by Vladimir Arnold-who died last week at the age of 72, and who is memorialized by the Times today as "a founder of singularity theory, or, as it is sometimes more ominously called, catastrophe theory"-it's his January, 1998 article "Innumeracy and the Fires of the Inquisition." While Arnold's work was what we laypeople would regard as a completely incomprehensible math, he was cognizant of the problems of the gulf between the state of written and taught mathematics and the ability of common people to understand it-and also extremely observant regarding politics, particularly sensitive to the presence and history of antisemitism, and greatly interested in the drift of Russia as a state concerned with an intellectual populace. READ MORE