This past Saturday, the second run of "Feasting on Asphalt", came to an end with an episode called the Lutefisk Express. For those of you who are not regular Food Network watchers, "Feasting on Asphalt" was cooked up by Alton Brown, host of Food Network's "Good Eats" show, to highlight the regional food to be found on America's byways. Last year, Alton and his biker buddies--they all ride motorcycles--traveled coast to coast across the South. This year, they started near New... more

Adoption is a private journey that can sometimes find its way into public forums. I write often in this blog about my trips to Russia to adopt my two sons and their lives since they have come to live in America.

And just about every day of every week, I read what many of you have gone through and are going through to welcome children born in Russia into your homes. Through your writings, I travel to parts of Russia I have never seen and experience adoptions that went both more and less smoothly than my own. In reading the writings of those of you already home with your families, I've... more

Move over Disney and Nickelodeon: Russia has launched Bibigon.

Bibigon is a new children's television channel, that was launched on Saturday, by the Russian TV and radio company VGTRK, with--as several news reports were quick to point out--key backing by Russian President Vladimir Putin. You can see the channel's Internet home page here (or read through a lumpy English translation, courtesy of Babelfish.

The channel is named for a character created by the Russian children's poet... more

There are three Russian cultural festivals on the calendar in September. The first will be on Saturday, Sept. 9 from noon to 7 p.m. at Penn's Landing in Philadelphia. The Russian Mosaic Cultural Festival, organized by the Philadelphia Russian-American Chamber of Commerce, features folk, classical, and ballroom dance performances, and Russian, Jewish, Georgian, Moldavian and Middle Asian food.

If you're in Silicon Valley on Saturday, Sept. 22, try the Russian festival at St. Nicholas Orthodox Church... more

The other day, I wrote about people who were putting some part of their adoption journey into video format. But I realized, as I was poking around YouTube afterwards, that video sharing sites can serve another useful purpose: As part of the process of educating the child you adopted from Russia on the country of his or her birth.

I started, of course, by searching for videos on the Russian cities nearest and dearest to my heart: Vladivostok and Yuzhno-Sakhalinsk, on Sakhalin Island.... more

Many of you have read, on this site and on others, accounts of what life is like in different parts of Russia. You've read stories about what prospective parents experienced as they traveled through places like Moscow for the first time. What they felt when they saw the town and the orphanage in which their child was living. What they were thinking when they met their child for the first time.

But what if you could see it all yourself?

Thanks to the Internet, increasingly, you can. There are a number of videos made by families... more

Clear out your TiVos: There's a program on Russian culture to record tomorrow night.

On Wednesday, August 29 at 9 p.m. eastern, the PBS series "Great Performances" will air a documentary on the early years of the great Soviet ballet dancer Rudolf Nureyev. Using archival footage and KGB files, John Bridcut, the film's writer and producer has come up with a portrait of the dancer prior to his defection to the West in Paris in 1961. Nureyev's dancing gave new importance to the roles of male dancers in classical ballet, and his off-stage socializing with Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis and Andy Warhol paved the way for dancers... more

Folks, I am two for two.

First, I learn that I missed Moscow Potato 2007, then I find out that the Russian National Baseball Team was in the U.S. for a month of games. And I didn’t see any of them.

You didn't know that Russians played baseball? Neither did I, and neither, maybe, did the team. OK, that was not kind. But in a month of baseball, they racked up the kind of win-loss... more

I've spent the last few days writing about mashups for a tech magazine. But, in doing so, it seems I missed a really big mash-up, Moscow Potato 2007.

You may remember that, two weeks back, I was celebrating my 7-pound potato harvest, part of a quixotic and sometimes frustrating effort to honor my children's Russian heritage with home-grown food.

This weekend, The International Herald Tribune, a paper I grew accustomed to reading during my expatriate days, ... more

Almost 90 years ago, Russia's last tsar and his family were killed near the Siberian city of Yekaterinburg. On Friday, Russian prosecutors announced that they are re-opening a probe into the deaths of Tsar Nicholas II and his family.

According to news reports, the inquiry has been prompted by a discovery of bones by a Yekaterinburg archeologist. The researcher, Sergei Pogorelov, claims that the bones that he found in a burned area in what is now Tuymen... more