Mark Ames is a Brooklyn-based Americanjournalist. He was the editor of the biweekly the eXile in Moscow, from its founding in 1997 until its closure in 2008. Ames has also written for the New York Press, PandoDaily, The Nation, Playboy, The San Jose Mercury News, Alternet, Птюч Connection, GQ, and is the author of three books. He co-hosts the podcastRadio War Nerd along with John Dolan.
Biography
Ames was raised in Saratoga, California, where he attended an Episcopalian private school. He graduated from Saratoga High School in 1983. He later wrote about a 2003 alleged bombing attempt at his alma mater in Going Postal—Rage, Murder and Rebellion: From Reagan's Workplaces to Clinton's Columbine and Beyond. After leaving Saratoga, Ames attended the University of California, Berkeley, while living with his father. He later described how his college years shaped his later political views in a section of the book The Exile: Sex, Drugs, and Libel in the New Russia: After college, Ames lived in New York City, Boston, San Francisco, and Prague, and played briefly in a punk band. He also tried writing screenplays. In August 1991, he visited Europe, spending two weeks in St. Petersburg. Though he returned to live in Foster City, California, he continued thinking of Russia, and delved into Russian literature. After spending mid-1992 to early 1993 in Prague, Ames moved to Moscow. In 1995, he published "The Rise and Fall of Moscow's Expat 'Royalty'" in the English-language Moscow newspaper The Moscow Times, and was shortly thereafter hired by its competitor Living Here. In 1997, he established the eXile, where he served as writer and editor, and shortly after founded it, he hired Matt Taibbi. In The eXile, Ames wrote on politics, organized crime in Russia, prostitution, and drug use. The paper played practical jokes on Pravda staffers and public figures including Mikhail Gorbachev. In 2000 Ames and Taibbi published The Exile: Sex, Drugs, and Libel in the New Russia.Chicago Reader contributor Martha Bayne reviewed the book, and wrote: "The product of Ames and Taibbi's union is rude, cruel, pornographic, self-aggrandizing, infantile, and breathtakingly misogynist, with a dozen pages of news and another dozen of gonzo entertainment listings. It's also one of the biggest success stories of the tiny, incestuous world of expatriate Moscow. Pranks are sharper--and meaner--than others, but they're all conceived under a towering belief in the righteousness of the paper's mission. The Exile has kept up a holy racket, railing away against stupidity, corruption, and influence peddling... It has covered mind-numbingly complex topics like privatization in a straightforward style that's not only comprehensible but actually interesting to a reader with no background in Russian economic history and little enthusiasm for acquiring one." Ames spoke about his sex life in Moscow during an interview with The New York Observer in 2000: "'Russian women, especially on the first date, expect you to rape them,' said Mr. Ames. 'They’ll go back home with you and say, ‘No, no, no,’ and if you’re an American, you’ve been trained to respect the ‘No,’ because you’re afraid of sexual harassment or date rape, and so you fail over and over. But it took me a while to learn you really have to force Russian girls, and that’s what they want, it’s like a mock rape." In June 2008, the eXile website was closed down by the Russian government and Ames returned to the U.S. Ames continues to edit the eXile in an online-only format: eXiledonline. Ames became senior editor at Paul Carr'sNot Safe For Work Corporation website in August 2012. In October 2017, in the context of the Harvey Weinstein sexual abuse allegations and a new book release by Taibbi, passages from the book were highlighted in the media. Ames responded that the book was satirical fiction and the events described never occurred:
