From Putin to Pussy Riot

    Russia’s gone blooey? Call in an expert.

    Masha Gessen, a Russian-American who blogs about that country’s culture and politics for The New York Times’s website, will try to make some sense of the turmoil when she speaks at the Stony Brook Southampton campus for the Writers Speak series Wednesday night.

    Want to learn more about human rights abuses and the jailing of the band Pussy Riot? Ms. Gessen has just released the book “Words Will Break Cement: The Passion of Pussy Riot,” which she will read from starting at 7 p.m. What’s more, she co-edited “Gay Propaganda: Russian Love Stories” in answer to the pre-Sochi Olympics anti-homosexual measures in Russia.

    Anxious about the annexation of Ukraine’s Crimean peninsula and curious about the psychology of the man behind it? In 2012 Ms. Gessen published “The Man Without a Face: The Unlikely Rise of Vladimir Putin.”

    Dan Menaker, a professor at the college and formerly an editor at The New Yorker, will interview her about all that and more. It happens in the Radio Lounge, upstairs in Chancellors Hall.