Matt Taibbi

Rolling Stone Contributing Editor, Matt Taibbi, graduated from Bard College in New York in 1991; finished his studies at Leningrad Polytechnichal University in Russia.

Taibbi worked as a freelance reporter in the former Soviet Union, including a stint in Uzbekistan, from whence he was deported in 1992 after writing an article for the Associated Press that was critical of President Islam Karimov.

At the time of his deportation, Taibbi was also the starting left fielder for the Uzbek National baseball team.

He returned to the United States in 1994 and worked for a time as an investigator in a Boston-based private detective agency.

In 1995 he went back to Russia and played pro baseball for two Russian clubs, Spartak and the Red Army.

Subsequently he moved to Mongolia and in 1996-97 played professional basketball in the Mongolian Basketball Association, where he was the nation's leading rebounder, and was known as the "Mongolian Rodman."

He eventually resettled in Moscow, where he founded, with writer Mark Ames, an English-language satire newspaper called the eXile.

Among the paper's more notorious stunts was an incident in which it convinced Mikhail Gorbachev to take a job as an assistant coach to the New York Jets.

The paper also made headlines for throwing a cream pie made of horse sperm in the face of a New York Times reporter, and for convincing the caretaker of Lenin's corpse to design a museum display for the waterlogged foot of John F. Kennedy, Jr.  In between the jokes the eXile earned a reputation for hard-nosed reporting of corruption both in Russian government and the American aid community. The paper was the only publication to correctly predict the 1998 Russian financial crisis.

In conjunction with the Russian paper Stringer, for whom Taibbi wrote in Russian, the eXile also wiretapped the telephone of Kremlin Chief of Staff Alexander Voloshin in 2001.  Taibbi in his time in Russia produced a great deal of participatory journalism, working in a variety of jobs to show readers the reality of Russian life. He worked at various times as a bricklayer in Siberia, a migrant farm laborer, a moonshine dealer, a professional clown, a keeper in an elephant cage, a security guard, and a construction worker in an Orthodox monastery.

Taibbi returned to the U.S. for good in 2002 and founded the Buffalo-based newspaper The Beast.

He left that paper a year later to work as a columnist for the New York Press, and eventually as a contributing editor for Rolling Stone.

His Press column on George Bush's prewar press conference, "Cleaning the Pool," was included in the Best Political Writing 2003 anthology, and a year later he was named one of the 35 most influential New Yorkers under 35 by the New York Observer.

Prior to Spanking the Donkey, a collection of writings about the 2004 presidential campaign, Taibbi published one book, The eXile: Sex, Drugs and Libel in the New Russia (Grove, 2000).

He lives in New York City.