Ames was raised in Saratoga, California, a then-provincial town in the San Francisco Bay Area's Silicon Valley, where he attended an Episcopalian private school. His Saratoga upbringing produced a lasting influence on his writing.[1]

After leaving Saratoga, Ames attended the University of California, Berkeley while living with his father (his parents had divorced when Ames was eight years old). He later described how his college years shaped his later political views in a section of the eXile book (The Exile: Sex, Drugs, and Libel in the New Russia):

"I was a student at Berkeley in the late Reagan years. We had a lot of ideas back then, big dreams about getting famous and destroying the "Beigeocracy" that we thought stifled and controlled American Letters. Everything seemed possible then: world war, literary fame ... Anyway, something Really Big, with us at the center of it all. We'd ridicule the boring lefties, our enemies. We'd drop all sorts of drugs and go to the underground shows: Scratch Acid, Husker Du, Sonic Youth. It felt like something might happen, and soon." ( excerpt available online)

After college, Ames "lived in poverty and spitefulness" (according to his publisher's biographical sketch) in New York, Boston, San Francisco, and Prague, and played in a short-lived punk band. ([2]) He also lived with a Czech girlfriend in a suburban California nursing home.

In early 1990s, Ames began his gradual migration from California to Moscow. In August 1991 he visited Europe, sojourning for two weeks in St. Petersburg (then Leningrad). "That 14-day Homeric adventure on the streets of Leningrad really made an impression," Ames wrote; and though he returned to the United States to live in Foster City, California, he continued thinking of Russia, and delved into Russian literature. After spending mid '92 to early '93 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 left to establish the eXile, where he remains as writer and editor.

In June 2008, after Ames claimed that unwanted attention by Russian authorities scared all the paper's investors away and left The eXile without any funding, the site www.theexile.ru was closed down and Ames moved back to the United States. Ames continues to edit the the eXile as eXiledonline in an online-only format.

Writing about the Georgian crisis in September 2008, Ames wrote:

"I’d hate to be Georgia right now. So many American pundits have plans for the Georgians, brilliant schemes designed to get Georgia into a big war with the Russians. “Here’s what you oughta do.” It’s like listening in on bar talk...some drunk trying to talk a 98-pound weakling into a rematch with the hulking thug who just put him on the floor. Funny thing, they never want to prove their theory themselves."

In February, 2010, Vanity Fair profiled Ames and The eXile.

Ames' argues that The Economist and its formerly Moscow based correspondent Edward Lucas engages in sleazy and sloppy journalism, trying to paint Russia and former President of Russia Vladimir Putin as a fascist state and fascist ruler, respectively. He claims that the magazine regularly flip-flops on issues relating to Russian politics, citing the example in the lead up to the devastating 1998 Russian financial crisis where the magazine stated that market forces were growing stronger in Russia and that the Russian government needed more people such as Anatoly Chubais in positions of power. Four months later, when the Russian financial system, which Ames describes as the "IMF-backed pyramid scheme", began to collapse, Ames charged that the magazine "changed its mind, but in smarmy known-it-all language suggesting it had known this all along". Ames states his belief that it has begun to portray Russia as a fascist state with greater veracity since the Yukos affair, and claims the magazine "lied about a Russian Fascist threat in order to prop up a wildly unpopular, corrupt regime, which had overseen the total collapse of its economy, devastated the health of its citizens, and forever ruined the concepts of "liberalism," "free markets" and "free speech" in the minds of those who survived it...all because it seemed to benefit us." Ames also cites the example, of what he calls "vile" reporting, when calls for relief went out for help to those affected by the Great Famine (1845–1852) in Ireland, the Economist stated "It is no man's business to provide for another. If left to the natural law of distribution, those who deserve more would obtain it."