831: Lists!!!

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Speaker 1 A quick warning, there are curse words that are un-beeped in today's episode of the show. If you prefer a beeped version, you can find that at our website, thisamericanlife.org.

Speaker 4 The People's Almanac came out in the mid-1970s. It's hard to imagine a more eccentric bestseller.

Speaker 4 Over 1,400 pages long, it read like an encyclopedia written by an excited and precocious 15-year-old who loved all the obscure details of all the knowledge in all the world.

Speaker 4 There were sections on the greatest man-made disasters ever, and also on the greatest prize fighters, a guide to buried treasure in the United States, biographies of famous and infamous scientists, a history of advertising going back to ancient Greece, and also a chapter about a minister who took over a newspaper for a week in the year 1900 and made all editorial decisions, what was on the front page, what they covered, based on what he believed Jesus would have done if Jesus had gone to the newspaper game.

Speaker 4 And at the end of the book, was an address and a note from the authors asking for suggestions for future editions and asking readers to tell tell them what parts of the book they liked and disliked.

Speaker 7 So we eventually received thousands of letters, each of which I read.

Speaker 4 David Wolitzynski was one of the authors of the People's Almanac.

Speaker 7 And because of that, I was able to determine that the most popular chapter in the People's Almanac was lists.

Speaker 9 Lists.

Speaker 4 Of all the knowledge in the world, people most loved 25 pages out of the 1400-page book that had some lists.

Speaker 4 Some of those lists were boring stuff like the world's 15 biggest cities and 10 tallest buildings and 10 longest rivers.

Speaker 6 But there were weirder lists.

Speaker 4 20 historical figures who were born as illegitimate children. 15 people who had an absurd number of spouses.
And this one, that was maybe a little more edgy, in 1975 when this was published.

Speaker 4 20 celebrities who'd been psychoanalyzed.

Speaker 7 From letters they got, Wolochinski says that they learned that one list that readers really loved was famous people who never existed but live today, like Sherlock Holmes,

Speaker 7 Superman, Wonder Woman, Scrooge McDuck.

Speaker 4 Scrooge McDuck, not technically a person, but you get the idea.

Speaker 7 And the most popular list was nine breeds of dog that bite the most.

Speaker 7 So based on that, we decided to do the first book of lists.

Speaker 4 The first book of lists was an even bigger, even more ridiculously huge bestseller. A pop culture phenomenon.

Speaker 4 It sold over three million copies, had four sequels, a short-lived TV spin-off, and a board game. I was a teenager in the 1970s.

Speaker 10 I had no interest in this kind of thing whatsoever, but I remember it being one of those ubiquitous books that you could not help but know about.

Speaker 4 And looking back on it now, reading the book of lists today,

Speaker 4 I think they accidentally figured out how to give the pleasure of scrolling the internet way before the internet existed.

Speaker 4 Basically, it was a way to leaf through impossibly random stuff till something catchy grabbed your eye.

Speaker 7 We had different kinds of lists, and people were responding to all of them. We had the celebrity lists,

Speaker 7 you know, where we would ask Ronald Reagan, what are the events in history you wish you could have witnessed.

Speaker 7 Then there was a straight list that was statistical, you know, what were the worst airlines in the world based on deaths per miles flown.

Speaker 7 And then my favorite kind were what we called the annotated list, where you'd actually have to do some research. and then put a paragraph describing the entry.

Speaker 4 The most popular list they ever did was like that.

Speaker 4 And before I tell you what this list was, I want you to please listen for a second to some of the lists that it had to beat out to be the most popular list.

Speaker 5 Okay, here we go:

Speaker 4 15 famous events that happened in the bathtub. 16 names of things that you never knew had names.
18 famous brains and what they weighed.

Speaker 4 14 men who became units of measurement and the units named after them. Benjamin Franklin's Eight Reasons to Marry an Older Woman.

Speaker 4 A lot of competition there.

Speaker 4 So,

Speaker 4 what was in that most popular list?

Speaker 7 Six sexual positions in order of popularity, and then the advantages and disadvantages of each one. Decades later, people still tell me, thank you so much for that list.
I learned so much.

Speaker 4 And maybe this is obvious on its face, but just lay out why that would be such a big deal in the 70s.

Speaker 7 I think it was a big deal because nobody talked about it. It wasn't in print.

Speaker 7 And I think a lot of people

Speaker 7 only thought there was one sexual position.

Speaker 6 No.

Speaker 6 Yeah.

Speaker 7 Oh, yeah. You know, I mean, there were people like that.
And a lot of the people who would tell me about how it affected them,

Speaker 7 they read it at a time when they were teenagers.

Speaker 4 I mean, essentially, I just opened it up to that page in the book, and these are so basic. Like, it literally is like which person is on top

Speaker 4 and whether they're sort of lying, sitting, or standing. And each position gets five sentences maybe you know like a sentence of advantage a sentence of disadvantage like it's very

Speaker 9 terse it's two pages total

Speaker 7 yeah yeah yeah it's not the kama sutra

Speaker 4 David Walachynski has thought way more about lists than most of us and he told me this one story that illustrates how putting something on a list has such power he said that for most of his adult life, he was kind of obsessed about the terrible things that repressive governments around the world do to their people.

Speaker 4 And he wanted to write about it for magazines and convince people how important this was. And he really couldn't figure out how to do that compellingly.

Speaker 7 And so in 2003,

Speaker 11 I got this idea.

Speaker 7 I'll do it as a list.

Speaker 7 The 10 worst living dictators.

Speaker 7 And I was obsessive in creating the order of list of worst dictators. I had criteria,

Speaker 7 different criteria, and then I gave extra credit for dictators who tortured or murdered their political opponents.

Speaker 4 He published this list with write-ups on each dictator in Parade magazine, which was a big deal at the time. Reached 32 million people.

Speaker 7 And it was so popular that

Speaker 7 we did it annually and it became a cover story.

Speaker 7 So millions of people read about this topic they would not otherwise have read about. The list format made accessible to people a subject they wouldn't

Speaker 7 know they might be interested in.

Speaker 4 It made the subject digestible and human.

Speaker 10 Here were 10 awful human beings you could have feelings about.

Speaker 4 That's the power of a list.

Speaker 4 But of course, most of the lists in our lives are different from this. Most are the lists that we write for ourselves.

Speaker 7 And it's interesting.

Speaker 4 People put all kinds of things on those lists.

Speaker 12 Oh my God.

Speaker 14 I feel nervous.

Speaker 11 Why do you feel nervous?

Speaker 14 Because

Speaker 14 I was just looking through my lists and I just

Speaker 14 feel like a freak.

Speaker 4 This is Aviva DeKornfeld, a producer at our show here.

Speaker 4 And I learned about the very personal and idiosyncratic list that she keeps in a staff meeting where I talked about Walachinski and different kinds of lists.

Speaker 4 And at that meeting, Aviva started talking about her lists.

Speaker 14 And so I was offering this,

Speaker 14 kind of assuming everyone would, I would like start saying my list, so then everyone else would be like, yeah, yeah, me too.

Speaker 14 And then they would share their list, and it would be kind of like this bonding moment.

Speaker 4 That's what you thought was going to happen.

Speaker 12 Yeah.

Speaker 14 And that's not what happened at all. What happened is that I named like a couple of my more recent lists and then everyone started laughing and was like, what the hell?

Speaker 14 In fact, Laura, our coworker, messaged in the chat a Viva's brain with like seven exclamation points. And it felt like a little, I mean, it was all in good spirits, but it felt a little embarrassing.

Speaker 4 Viva does keep some lists that lots of people keep. Practical stuff, like books she wants to read, or gift ideas for people she loves.

Speaker 4 But then, on the notes app of her phone, there's a whole bunch of lists that have no practical purpose at all, but are really just her sort of organizing the stuff that is rattling around in her head.

Speaker 14 So,

Speaker 14 a list that is just like organizing my brain is, um,

Speaker 14 let me look.

Speaker 14 things that are off-brand for me

Speaker 12 or

Speaker 14 common things I've never done

Speaker 12 or

Speaker 14 times strangers have involved me in their business for unclear reasons like on the street or on the subway that happens to me all the time okay so then let's dive into those lists things that are off-brand for me

Speaker 4 read me that list

Speaker 14 okay i'm bad at jumping

Speaker 14 i'm inconsistent with my birth control.

Speaker 4 You mean you're not taking your pillow every day that you should?

Speaker 14 No.

Speaker 4 Why is that off-brand?

Speaker 14 Because I'm organized. The other thing that's embarrassing about reading these lists is that they're so private, but whatever.

Speaker 12 I don't care.

Speaker 12 I can't rollerblade.

Speaker 12 I hate PETA.

Speaker 14 Even though I was vegan for a year and vegetarian for a bunch of years, I just really don't like them.

Speaker 14 I don't love bowling.

Speaker 14 That's a new addition.

Speaker 14 The last one I really don't want to share, but will, but

Speaker 14 it probably shouldn't be on the radio because it makes me seem really psychotic, which is that I've never kissed anyone famous, and I just assumed I would have by now.

Speaker 6 Because you're how old?

Speaker 12 30.

Speaker 4 And so you've kissed a bunch of people.

Speaker 14 Yeah, a ton. And the most famous person I've ever kissed is the captain of the Belgian field hockey team, which is not famous.

Speaker 6 No, that is not famous.

Speaker 14 No.

Speaker 12 Yeah.

Speaker 14 His name is Jay.

Speaker 4 This list, with a list common things I've never done, which by the way only has two items on it, karaoke and going to Costco,

Speaker 4 or the list where I feel the emotions that I feel on my body, or the list times people have referred to me as neurodivergent, even though I don't think I am.

Speaker 4 All these lists are different ways that Aviva is sort of naming parts of herself for herself.

Speaker 14 Yeah, yeah, I'm just trying to make sense of who I am and what is going on in my brain.

Speaker 4 English form.

Speaker 14 Yeah, because it's so organized and clear and clean. And the business of making sense of yourself is, I've found to be extremely messy.

Speaker 4 With that in mind, Aviva still keeps old defunct lists because they're like a record of who she was.

Speaker 4 Lists from when she was a teenager, like harmless things my dad hates, or things I should have known, or her very first list, scenes from my grandmother's nursing home, made on weekly visits when she was 14, trying to make sense of that world.

Speaker 4 Normally she doesn't show these lists to anybody. She'll just notice something about herself, and then she'll notice a second example of the same thing, and she starts to collect them.

Speaker 4 So she can stare at the list, try to understand it. And the fact that it's collected on a list, what feeling does that give you once it's on the list?

Speaker 14 Oh my god, it's like relief. It's so nice because it's just bouncing around in my brain.
And so once it's on a list, I don't feel like I have to remember it.

Speaker 4 But it isn't just like you don't have to think about it. It's like you don't have to worry about it.

Speaker 4 Like before you put it on the list, it seems like there's a kind of fretting of like, what does this mean about me that this is a thing?

Speaker 4 And then once you put it on the list, you're like, I know what it means. It means it's on this list.

Speaker 14 Yeah, totally. That's true.

Speaker 14 Like I exist and this is a thing about me.

Speaker 4 Today on our program, lists and how they tame the chaos of the world.

Speaker 4 I have to say, I feel very aware in putting together everything that I've said to you so far today.

Speaker 4 The way I did it is the way I write every radio story I've ever done since, I don't know, forever. The first thing I do is I make a list of all the possible quotes that I might use.

Speaker 4 So in this case, it was three single-space type pages of quotes from Aviva and from David Walachinsky with asterisks by the quotes I like the most.

Speaker 4 And then, what I do is I stare at the list until it just pops out for me. This quote should come first, and this one second, and this one could end the thing.

Speaker 4 I have no idea how to write any radio story without a list to take control of all the confusion and all the possible choices that I could make and make it make sense.

Speaker 4 So, today, lists, how they run the world and everything in it. From WBEZ Chicago, it's this American Life.

Speaker 6 I'm Ira Glass. And hold on, I have a a list right here.
Number one, stay with us.

Speaker 4 Number two, stay with us. Number three,

Speaker 4 stay with us.

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Available in the US only.

Speaker 10 It's this American Life.

Speaker 4 Today's show is a rerun, Act 1, List for Life.

Speaker 4 So let's start our our show today with a list designed as a kind of magical tool for living your life and maximizing your potential and being your very best self.

Speaker 9 Or anyway, that's what this list was supposed to do.

Speaker 4 Story comes to us from John Fasiel.

Speaker 18 You ready to talk about the list? Sure.

Speaker 18 You want to see it? It's right.

Speaker 18 This is it right here.

Speaker 19 What do you want to ask me about it?

Speaker 18 I'm on a Zoom call with my brother Pat. Talking about a list that was written by our other brother, Mike.
And I want to ask him what he thinks I should do with it.

Speaker 18 It's one of the last pieces of Mike's writing that we have.

Speaker 19 I don't care. If you burned it, I wouldn't feel sad.
I wouldn't be angry. I'd say,

Speaker 19 I'd say, why'd you burn it without me?

Speaker 18 My brother Mike died in 2015. That's almost 10 years ago now.

Speaker 6 Geez.

Speaker 18 And,

Speaker 18 you know, trigger warning and all that, he died because of a suicidal act.

Speaker 18 It's unclear why he did what he did. There were stories his roommates told about paranoia, hallucinations, Mike becoming obsessed with aliens.

Speaker 18 It was all so sudden and shocking that my family and I started grasping around for anything, trying to make it all make sense. Which brings me to the list.

Speaker 18 Mike wrote the list the summer he was about to be a sophomore in high school. 16 principles to live his life by, titled Goals for Success, double underlined on a rectangular piece of poster board.

Speaker 18 They were corny broisms, if I'm being honest. Make a commitment.
Be unselfish. Create unity.
Come together as never before.

Speaker 18 As you can see, Mike was a real overachiever, type A type.

Speaker 18 Improve every day as a player, person, and student. Be tough.
Be self-disciplined. Do it right, don't accept less.
He was captain of the high school football team, straight A student.

Speaker 18 Give great effort, be enthusiastic, eliminate mistakes, don't beat yourself.

Speaker 18 He hung the list on his closet door, facing his bed, so that when he woke up in the morning, the first thing he saw was, expect to win, be consistent, develop leadership, be responsible.

Speaker 18 I first noticed the the list when I went into Mike's bedroom to steal a pair of his boxers. I was always forgetting to do my laundry.
Mike always did his.

Speaker 18 And my feelings about the list were immediately complicated. I felt like it was somehow judging me.

Speaker 18 I was the oldest of my siblings, but to me, Mike always felt older. He was Mr.
Rotary Club, Mr. scheduled out his daily routine.

Speaker 18 I was Mr. been arrested twice, Mr.
smoking weed out of an aluminum can can and probably doing irreparable damage to my lungs in the woods. And Mike knew he was better than me.

Speaker 18 He even wrote a poem in English class about how disappointed he was in me. I'm not kidding.
It was titled Second Chances.

Speaker 18 Back then, I resented the list. I probably made fun of him about it, because that was the nature of our relationship, even though we were close.

Speaker 18 But after he died, I actually saw these principles as something I should live up to. Because at that point, I was spiraling.

Speaker 18 Mike was 24 when he died. I was 26.

Speaker 18 I couldn't get myself together. Drinking, depression, a simmering, futile anger at the universe.

Speaker 18 The original had been framed, and I asked my parents if I could have it and hung it up in my apartment by the front door. I thought maybe its commandments might rub off on me.

Speaker 18 And there it stayed for a bit. I'd glance at it every once in a while and feel again like I was falling short.
So after a couple of years, I took it down. I shoved it in the back of my closet.

Speaker 18 It just bothered me, the toxic positivity, therapist, waiting room, posternness of it all. But I also couldn't bear to get rid of it.

Speaker 18 Which is why I called up Pat to finally figure out what to do with it.

Speaker 19 If anything,

Speaker 19 I would think the list would be cursed.

Speaker 20 So you can keep it.

Speaker 19 It makes you

Speaker 19 feel better. I don't want anything to do with the list.

Speaker 18 Pat was the closest person to Mike in the world. He's two years younger than Mike, who is a year and a half younger than me.
Pat and I can't even agree on the most basic things about the list.

Speaker 18 And he had neat handwriting. Like, that was one thing that struck me looking at the list is how neat his handwriting is.

Speaker 19 Doesn't look neat. Not to me.
Yeah, way. Are there straight lines? Are we looking at the same photo?

Speaker 5 Yeah, yeah.

Speaker 19 No, that's not neat. That's neat.
Look at the K. He doesn't even dot the eyes.

Speaker 18 But he's consistently not dotting his I's. That's that says something

Speaker 19 that he never learned how to write the letter I.

Speaker 18 Pat saw something in the lists that I also felt, but I couldn't necessarily name.

Speaker 18 What role do you think the list played in

Speaker 18 his death?

Speaker 19 I mean, the list didn't play a role, but it's a reflection of

Speaker 19 his psychology, which played every role in his death and

Speaker 19 shows you

Speaker 19 the type of responsibility

Speaker 19 he felt.

Speaker 19 It shows you the type of pressure he put on himself.

Speaker 19 There's nothing about self-care in it. And there's nothing about being true to yourself either.

Speaker 19 It shows you a lot of what was going on with him and this

Speaker 19 mindset that he got trapped in and that made him very sick.

Speaker 18 When Mike was a sophomore at Penn State, he started experiencing delusions, and he was barely sleeping. But if he felt like he was struggling, he didn't tell anyone.
He kept going to class.

Speaker 18 His roommates noticed, and they were talking about how to get him help.

Speaker 18 And I think, this is just my opinion, a guess, that Mike didn't want to be found out.

Speaker 5 I mean,

Speaker 18 in the past, I've connected the list to Mike's mindset as in, like, he was not somebody who's going to be vulnerable if he was suffering.

Speaker 19 No, he was not.

Speaker 18 Are there any bullet points that stand out to you in particular?

Speaker 19 There's a bunch.

Speaker 19 Eliminate mistakes.

Speaker 19 That's one of the ones that's just so stupid. Eliminate mistakes.
We mean you can't.

Speaker 18 That's why they're mistakes. Yeah.

Speaker 19 Create unity. Come together as never before.

Speaker 19 I mean, you don't, he's not just trying to get people to come together as never before.

Speaker 18 I like that one. That reminds me of he was a good unifier.
You know, he had friends across all the arbitrary social cliques.

Speaker 18 After he passed, did you think about the list at all, or did you?

Speaker 19 I didn't give it a lot of thought until I went

Speaker 19 to the football banquet

Speaker 19 and

Speaker 18 heard Mr.

Speaker 19 Ricky speak,

Speaker 19 and then I got pretty angry.

Speaker 19 And

Speaker 19 does what he did

Speaker 22 to make himself pretty annoyed at the list. One of the captains of our 2008 team and a 2009 Garnet Valley graduate, Mike Fasil, embodied the qualities of the coachable player.

Speaker 18 That's Mike's high school football coach, in case you can't just tell from his voice, renaming an award after my brother at a banquet in 2016.

Speaker 22 Mike created and shared a list of goals for success, 16 standards that he vowed to uphold and to use as a compass to guide his path. They were: make a commitment, be unselfish.

Speaker 18 This is really the moment the list passed into lore. When it became the way my brother was remembered,

Speaker 18 the coach paid to have goals for success professionally matted and framed.

Speaker 18 That's the copy that I have.

Speaker 18 He also hung a replica of the list in our high school's weight room

Speaker 18 next to a photo of Mike in football gear with his tough game face on to inspire future generations,

Speaker 5 which I appreciated.

Speaker 18 He was putting so much into memorializing Mike.

Speaker 18 But later, I started worrying about the kids who saw it

Speaker 18 and whether they might judge themselves by it the same way that I had.

Speaker 22 We want our players to do what you're supposed to do and believe if it is to be, it's up to me. We want them to be model citizens, model athletes, and model sons.

Speaker 22 In essence, we want them to be like Mike Fasil.

Speaker 18 The coach goes on to describe what happened to Mike.

Speaker 18 He says that he fell from the fourth floor balcony of his dorm

Speaker 18 and that it was an accident,

Speaker 18 which he got from my parents. That was how they framed it.

Speaker 18 But Mike didn't fall. He jumped.

Speaker 19 The list

Speaker 19 still makes me feel sad, but that was when the list started making me feel angry.

Speaker 19 To me, it's like this obsession

Speaker 19 with image

Speaker 19 that is such a toxic quality of

Speaker 19 the community that we're from and the family that we're from.

Speaker 18 We may have looked good from the outside, but alcoholism and mental illness run in our family and were a big part of my childhood. You don't need to know the specifics, just know that it was chaos.

Speaker 18 And not even Mr. Goldenchild was spared from it.

Speaker 18 But where I struggled and flailed and totally embodied all that chaos, Mike tried to contain it, to impose order on it, to fix it by being

Speaker 18 And that's what the list is, a manifestation of his drive to be perfect. That's how Pat sees it, anyway.

Speaker 19 It's painful for me, the list, because it's about what trauma did

Speaker 19 to Mike.

Speaker 19 And

Speaker 19 now these adults are waving it around like it was some sort of thing to be proud of with him. And it's...
It's there's a lot of things that I, that I'm very proud of that he did.

Speaker 19 You know, I'd rather those things be remembered than this

Speaker 19 insane pressure that he put on himself.

Speaker 18 What do you wish he was remembered for? What are the things you want him remembered for?

Speaker 19 I think just who he was, really,

Speaker 12 I mean,

Speaker 19 there's really nothing to be ashamed of.

Speaker 19 But like, he wasn't this model person like, like in school. Like we sold weed together.
Like we we provided pretty much the entire football team with weed.

Speaker 19 We had like a little business thing going on. Like it was funny.
It's not, it wasn't bad. It was funny.
Like, it's also just the truth.

Speaker 19 Whether it's funny or not funny, you know, I just want the truth remembered. I don't want to,

Speaker 19 I don't want to have to deal with these fake stories about Mike. When I was at the banquet

Speaker 19 and they gave

Speaker 19 his, they gave a check to the kid that won his award.

Speaker 19 And dad, and I'm with dad and

Speaker 19 kid comes up and dad says to him, he goes,

Speaker 19 make sure you spend this on other people. That's what Mike would have done.

Speaker 24 And I look at the kid.

Speaker 19 That's what I said. And I looked at dad and I go, who are you talking about?

Speaker 9 Talking about Mike?

Speaker 19 And then I look at the kid and I'm just like, dude, my brother brother would have spent this on the dumbest shit.

Speaker 12 All right.

Speaker 19 You do whatever you want with that money, kid. Go have fun.

Speaker 6 Really? You said that?

Speaker 17 Yeah.

Speaker 19 I mean, he would have.

Speaker 18 He would have

Speaker 18 stolen that money. He was

Speaker 12 greedy

Speaker 6 so bad with money.

Speaker 19 Yeah.

Speaker 19 He would buy like

Speaker 19 a 400 pair of dollar pair of sunglasses and then like accidentally leave them on top of a car and lose them.

Speaker 18 Didn't he put sub a subwoofer in his in his

Speaker 5 car too? Okay.

Speaker 19 The subwoofer was awesome, okay?

Speaker 19 The subwoofer was such a deal and

Speaker 19 perfectly for the hatchback.

Speaker 18 The list doesn't just leave out Mike's flaws.

Speaker 18 It also misses really the best stuff about him.

Speaker 18 He was warm, generous, extremely goofy.

Speaker 19 He was curious, and that was a really good quality that he had. He found people really interesting.
So he liked to listen.

Speaker 18 Be curious would be a good one to be on here.

Speaker 6 Yeah.

Speaker 19 Kids from my grade, they come up to me and they tell me stories about Mike when they started on the football team and they felt they didn't belong there because the older kids were dicks.

Speaker 19 And they said my brother would come around and he would he would comfort them and he would he would encourage them.

Speaker 19 And then I remember hearing from Alio Promola and she said when they were dating, Mike had a great relationship with her grandmother and he would watch TV with her grandmother.

Speaker 19 I think it was like game shows or something. Maybe it was a wheel of fortune.
And he would just watch TV with her and they would shoot the shit. And

Speaker 19 yeah, those are the stories that like I'm proud of because they're a reflection of who he was. He was a good guy that people enjoyed.
And that's the kind of stuff I want to remember.

Speaker 18 Last year, Pat wrote to the football coach at our our high school and asked him to use the list to spread awareness about suicide. He got him to add a line to the bottom of it.

Speaker 18 It says, there is great strength in vulnerability, as it takes courage to push through the fear and share one's true self with others.

Speaker 18 Recently, after my wife and I moved into our new apartment, I made a decision. to hang up the list again.
It's in my home office.

Speaker 18 Now I'm the one looking at it every day.

Speaker 18 And I don't resent it anymore. Maybe it still makes me feel a little weird, okay? But I just see it for what it is.
I don't feel judged by it. And some of the lists I'm genuinely down with.

Speaker 18 Like, Create Unity is a beautiful idea. It reminds me of the best of Mike.

Speaker 18 But mostly,

Speaker 18 I just like looking at my brother's handwriting.

Speaker 4 John Casile. He's a senior producer at the show Snap Judgment.
His story was produced by Sean Cole.

Speaker 4 Coming up, over 100 dogs and one giant bear and his list of enemies. That's in a minute.
We'll just talk about radio when our program continues.

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Speaker 4 This is American Life from Iraq Glass. Today's program has a rerun lists how they tame the chaos of the world.

Speaker 15 This This list is all the dogs in my dog's life,

Speaker 15 kind of segmented by different criteria.

Speaker 4 This is Bobby Sherwood, who's friends with one of our producers here, Chris Benderev. He's showing Chris a list that he keeps on his phone of neighborhood dogs.

Speaker 15 We've got Lunchbox, who's a cream Scotty with a turquoise vest. We've got Virgil, who is kind of some kind of doodle dog, but I said little fried chicken dog.
And the owner looks like my friend Otto.

Speaker 15 Wait, what is little fried chicken dog? Like some doodles have tight, curly brown hair fur, and it looks exactly like fried chicken. So this dog literally looks like a walking piece of fried chicken.

Speaker 4 Bobby keeps this list because there are so many dogs where he lives.

Speaker 4 There are like 130 dogs on this list.

Speaker 4 His memory isn't always the greatest, and he's convinced that people can tell if you don't know their dog's name and you're faking it by saying things like, How's he or she doing today?

Speaker 15 Or how's your puppy?

Speaker 10 You got to find out. He is not into the potential awkwardness of that.

Speaker 4 And okay, just for context, he does have a list of people like this too. To remember the spouses of friends and coworkers that he's met just once, and people's kids.

Speaker 4 But the dog list, he also finds it helpful to rank all the dogs. So his dog Chewy's favorites are at the top.

Speaker 10 His least favorites are at the bottom.

Speaker 15 Like, there are some dogs that bullied Chewy. So we throw them at the bottom of the list.
And then we know, hey, this one is his

Speaker 15 who beats up Chewy. You might want to bleep that name.

Speaker 4 To see how this works in practice, Chris followed Bobby to the dog park. And it doesn't take long before they get into a list-needing situation.

Speaker 15 I definitely think I recognize that dog. The tall doodle over there.

Speaker 16 Walk me through what you're doing.

Speaker 15 So,

Speaker 15 see a big boy I'm sure Chewie's run into at this dog park before.

Speaker 13 Let me see. Scrolling.

Speaker 4 He scrolls down the list on his phone

Speaker 4 till he gets to the dog park section.

Speaker 10 Searching for a dog with the description.

Speaker 23 Shaggy brown doodle, yeah.

Speaker 5 I don't know.

Speaker 4 He finds nothing. He'll have to add that one to the list.

Speaker 10 Bobby has no idea how other dog owners do it.

Speaker 4 Keep track of all the dogs. Though I think it's entirely possible that other people are no better with the names than he is.

Speaker 4 They just don't care. Oh, good.
He's a cutie. When he and Chris get back to the house,

Speaker 4 they run into a neighbor's dog who somehow wasn't on the list yet.

Speaker 5 I'm going to add it to the list, though.

Speaker 15 Actually, I've actually bumped into that dog many times, and he always says he's friendly and it's like, yeah, I know, like we've met like 10 times.

Speaker 6 You think he doesn't remember you?

Speaker 5 I don't know.

Speaker 15 I don't know. That guy needs a list though, you know?

Speaker 9 Act two, target list.

Speaker 4 There's some list you definitely do not want to be on.

Speaker 4 One Thanksgiving, not long ago, M had people come stay with him at a house they affectionately called the Dacha, because it's out of the city, not Russian.

Speaker 10 That's just the word Russians use.

Speaker 20 We totally call it the Dacha.

Speaker 4 M is M guessen. They read about Russia for the New York Times and in books.

Speaker 4 And the day after Thanksgiving, two of their guests left for some other celebration, and a bunch of the remaining guests, four or five people, went on a hike.

Speaker 5 Pretty vertical one, actually, up a nearby mountain.

Speaker 4 So they get to a spot way up high.

Speaker 20 Yeah, it's an overlook point. It's pretty tiny.
We're all standing pretty close together, looking out at the Catskills and

Speaker 20 the little town where we live. And then two of us pulled out our phones.

Speaker 6 As one does.

Speaker 4 How much nature can you take?

Speaker 20 And both of us saw a news item that one of the friends who had left that morning had been declared a foreign agent.

Speaker 4 Foreign agent. In other words, the Russian government just put him on an official list of people that it is not very very fond of.
Foreign agent is not a good thing.

Speaker 20 And this is something that the Russian government does almost every Friday.

Speaker 4 They put it out a list of foreign agents.

Speaker 20 Right.

Speaker 20 It's like this weird, weird spectator sport to see who is now a foreign agent.

Speaker 10 It's weird.

Speaker 4 It's like a sinister version of

Speaker 4 when Oscar nominations come out or something, you know?

Speaker 20 Actually, that's not a bad simile

Speaker 20 because, you know, when Oscar nominations come out, then you have to wonder what's going to be the outcome for any one of these.

Speaker 20 And with foreign agents it's a little bit like that. Part of being on the list of foreign agents is that you're put on notice.

Speaker 20 You're on our radar. We may launch a criminal case against you which has much harsher consequences.

Speaker 4 Or you can graduate from this list to worse lists.

Speaker 25 Yes.

Speaker 20 They end up on other lists like the wanted list, or somebody just stays a foreign agent indefinitely, but it's extremely unpleasant. It sort of

Speaker 20 reconfigures your world.

Speaker 4 So, they're out on this mountain. M and one of the other Russians read this on their phones that their friend who they just had Thanksgiving dinner with the night before is now a foreign agent.

Speaker 20 So, we both say his last name, Vinyavkin.

Speaker 20 And this is something...

Speaker 20 that's actually happened before between the two of us, where we just take out our phones on a Friday, see a name, and say the name, because you don't have to say, you know, Vinyafkin has been named a foreign agent, because we know it's Friday.

Speaker 4 Em says Russia is now in an age of lists. One of the reasons that we thought to rerun this episode this week is that President Trump is meeting with Vladimir Putin, who's a notorious listmaker.

Speaker 4 uses lists as an important way that he exercises power.

Speaker 4 And M says that Russia's current age of lists started when Vladimir Putin created the list of foreign agents.

Speaker 4 This was back when he first took the presidency for a second time in 2012 and started clamping down on dissent.

Speaker 4 At first, there was just organizations on the foreign agents list, human rights groups, media outfits. And then, three and a half years ago, they started adding the names of people to the list.

Speaker 4 Russia actually modeled his foreign agent law on an American foreign agent law that dates in the 1930s.

Speaker 4 One key difference between the two laws, among many, in America, to be a foreign agent, you actually have to be working for or acting on behalf of a foreign government organization.

Speaker 4 And you put yourself on the list. You register as a foreign agent.
In Russia, the government just puts you on a list, calls you a foreign agent, and voila, you are one.

Speaker 4 M says this list and the way the Putin government's been using it are typical of the way he's operating these days.

Speaker 20 It's like very bureaucratic.

Speaker 20 And so all these lists have weird nomenclatures, right? It's foreign agents list or undesirable organizations or unfriendly countries.

Speaker 20 So the United States, for example, is an unfriendly country to Russia.

Speaker 11 Right.

Speaker 6 What they mean is like mortal enemy.

Speaker 4 It's so weird that they feel compelled to divide off the world into the friendly countries and unfriendly countries that they actually have to write it down on a list.

Speaker 20 That's a great point. I mean, it's a very, you know, it's a combination of a country that has the ideology of a fortress under siege

Speaker 20 and a country that has like a deeply, deeply bureaucratic self-understanding. So everything has to be somehow classified and put down on paper or, you know, in an Excel table.

Speaker 20 This resurgent totalitarianism in Russia, it's really focused on the bureaucracy. Like the bureaucracy is

Speaker 20 hard,

Speaker 8 It's core.

Speaker 20 And that's why lists are so important.

Speaker 6 Are you on this list?

Speaker 25 I'm not.

Speaker 20 I'm on a

Speaker 20 different list.

Speaker 7 A worse list.

Speaker 4 What list is that?

Speaker 20 I'm on the wanted list because there's a criminal case against me.

Speaker 4 M says that being put on one of these lists throws you out of the normal world and into this weird, undefined limbo or purgatory where things are different and more worrisome.

Speaker 4 Because it's unclear what's going to happen next.

Speaker 10 What is clear is that it's a permanent status change.

Speaker 4 Our program today is about lists, and as part of that, we wanted to hear from people who are on a target list about what it's like to live that disquieting life.

Speaker 4 And Em agreed to reach out to some to talk about it and talk especially about what it's like to be on the foreign agent list.

Speaker 4 The foreign agent list is interesting because Being on that list really can mean such a wide range of things. Like maybe it'll be nothing, or maybe things will get a lot worse.

Speaker 4 Here's what I'm put together.

Speaker 20 I've been watching the foreign agent list grow for a few years. It's now about 400 people, most of them living outside of Russia.
And I probably know half of them.

Speaker 20 That's one reason I've been sort of obsessed with the list. It's a day that changes your life.

Speaker 8 Just I was cutting the turkey, and I believe that it was, I was in the midst of cutting my fourth turkey in a row.

Speaker 20 This is Ilya, my friend who was put on the list the Friday after Thanksgiving. Fourth turkey that weekend or fourth turkey that day?

Speaker 13 Probably that weekend.

Speaker 13 And

Speaker 11 then

Speaker 8 I saw my wife coming to me and I realized that she was pale and just

Speaker 11 I realized that something happened.

Speaker 8 And then she told me that I was declared a foreign agent.

Speaker 20 Here's Kalina Arapova's version of the experience of finding out she was on the list. She's a media lawyer who was representing journalists who had been put on the list.

Speaker 20 Then she was branded a foreign agent herself. She was the first lawyer on the list.
She found out when a reporter called to ask her about the implications.

Speaker 2 Believe me or not, like for the first few seconds, I didn't realize that he's actually saying to me that my name appeared on the list.

Speaker 2 I thought that he was asking me to provide a comment like what would happen? What if you appear on the list? How that would affect your life. And then I just realized that it's actually

Speaker 2 that he's actually informing me that my name is on the list.

Speaker 20 Being put on the foreign agent list has consequences regardless of where the person lives. And once the Russian government names you a foreign agent, you face a bunch of choices.

Speaker 20 Because there are all sorts of special rules that apply to foreign agents. And you have to decide whether you're going to comply.

Speaker 20 One rule. Every time you communicate anything publicly or semi-publicly, in the media or on social media or in a dating app even,

Speaker 20 you have to warn people that they're dealing with a foreign agent. There's a special disclaimer you have to use, in extra large type.

Speaker 2 It's huge. It has to be like

Speaker 2 in font and letters twice bigger than the main text.

Speaker 20 Do you remember the exact words? You can say them in Russian if you want.

Speaker 11 Yes.

Speaker 20 The disclaimer says this message or information was created and or disseminated by a foreign agent non-governmental organization.

Speaker 2 Which is quite like a big paragraph, considering the size.

Speaker 2 Like in social media, it would be like a caps lock.

Speaker 20 It's an all caps, yeah.

Speaker 20 And it gets more Byzantine. A person who has been put on the list must create a corporation.
And the corporation, in the eyes of the state, is you. And you're the corporation.

Speaker 20 This corporation has to file quarterly financial reports detailing the income you make and the money you spend, submit to an annual audit, and also post regular reports of your activities, whatever that means, on the internet or submit them to the media for publication.

Speaker 20 The paperwork has to be perfect every time, but the rules are vague.

Speaker 2 So you can make mistakes easily. And then, if you made a mistake, here government comes with a fine.
First fine, second fine, and then criminal case. So it's all made as a big trap.

Speaker 2 You know, all these games around it,

Speaker 2 it's like

Speaker 2 Tom and Jerry game. They are just running after us and we're trying to

Speaker 2 run away, trying to still do the job.

Speaker 20 galena follows the rules most of her clients do even if they're living outside of russia because everyone has someone or something left behind family members that the authorities can decide to harass property the authorities can seize my friend karen decided not to follow the rules He'd left Russia right after the full-scale invasion of Ukraine, and a couple of months later, his name popped up on the list.

Speaker 20 Like everyone, he still had a million things tying him to Russia.

Speaker 21 So I knew that I'm not gonna play

Speaker 21 by those rules and I decided to just

Speaker 21 get rid of everything I had back there,

Speaker 21 including my apartment.

Speaker 20 So you were thinking that now that you were on this list of foreign agents, your property in Russia was in danger and you should basically take money out of the country?

Speaker 21 Yes.

Speaker 20 What did that feel like?

Speaker 21 It felt like nothing.

Speaker 21 I

Speaker 21 told myself like, we don't go there.

Speaker 21 I mean, in that

Speaker 21 like infinite depth of feelings about,

Speaker 21 you know, your country,

Speaker 21 everybody

Speaker 21 who you left there and stuff, stuff, it can drive you crazy, so I just didn't feel anything.

Speaker 20 A little over a year later, Karen found out that he was on another list, the list of extremists and terrorists. This was, you could say, an upgrade.

Speaker 20 It meant that the Russian state froze whatever assets he still had in Russia, so he'd been smart to sell his apartment. But being on this list also meant they'd opened a criminal case against him.

Speaker 20 Just to make this clear, I hadn't been informed that there was a case against him. Karan had to hire a lawyer to figure out what he was charged with and which prosecutor was charging him.

Speaker 20 Karan and I have talked about this weird process of having to find your own case, because there's also a criminal case against me in Russia.

Speaker 20 I found out about it from articles in Russian government media, and then my name appeared on the wanted list.

Speaker 20 In the hierarchy of lists, the wanted list is probably the worst, that we know about, anyway.

Speaker 20 I've now been arrested in absentia, and in the next few months, a Moscow court is going to sentence me to seven or eight or nine years in prison.

Speaker 20 It took my lawyer two months to find the case against me for, quote, spreading false information about the Russian military. Karen said I was lucky.
It took his lawyer six months to find his case.

Speaker 20 Karen's crime? Years ago, Karen donated money to Alexei Navalny's Anti-Corruption Foundation. Navalny is the Russian politician who died in an Arctic prison earlier this year.

Speaker 20 And when did you give money to the Navalny organization? Do you remember?

Speaker 21 Well, for years.

Speaker 21 And that was,

Speaker 21 of course, it was long before they

Speaker 21 labeled Navalny Foundation as

Speaker 21 illegal or

Speaker 21 extremist or anything else.

Speaker 21 I was one of thousands of people, I believe, who supported Navalny and his foundation.

Speaker 20 Do you have any idea how much money you gave them?

Speaker 21 Not that much.

Speaker 21 I believe a few hundred

Speaker 21 dollars total.

Speaker 20 By the way, Alexei Navalny was also on the list of extremists and terrorists. He still is on that list because the authorities say they haven't received proper documentation of his death.
death.

Speaker 20 You know,

Speaker 21 any contact with Russian state recently

Speaker 21 resembles more and more

Speaker 21 sort of contact with hooligans

Speaker 21 back in elementary or middle school.

Speaker 11 Bullies.

Speaker 21 Yeah, like with bullies.

Speaker 21 This is

Speaker 21 a feeling that

Speaker 21 they are very strong,

Speaker 21 very hostile

Speaker 21 and

Speaker 21 very

Speaker 11 small-minded.

Speaker 21 Yeah, strong,

Speaker 21 hostile, and small-minded. Sort of feeling that

Speaker 21 they are like

Speaker 21 big

Speaker 21 angry animal who is trying to attack you when they're scared of you and who can like kill you because they're scared of you.

Speaker 20 Let's just call this animal what it is. You're describing a bear, a Russian bear.

Speaker 21 That's such a cliché.

Speaker 8 Come on.

Speaker 20 With the Russian bear on your heels, you have to watch your step.

Speaker 6 If you're going to travel, you have to ask, is it safe?

Speaker 20 Can I go there?

Speaker 20 Ilya Krasinchik, a different Ilya, now divides all the countries in the world into three categories.

Speaker 15 Can't go,

Speaker 15 maybe can go,

Speaker 15 can go with consequences.

Speaker 20 Can go with consequences really means don't go. You don't want the consequences.

Speaker 20 Ilya started a media outlet called Helpdusk, which reports on the war in Ukraine and helps Ukrainians flee the fighting.

Speaker 20 In the eyes of the Russian state, he has been a criminal for more than two years for posting about war crimes on Bucha.

Speaker 20 I haven't been a criminal for as long as Ilya has, but I've also learned. There's a whole convoluted science to it.

Speaker 20 Some countries will extradite people to Russia. Some countries might.

Speaker 20 And then there's Interpol, the International Police, which Russia tries to use to have people detained and sometimes extradited.

Speaker 20 The planning that goes into traveling to other countries can get very granular.

Speaker 21 Sometimes it's not about where you go, but

Speaker 21 about which company you fly. And this is really difficult because, for example, Turkish airlines have, if something will happen,

Speaker 21 they can land in Russia because they have this airport as the Plan B airport. But you need to call every airline and ask them for every route.
And I think somebody should do this.

Speaker 20 You could easily spend all your time, your entire life, perfecting the act. Being Jerry, who keeps evading Tom.

Speaker 21 So it's absurd, and absurd should be fun.

Speaker 21 I don't know, like Kafka, yeah, Kafka is funny some some way, but

Speaker 21 it's also awful.

Speaker 20 It used to be when a friend was named a foreign agent, I would send them a note saying, Proud to know you. Like it was some sort of recognition.

Speaker 20 At some point, that that stopped feeling right.

Speaker 6 I didn't feel proud.

Speaker 20 Not when my friends were put on the list, and not when I landed on Russia's Wanted list.

Speaker 20 When that happened, my friend Elya, the one who was carving the turkeys at Thanksgiving, texted me, I'm not sure what the protocol is. Do I congratulate you or express condolences? I felt sad.

Speaker 25 It helped me understand the sadness.

Speaker 20 Because, you know, when I found out that

Speaker 20 there was a criminal criminal case against me, and then later when I found out that I was arrested in absentia,

Speaker 20 in a sense,

Speaker 20 intellectually, it's almost exciting, and

Speaker 20 as people often say,

Speaker 20 it's a sort of recognition.

Speaker 20 And I felt profoundly sad. I felt

Speaker 20 like I was carrying around another

Speaker 20 burden that hadn't been there before.

Speaker 20 What is it?

Speaker 12 Oh,

Speaker 13 it's a good one.

Speaker 13 If I'm telling you something rude,

Speaker 13 if I'm telling you I hate you,

Speaker 13 it's okay to be sad about that, because it's sad that someone hates me.

Speaker 13 And when I'm saying that, well, I'm honored by that, or they're stupid,

Speaker 13 I feel that this reaction just shielding you from the sadness and tragedy of that.

Speaker 20 The elephant in the room of my sadness is that being considered a criminal by the Russian state means I'll never be able to go home again.

Speaker 20 Not even if there is a change of regime.

Speaker 20 I doubt that the first, second, or even third thing they're going to do after Putin is purge all the lists.

Speaker 20 So, like the vast majority of Russians who are on these lists, I'm in exile for life.

Speaker 20 For many of us who live outside of Russia, this business of being on lists is really akin to having a troublesome chronic illness.

Speaker 20 You keep tabs on it, you modify your behavior as necessary, you hope it doesn't kill you, but other than that, you live a relatively normal American or German or Dutch life.

Speaker 20 For those who are still in Russia though, the condition can be much more serious.

Speaker 20 Zoya is one such person.

Speaker 25 Zoya is not her real name.

Speaker 20 She's an LGBT activist, and in November of last year, the Russian Supreme Court declared the, quote, international LGBT movement was an extremist organization.

Speaker 20 Zoya had been put on lists even before that, though. Internal lists.
circulated within government agencies.

Speaker 20 These lists aren't meant to be public, but there's an illicit service that will search different internal lists and databases and send you what they find.

Speaker 20 Like a Freedom of Information Act request, but fast, unredacted, and for sale.

Speaker 27 You can just pay a very small amount, like $30,

Speaker 27 and download everything what they have on you,

Speaker 27 including these unformal lists that police

Speaker 27 create for their work.

Speaker 27 You will be able to see how this regime see you. What do they have on you? Do they follow your flights? Do they like

Speaker 27 it's enough information.

Speaker 20 And what she get is an Excel document or PDF?

Speaker 25 PDF.

Speaker 5 PDF. PDF document.

Speaker 20 On the PDF, the lists you're on are marked in red. So her PDF said extremism and terrorism in red.

Speaker 20 But again, this wasn't the public list of extremists and terrorists.

Speaker 27 Yeah, it's two different lists.

Speaker 27 If it's possible, I will say it to you in Russian.

Speaker 27 If you can translate it.

Speaker 11 So

Speaker 20 the reason you wanted to say it in Russian is because, not because you can't translate it, but because

Speaker 20 the word doesn't exist. Yeah.
Right? So it's like if they added another

Speaker 20 suffix to the word suspect.

Speaker 20 So it's like

Speaker 20 it's closest to

Speaker 20 if they called you suspectable

Speaker 20 in extremism and suspectable in terrorism.

Speaker 27 Yes.

Speaker 20 It's like this internal list is the draft of a list. Like eventually Zoe will probably be brought up on charges.
She'll be the suspect in a made-up crime.

Speaker 20 But for now, in draft form, she's merely suspectable.

Speaker 20 Can you tell me why you were trying to buy this information?

Speaker 27 I think it's for me to understand reality around me, because when you are inside country, you very often don't feel that it's risky to stay there.

Speaker 27 And where you...

Speaker 27 get this information you understand that no you you cannot be in safe

Speaker 27 you have to be prepared every day that you could be arrested, they could come to your flat, and

Speaker 27 it's not a question, will they come or not?

Speaker 5 They will.

Speaker 27 Just the question is when and will you have time to

Speaker 27 leave country? Will you have time to say goodbye for your parents or not?

Speaker 20 And what did Zoya do after finding out she was on this list of people who would eventually, probably,

Speaker 20 be placed on the list of extremists and terrorists?

Speaker 25 She cried.

Speaker 20 She started making some plans for leaving the country someday.

Speaker 20 And she made one very practical plan for staying.

Speaker 27 We bought a very good door.

Speaker 27 And when I came to the shop, I asked a guy to recommend me a door.

Speaker 27 The best.

Speaker 27 The best when police will come and they want to

Speaker 27 break this door, I need like 50 minutes, 20 minutes. And they choose this door for me.
This was the main criteria.

Speaker 20 When you were buying the door, what did they think you needed it for?

Speaker 27 They thought that I'm a

Speaker 27 drug dealer.

Speaker 27 And the guy told me that, okay, you will have a time

Speaker 27 to throw away

Speaker 27 to the toilet, everything what you have.

Speaker 27 I didn't explain them why I need this door. I think that probably it's a more understandable reason for them.

Speaker 12 Police

Speaker 27 usually come in the morning,

Speaker 27 every evening, before I'm going to sleep, I check the door.

Speaker 27 Everything should be closed, because if not, then I will not have this 20 minutes.

Speaker 20 How many locks does the door have? Three.

Speaker 20 And why do you need 20 minutes?

Speaker 27 I need to clean my computer and contacts

Speaker 27 because if I will not do this then all my friends will be in risk and also I have to fix my dog.

Speaker 27 My dog will protect me and they could shoot dog.

Speaker 20 So you have to put your dog in the other room?

Speaker 27 Yeah, in the bathroom and ask them and kindly ask them to not touch him.

Speaker 20 Zoya has many reasons to stay in Russia. Since her sister died of cancer several years ago, Zoya and Zoya's mother have together been raising Zoya's niece.

Speaker 20 Zoya's parents don't want to leave. Zoya's partner doesn't want to leave.
Most important, Zoya doesn't want to leave.

Speaker 20 So she has decided that she will stay as long as she possibly can.

Speaker 20 She believes the authorities will give her one final warning. something like, leave the country now, go to jail.

Speaker 20 And then she'll leave.

Speaker 20 I'm not sure why she thinks there will be a warning.

Speaker 20 When it comes to her niece though, Zoya is sure that the girl should leave the country as soon as she's old enough.

Speaker 27 in these elections and how people celebrate it. And

Speaker 27 I wish all the best for my niece. I want her to live in a free country with the possibility to choose partners,

Speaker 12 work,

Speaker 27 opinion, everything.

Speaker 20 What if I said all the same things to you?

Speaker 27 It's good if someone wish me all the best,

Speaker 27 but my niece will... This is what I wish for her.
But of course, she will decide.

Speaker 20 Just before we sat down for our interview, Zoya told me something that was still pretty new to her too.

Speaker 20 She was pregnant.

Speaker 27 I am in a huge crisis now because today, all morning, I just cry.

Speaker 27 And I feel it how I start to care not about myself, but about a...

Speaker 5 child.

Speaker 20 It's like this child when they're born will already be on one of those lists.

Speaker 20 Hanna Arendt called bureaucracy the rule by nobody.

Speaker 20 Maybe that's why it feels so hopeless.

Speaker 20 They label you an extremist or a foreign agent, and next thing you know, you're using those terms yourself to describe your life, because it is your life.

Speaker 20 Thinking about where you can go, what you can say in public, how you're being singled out by the Russian state can affect people you love, and how it can always, always get worse.

Speaker 20 And you're never not going to think about it.

Speaker 4 M. Gesson is an opinion columnist with the New York Times and the author of several books, including The Future is History, How Totalitarianism Reclaimed Russia.

Speaker 4 In the years since the story first erred, Zoya had her baby and she is still in Moscow.

Speaker 4 M was sentenced in absentia to eight years in prison for, quote, distributing false information about the Russian armed forces.

Speaker 12 A pair of stockings, a pair of shoes, a record by the moody blues, a bottle of Chanel, number five, a poster of a band called Better Alive.

Speaker 28 Silk negligent and a black garter belt, a book about how to get to know yourself.

Speaker 10 A shirt you adopted used to be mine.

Speaker 28 These are some of the things you left behind.

Speaker 4 Today's program was produced and edited by Nancy Updike and me. Nancy also produced End Guestson's Story.

Speaker 4 People who put together today's show today include Michael Comete, Andrea Lopez-Crusado, Avuka DeKornfeld, Bethel Hopte, Cassie Halley, Seth Wynn, Catherine Raymond, Safio Riddle, Ryan Rumery, Alyssa Schiff, Christopher Sotala, Marisa Robertson, Texter, and Matt Tierney.

Speaker 4 Our managing editor, Sarab Duraman, our senior editors, David Kestenbaum, our executive editor, is Emmanuel Berry. Help on today's rerun from Suzanne Gabber and Stone Nelson.

Speaker 4 Special thanks today to Elijah Walachinsky, Lika Kremer, Janae West, Isaac Arnstorff, and Martine Powers. As always, I hope you will consider becoming a This American Life partner.

Speaker 4 You get to listen to our show without any ads in it.

Speaker 4 You get dozens of bonus episodes that honestly have turned out to be so much better than we ever dreamed they would be when we first cooked up the idea of doing bonus episodes.

Speaker 4 And you get a whole greatest hits archive that appears right in your podcast feed. So if you're looking for something good to listen to, it is right there in your feed.

Speaker 4 To sign up for this, go to thisamericanlife.org/slash life partner. This American Life is delivered to public radio stations by PRX, the public radio exchange.
Thanks as always to our co-founder, Mr.

Speaker 4 Tori Maratia. How's he described his own management style in a list with three main points?

Speaker 21 Strong,

Speaker 21 hostile, and small-minded.

Speaker 10 All right, Glass.

Speaker 4 Back next week with more stories of This American Life. A rosary.

Speaker 4 A glassine bag.

Speaker 4 One word

Speaker 4 packed up on my door.

Speaker 4 Just one word, Jesus.

Speaker 15 Goodbye.

Speaker 4 Next week on the podcast of This American Life: a man and his car.

Speaker 26 You know, like some people also use the pronoun it for the car. I use the pronoun she for her.
Like, and people say you are in a relationship with this car.

Speaker 4 In the small community where he lives, this guy, Ali, has the only car, making him the unofficial taxi driver, delivery guy, and school bus driver. So, what happens when his car makes an enemy?

Speaker 4 That's next week on the podcast or New World Public Radio Station.

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