Part Two: Samizdat: How to Self-Publish During a Dictatorship
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Prohibition is synonymous with speakeasies, jazz, flappers, and of course, failure. I'm Ed Helms, and on season three of my podcast, Snafu, there's a story I couldn't wait to tell you. It's about an unlikely duo in the 1920s who tried to warn the public that Prohibition was going to backfire so badly it just might leave thousands dead from poison. Listen and subscribe to Snafu on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

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My husband cheated on me with two women. He wants to stay together because he has cancer. Should I stay? Okay, Sam, that has to be the craziest story in OK Storytime podcast history. Well, John, that's because it's Dump'Em Week, and this user writes, Last week we had an attempted break-in. I asked my husband, who was supposed to be at his mom's, to come over and change the locks, but his mom told me he wasn't with her. And it took me less than an

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Hello, and welcome to Cool People Who Did Cool Stuff, your weekly podcast that you're probably listening to by audio format and not a hand-typed transcript. And if it was a hand-typed transcript, I'm terribly sorry to whoever had to type it, because I would have written more succinctly. I'm your host, Margaret Kiljoy, and my guest today is Katie Stoll. How are you? Hi, I'm good. I'm excited for part two. I'm excited for part two.

And I don't think you need to apologize. If someone loves your show and wants to type it out, they want all of you. They want all of your words. Yeah. Okay. Fair enough. But I was thinking Katie Stoll is a nice short name. So if I ever have to start writing Samizdat, maybe I'll name a character after you just because it doesn't take very long to type, you know? Oh, gosh. I would be honored. And yeah, it is. It's pretty to the point.

Our audio, nope, wait, producer. Our producer is Sophie. Hi, Sophie. I'm Sophie. My dog Truman is standing on the other side of the room as me and barking at me. Hi, Truman. And eating your pillow or no? And just being a menace to society today. She has not been able to do full herding dog activities today. And so she is letting me know that I am unacceptable to her.

And that's fair. Yeah. You're acceptable to us. Thank you. Did you hear that, Truman? Did you hear that? She's like, oh, are you petting me now? I have forgiven you for all your all your bad behavior. My dog does a thing where he comes to the back door as if he wants to get let in. And as soon as you open the door, he runs away because his trick is to try and get you to come outside to play with him. Oh, yeah. It's a trick. Truman does the same thing. Yeah. So annoying.

I mean, sometimes I let him. This is probably partly why he does it. Exactly. It works. It's so annoying because I'm just like, yeah, whatever you want, girl. Yeah. Well, what I want is also to finish my introduction, which is that our audio engineer is Rory. Hi, Rory. Hi, Rory. Hello. Hi. I don't know. I don't know what their voice sounds like.

And our theme music was written for Spion Woman. And we are on part two talking about Samizdat, the Soviet self-publishing revolution. Well, it wasn't a revolution, but a way to try to continue to make things happen despite intense censorship. The cliffhanger for last week was that I promised you the most famous author we're going to talk about this week, which, I mean, I didn't recognize. I've actually literally read one of his books, but I still didn't recognize his name, but that's because I'm basically like...

I'm both name blind and face blind. It's really not good. I just like don't recognize people, you know? Well, I'm going to assume it's, you know, not a name that's around a lot here. Maybe it's hard to pronounce in some capacity. I don't know. Maybe not. Yeah. I shouldn't have guessed. You're about to say it. I am about to say it. So the guy that we're going to talk about, his name is Alexander Solzhenitsyn.

Steve rolls right off the tongue. I can't believe you forgot that name anyway. I know. And then there's also this thing where like everything that's transliterated, you're going to run across multiple spellings on the internet, you know, because the actual spelling isn't this at all. It's, you know, in Cyrillic. And the thing about Alexander, which is what I'm going to call him, is that he's kind of nobody's hero. He doesn't like the West. He doesn't like the USSR. He's not a monarchist.

By the end of his life, he maybe liked Putin. But then I've also read that that was like entirely played up by Putin. I don't know. Which is believable. I know. Jordan Peterson likes talking about him, which is the grossest thing about him. Red flag. I know. I know. Yeah, but that doesn't mean that this guy would like Jordan Peterson talking about him. Right. And like.

And I've read so many contradictory things about this man and his beliefs. And so I tried to read his beliefs directly as much as possible. But the thing is, he is caught up in Cold War culture war. Sure. And so both sides want desperately for him to be their guy. Well, the USSR didn't want him to be their guy. They kicked him out. But that's a spoiler. But like post-Soviet Russia. Yeah. Yeah.

He is one of the most famous anti-communist writers of the 20th century, so the right wing gloms on to him. And I know I talked a big game about how most of the Samizdat writers and people purged by Stalin and shit were socialists. Alexander, he's kind of an exception to that. He's one of many exceptions to that. I mean, he's a lot of different things over the course of his life. On the whole, near the end of his life, he's a grouchy Eastern Orthodox guy who liked to write history and write about his experiences in the gulags.

Basically, he like wrote about how much he fucking suffered. That's what this man liked doing. Okay. Okay, sure. Alexander was born on December 11th, 1918 during the Russian Revolution. His father died before he was born and he grew up with his mother in a dilapidated hut. His family was Eastern Orthodox, but he converted to atheism as a teen and joined the communist youth. He is a brilliant scientist, especially a mathematician. He gets married to a chemist.

By the time World War II was doing its thing, he commanded an artillery battery as a loyal Red Army soldier off to rid the world of Nazism. Math is a really useful skill when you're talking about where shells land when you shoot them from artillery batteries. But he made a mistake. He wrote one of his friends a private letter during the war in which he made fun of a certain man with a mustache. So he's sent to prison.

Wait. Because he's making fun of Stalin. Oh, I thought you meant the other man with a mustache. Oh, yeah, no, that would be, no, this is after when Stalin and Hitler were no longer friends when they were on shooting terms. Yeah, gotcha. They sent him off to prison, I think, after the war. They're like, oh, you did bad, but we need you to keep doing some math. We need you to keep adding, yeah. Yeah. And so for a while, he just went and dug clay in a labor camp.

Eventually, they realized he was a science guy, and the Gulag system was just fucking ginormous at this point in history. These days, it seems likely that about 14 million people were held in the Gulag system. About 10% of them would die in captivity or immediately after being released.

Everything about this is argued because of the fucking Cold War. There's like Soviet apologists who were like, well, the numbers of people who died are really high because they let people free right before they died. And I'm like, why does that make it better? Right. I'm like, and your point is what? Yeah. And his estimates, Alexander's estimates during his lifetime is 60 million people in the Gulag system instead of 14 million. And there's...

that was a believable number that he came to through for good reason. I believe, but I'm not certain because everyone's arguing about this shit. I believe it's more like 14 million people, which is to be clear, too many fucking people. A ton of people. Yeah. Neither of these numbers are okay. Yeah. One time, okay, it's unrelated. It's like Margaret anecdote time. One day I was at a farmer's market in Canada and,

And I met a guy whose father had been a Polish guy who was held in a gulag in Siberia. And this guy, he kept staring at me and my friends. We're like punks and we're like playing accordion and stuff at the farmer's market. He's just glaring at us. He does not like us. And finally, I like go over. I'm going to go off script and just tell the story. I go over and he's tabling this book. It's called The Shadow of Caton.

And I'm like, oh, it's this book. And he's like, what do you know about World War II history? And I'm like, let's talk about Finland in World War II. I love talking about Finland in World War II. And I talked to him for a while and he goes, you and your friends, you're not Bolsheviks, are you?

And I was like, no. In my mind, I'm like, who the fuck is a Bolshevik? You're like, what? Yeah. I'm like, no, we're anarchists. And his eyes light up as soon as I say that we're anarchists. He picks up a copy of his father's memoir. He flips through it to find the chapter where his father's life was saved by an anarchist fellow prisoner in the gulag system.

And so like that act of kindness in 1940s, like made me a friend in the 2010s. Yeah. It was really nice. Wow. Yeah. I love that anecdote. Yeah. A lot of people are in the gulags. And it's like me in this, like the anarchist and the Polish guy had not the same politics. Right. But the Polish guy had literally was just thrown in there because the USSR had invaded Poland. Anyway, whatever. Whole separate story.

So the gulag system, not a nice place. Alexander, he's digging clay. And then they're like, wait a second, you can do science. And the nice thing about having a really big gulag system is you can have all these like specialized work camps. Like for example, the forced science experiment work camp. They had so many people in gulags that they had a dedicated advanced research team of imprisoned scientists. That's wild. That is...

Well, I guess with that many people, it's not that unbelievable. Yeah, and I'm sure they're arresting the intelligentsia and like educated people and whatever. And so he spends three years out of his eight years in an advanced research science camp for imprisoned people. And he says that this is how he survived being in the camps is that only five of the years were in like the horrible clay digging parts, you know? He's probably right. Yeah. But he kept talking shit.

And he talked shit on the scientific research of the guy who ran the place. Basically being like, oh, that guy doesn't know how to fucking do science. Am I right? And people were like, you're not allowed to like say that shit. So he gets sent to Kazakhstan back to regular gulag time. Oh, man. While he's there, he learned how to memorize his own writing by using a rosary. And each bead represented a line of writing. And he wasn't even religious at this point. I think kind of shortly after this, he converts to Eastern Orthodoxy. I think he's still an atheist at this point.

But they were like, well, they'll give you a rosary if you ask. And so he did. And he would pass the bead and it would be like another line. Like each bead represented a different line of what he was writing. Wow. The kind of skills that I have not developed in my life. I was going to say, that sounds complicated. Yeah. After he was released, he was totally free to do whatever. No, I'm just kidding. He had to go to Siberia. Oh. There's internal exile at this point in history where if you...

I had a friend who was sent to internal exile, actually. He was arrested in Georgia and found guilty, even though it should have been a self-defense case, for defending himself from a gay bashing. And then they put him... Georgia has this specific law where they can exile you into a different part of Georgia. And so he had to go to a different county and live in exile in a small rural town. That's so weird. Yeah. Internal exile out of county jail? Yeah.

Well, no, he was in a jail. He's living in a town. Oh, I see. Oh, okay. Huh. Weird. Yeah. So it's like, so when, when our guy Alexander, we're no longer talking about my friend in Georgia, when he sent to Siberia, he's free, but he, he's free to go live in Siberia. He's not free to live in Western Russia. Gotcha. And he's having a rough go of it. His wife divorced him while he was in prison and he started teaching in the school. I've read he was like a high school science teacher basically. Yeah.

And he started secretly writing poems and plays. He was 35. He was divorced and he was struggling with cancer. He recovered from the cancer. He remarried his ex-wife. And then after the death of Stalin, the courts invalidated his original conviction. They retroactively decided it was okay to make fun of the man with a mustache in a private letter to a friend. And he was allowed to move back to Western Russia. Wow. So everything's fixed forever. At this point,

He publishes his first famous book, A Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, which is the book that I read. And I wasn't like, I'm reading about Russia. It was just like a book I ran across. It's short. It's about life in a gulag. It was interesting. And it was actually published in the USSR. Khrushchev himself, the new leader, he signed off on publishing this book because while it's critical of the gulag system, it's not a particularly radical book. It's like

Khrushchev is down with shit that criticizes Stalin, you know? Yeah. But soon after that, after this book comes out to like great, everyone likes it, and he starts writing some other books and some of them get published in the West and whatever, it's complicated. He's soon persona non grata in the literary scene of Russia. The government decides they don't want him writing anymore and they steal all of his manuscripts.

His repression leads to this massive cultural boycott of the USSR. And all of these writers get together and are like, are you kidding? Why are we doing this to this, you know, important writer? And this includes Western leftists like Sartre and Vonnegut. You know who probably wouldn't join in a cultural boycott if it affected their bottom line?

I couldn't begin to think of an answer. It's the sponsors of this show. The sponsors, of course. It's the sponsors of this show. I know. They would do whatever's best morally at all times. Right, Sophie? We could say that all of our sponsors always do what's correct morally. I don't know. We love sponsors. This podcast is brought to you by Don't Gamble. Here's to that. Thanks.

Hi, I'm Bob Pittman, Chairman and CEO of iHeartMedia. I'm excited to introduce a brand new season of my podcast, Math & Stories from the Frontiers of Marketing. I'm having conversations with some interesting folks across a wide range of industries to hear how they reached the top of their fields and the lessons they learned along the way that everyone can use.

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We're also hearing how leaders brought their businesses out of unprecedented times, like Stéphane Boncel, CEO of Moderna. He becomes a human decision to decide to throw by the window your business strategy and to do what you think is the right thing for the world. Join me as we uncover innovations in data and analytics, the math, and the ever-important creative spark, the magic.

Listen to Math & Magic, stories from the frontiers of marketing on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Sometimes as dads, I think we're too hard on ourselves. We get down on ourselves on not being able to, you know, we're the providers, but we also have to learn to take care of ourselves. A wrap-up way, you got to pray for yourself as well as for everybody else, but never forget yourself. Self-love made me a better dad because I realized my worth.

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Here's some advice from Jamie Dimon, the CEO of JPMorgan Chase, on standing out from the leadership crowd. Develop your EQ. A lot of people have plenty of brains, but EQ is do you trust me? Do I communicate well? You know, when you walk in a room, do people feel good you're there? Are you responsive to people? Do people know you have a heart? Develop the team, develop the people, create a system of trust, and it works over time.

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It takes him 10 years to write this book, from 1958 to 1968. So if you're listening to this, my editor at Feminist Press, to whom I owe a book, hey, I'm writing faster than this guy did. The book he writes is called Gulag Archipelago, and it is this long, damning history of the gulag system. It's written in novel form, but it's like, Russian novels are very often like, look, I'm basically writing nonfiction, but every now and then I'm going to have some characters in it.

you know? And it's a very Russian novel. It is 300,000 words long, which is baby, uh, shorter than all of the Lord of the Rings books put together.

You know, I would struggle through it these days. I have the attention span of a goldfish lately. That's the topic for another day. I feel like I'm going to have to live in the woods for a solid... Well, I do live in the woods. I'm going to have to live in the woods without the internet. It's the internet. For a year before I can finally read War and Peace by Tolstoy. Yeah, it's a real problem. I might cut all the cords soon. But anyway, not during this show. Done via internet. Nope. Nope.

Do you ever read Tolstoy's The Death of Ivan Ilyich? It's like a novella of his that's like about a funeral. It's not. Okay, no, I read this one about a soldier going off somewhere and hiding in the mountains. No, this one's like all about grief. It's like... Okay. What's it called?

The death of Ivan Ilyich. I could be pronouncing the last name. A real theme with the titles of these writers. Yeah. A day in the life of Ivan, whatever his last name is. Yeah. I feel like a lot of these things were like as generically titled as possible, somewhat on purpose, you know? Sure. Yeah. Tolstoy was, I mean, everyone like sort of loved him, but he was also a Christian anarchist and like sometimes hated him, you know?

That was like my first intro to Tolstoy. And I was like, Jesus Christ, that was depressing. Give me more. What I did is I just had a I had a really good friend who was really into reading Tolstoy. And I would just like make her tell me what she was reading as she went. So I didn't actually read them, but I like the blow by blow, you know? Yeah. Like the cliff notes. Yeah.

One day, I'm going to read War and Peace, and one day, which is actually going to come up later, it's going to be a joke about a grandma tricking a granddaughter into reading War and Peace later in this. Oh. And one day, I'm going to read Gulag Archipelago. So he writes this long damning history, and I don't know if this is exactly why he can't get it published, but one of the things he does is he traces the origins of the system to before Stalin. He traces it back to 1918 and Lenin. Okay.

And like, whoops, you're not allowed to criticize anyone but Stalin. Everyone has to be like, the only thing that was ever wrong with the USSR was just Stalin, is what everyone has to pretend, you know? Oh, God. He works with a number of people to get this book smuggled out to the West on microfilm. Paris wants to publish it, but he desperately wants to try to leverage everything he can to get it published in the USSR first. One, because he wants it to have more impact. Two, there's like...

If you get stuff published in the West while you're living in Russia, you're like guaranteed that the USSR is never going to touch it, like is never going to let you publish it at that point. And there's only three manuscripts, three copies of the manuscript in the USSR. And I believe all three of them were literally buried. I know that two of them were. One was buried in Estonia by his like friend's daughter.

Another copy, one of his typists knew where it was because he was working with typists. Sometimes these Samizdat publisher typists are getting paid. Sometimes they're not. Sometimes they're volunteer. I don't know enough about this particular person. I do know that because she typed this book, the state captures her and tortures her. And she gives up the location of the manuscript. So the KGB go and they burn it.

And then, as soon as she's released, she is found hanging in her own apartment building stairwell. It's either murder or suicide. Yeah. But honestly, I think claiming that she was murdered by the state, whether or not she tied the rope herself, is perfectly fair. I agree. I completely agree. Meanwhile, the USSR's Writers' Union has kicked him out in 1969.

And he's hiding on his friend's property. He's kind of, I think, openly hiding on his friend's property because the USSR is like totally equal. Everyone's equal in the USSR. But he has a friend who's a world famous cellist. And because he's a world famous cellist, he gets his own villa, like a dacha. Okay. He gets his own fancy house just outside of town. And because he's world famous and has his own dacha, the KGB is like kind of not allowed to search his place. Okay. You know, so that's where he's hiding in the good and equal society of the USSR. People are...

People have probably caught on by now that I'm not a big fan. Oh, okay. Now I see. Which means that I love the U.S. and capitalism. That's the obvious logical conclusion. Only one thing can be bad at a time. Right. Anyway, he wins the 1970 Nobel Prize for Literature. Gulag Archipelago isn't even out yet, but he's written these other books. He's unable to attend the event. It's in, I think, Stockholm.

Because he's convinced that if he leaves, the USSR will never let him back in again. Right. Which isn't something that my friends are thinking about now at all. I don't know what you're talking about. No, I can't relate. Yeah. But he wrote a banger speech that he sent out there that included that ordinary man was obliged, quote, not to participate in lies. Basically, his whole speech was like, tell the fucking truth. That's it. That's the goal. That's the whole fucking point of doing anything is to tell the fucking truth.

And when he won this Nobel Prize, the people who took the biggest risk, inmates from his former prison camp, risked everything to smuggle notes out to congratulate him. And that's fucking cool. It is really cool.

Along the way, he divorces his wife, the scientist Natalia, to marry. And yeah, well, this time she divorced him and then they get back together. Okay. And then this time he's like, well, actually, I'm sorry, my wife, the scientist Natalia. I'm in love with another woman, a scientist named Natalia. He's got a type. Well. This is another complicated figure. Yeah.

I don't, I actually, I don't know. I have no particular reason to believe that this new Natalia is like age inappropriate or anything like that. You know, it's like they're actually working together and they're falling in love, I think is what's happening. I'm making a joke. Life happens. We don't know the specifics. It could have been good. It could have been bad. I spent a while trying to find out and I didn't find the answer. It's also like she did divorce him the first time, but. Yeah. Yeah.

I also am reasonably certain there's like only 10 first names available in the USSR. There's also that. Somewhere in here, there's a joke about how they had to share the names because of communism. And so he's getting real paranoid because the state's after him, you know, and they killed his typist. Sure. And so he sleeps with a pitchfork by his bed, which is classy and strange. It is both of those things. You know, not sure. It gives you a fighting chance. Okay. Yeah. I mean, like...

Honestly, a pitchfork by your bed is really just a, like, take-me-down fighting. It's like a, like, I don't want to go alive. That's all it says if you have a pitchfork by your bed. Yeah, totally. But yeah, after his typist is found dead, he's like, all right, Paris, go ahead and publish Gulag Archipelago. It's clearly not getting published in Russia. Yeah. And so they publish it in 1973. One guy, Isaiah Berlin, wrote about it, quote, Yeah.

Until the Gulag Archipelago, the communists and their allies had persuaded their followers that denunciations of the regime were largely bourgeois propaganda. And so basically it's like,

This firsthand, highly detailed account of the gulags broke the myth because the Communist Party was like, what are you talking about? There's not 60 million, 14 million people in gulags. No, it's just like three guys named Nikolai. That's all we got. It's just the Nikolai camp. You know, a lot of academics in the West hated gulag archipelago. Frankly, I think because they're associated with the Communist Party in the West. That's the...

And people who survived the gulag are like, no, this is pretty dead on. Whereas the people in the West are like, no, this can't be true, you know? Yeah. And finally, the USSR is like, get the fuck out of our country. He is deported to West Germany, and then he moves to Vermont. This is 1974. In Vermont, his family soon joins him. The new wife. I believe only one of the wives, yeah. He's not actually a bigamist. Anyway. Yeah.

And this is where I wish the story was he just pivoted into being a Vermont guy. He would have been such a good Vermont guy. There's like pictures of him and he looks just like a Vermont, almost Amish guy. He's got the big beard. Are you telling me this is Bernie Sanders? Oh, no. Beard. Yeah. Imagine if Bernie Sanders was in like 1870. Yeah. Instead, he goes into exile mode, which is perfectly reasonable. All he does is write, eat and sleep.

He starts writing what he intends to be his magnum opus, a series of books he never finishes, although he finishes like four of the books, so I can't talk shit. It's called The Red Wheel, and it is a complete history of the Russian Revolution. Oh. And it's turned down for Soviet publication because he refuses to uncapitalize the word God, which is just like two petty people fighting, and I kind of respect it, you know? Yep.

He's famous as hell because the U.S. is trying hard to just turn him into like a cold warrior, you know? Yeah, yeah. But all of his neighbors chip in to help him keep his privacy. They put up a sign in town saying, no directions to the Solzhenitsyns. So they're like, no, we're not going to tell anyone where to find you. Like you can just live in your weird writing retreat in Vermont.

I love that. Also, I'd be like low-key horrified if every time I drove by a sign saying... No directions to the stalls. Yeah, you're like... Yeah. But also, way to go. Yeah. His wife, Natalia, runs a relief fund for Soviet prisoners and all the proceeds from Gulag Archipelago go directly to supporting her fund. So they're like doing a thing together. All right, Natalia. Yeah. Yeah.

But instead of becoming a cool guy, he kind of just starts increasingly alienating everyone from all political sides. More and more complicated. Uh-huh. Partly, this is kind of cool. It's impossible to make him the stooge of the CIA or anyone else because he's mad at the U.S. Yeah. You want to know one of the things he's mad at the U.S. about? It makes sense from his position. Yeah, I do. Abandoning the Vietnam War. Okay. And also, to quote the New York Times from their obituary of him, quote,

He criticized the U.S.'s music as intolerable and attacked its unfettered press, accusing it of violations of privacy. Wow. So he's like... You just really can't get this right, can you, Goldilocks? No. Oh, the unfettered press? Yeah, he doesn't like that it's unfettered press. The music thing, I'm like, you just sound like a cranky old guy, but... Yeah, but he's also a cranky old weird Russian man on top of it. Yeah, complicated.

After the fall of the USSR, he goes back home. He's accompanied by a news crew to capture his response. And he's basically just like, fuck, it's all crime and corruption. And also, the ethnic Russians are not being protected in the former bloc countries. I have spent a bunch of time reading arguments on both sides about whether or not he was an ethno-nationalist, whether or not he was an anti-Semite, and all of this stuff. And the problem is...

Everyone is so politically engaged around him that it's hard to peace out. Like, he did in 2002 write a, like, book covering hundreds of years of the history of Jewish people in Russia. But in it, he's critical of all of the anti-Semitic policies of the government and, like, talks about the problem with the pogroms and, like, all of this stuff. But also he, I don't know, like, earlier he had...

Like, he might be an anti-Semite. He certainly meets some people's definitions of anti-Semite, but he also, like, isn't the kind of anti-Semite that you imagine when you imagine a Russian anti-Semite. Kind of don't even need to try to put him into one box or another. Right. He's a complicated figure of a very complicated time with different influences and clearly doesn't subscribe to one thing or another. Yep. There's this influence, there's that. He might be anti-Semitic, but doesn't mean that he thinks the Pahlgrams were...

Good, you know. Well, it's also hard because the only thing I've read, I didn't read everything. I read several articles about it, but he was accused of anti-Semitism because he, like, for example, he was saying that the pogroms were... He's anti-Zionist. Sorry. Oh, no, that would have actually been interesting. He was claiming that the pogroms didn't come from the top of society, but instead, like, came bottom up from the Russian peasants, but not in a way where he was like, and therefore it's good, you know? And I'm like...

I think that's true. I think that it was a bottom up populist revolt of horrible racist bullshit, you know? Because they're tapping into something that's coming from somewhere. Yeah. But he is also sort of an ethno-patriot about like Russian people. And he wants to leave. I don't know. He's fucking. It's also interesting given all that he's been through. Yeah. You know? Totally. Totally.

In 1994, he went before the Russian parliament and was like, this is not a democracy, but an oligarchy. And then continuing on his like, he can't make friends on either side. In 2005, he criticized NATO. He told the Times of London, and I actually think this is sick. He told the Times of London that democracy is quote, not worth a brass farthing if it is installed by bayonet.

And so he's like criticizing the like bomb countries into democracy thing that's been going on, you know? Yeah. But also I think Putin likes him and Jordan Peterson likes him and whatever fucking, you know, he died at 89 years old in 2008 and people want to use him to prop up this or that position, including people who know more about him than I do. Right. But my takeaway was grouchy old man, but a heart of shit life who grew up in a dilapidated hut and

Whose writing helped break through the lies of the Soviet regime. Yeah. Yeah. But do you know what doesn't know how to transition to ads? Me. That's not true, Margaret. You're so good at it. That's true. Okay, you're right. Oh, thank you. Thank you. Even this was a clever ruse of a, because I actually was transitioning to ads. I think very well. Perfectly.

Thank you. And anybody listening at home that's like, ugh, how hard could it be? It can be hard. It can be hard to find a graceful transition and respect it as I do. Here's the ads.

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So glad to be back from those ads. I know, I know. I learned so much about so many wonderful things. Sometimes we do get ads for good things. I will say that every now and then. I want the listeners to use their own discretion. It's true. So Alexander's work was a little bit influential as Samizdat, but honestly, a lot of what was influential about it, I didn't really expect to go on this like long rabbit hole about him, but I just spent so long reading about him. It was fascinating. I'm glad to have learned about him. Yeah. Yeah.

But a lot of what was influential about his work was what broke containment and was published widely. There had been other similar pieces before. For example, in 1951, a poll named Gustav Gerlin had written, A World Apart, about three years in a prison camp. It was spread by carbon copies that were spread around and retyped. And also, that one stands as an exception. That's before Samizdat culture.

Stalin's alive in 1951. Gustav Gerlin was risking an awful fucking lot by writing about that. Yeah. But by the end of 1950s, in the USSR, you get the culture of what we call samizdat properly. So, the word samizdat. The various publishing houses run by the state all had names like gossizdat, which is the state publishing house, or polizidat, the publishing house for politics.

So this poet named Nikolai Glasgow, when he started self-publishing his poems, he ironically put the word samsabiasdat as the publisher on them, which meant the self-publishing house instead of the state publishing house or the politics publishing house. And he shortened it to samsabiasdat. And it gets translated as self-publishing, but it's really more clever than that.

Despite the word coming into regular usage in Soviet Russia, no Soviet dictionary ever included it. It was a non-word. It's just so petty, you know? Yeah. Nikolai, Nikolai Glaskov, his dad had been killed during the Great Purge, the late 1930s thing where Stalin killed most of the original Bolsheviks. And he was very aware of the stakes of what he was doing.

But he didn't use it to be like, here's the self-publishing to bring down the regime. He wanted to publish poetry. Yeah. And sometimes as a kind of a joke or like to be clever, he would self-censor the poems, like do fake censorship on them to make a point.

He was just a clever poet trying to do his thing. He once wrote a poem. I couldn't find it in English, but I read the description of it and it's still clever enough to repeat. It's a rewrite of The Raven by Edgar Allan Poe, which I think most people know this, but there's a depressed author and he's like sitting around and he's like, oh, woe is me. Will I ever be happy? And a bird comes in and is like, nevermore, you know? And he's like, oh, I'm extra sad. The bird told me I'm doomed or whatever. It's been a while since I read this.

And so he did a rewrite of it where at the end, the character just looks at the raven and is like, yeah, well, if you're so smart, name a city in Chile. And the bird, I think, just the implication is the bird just says nevermore again. And the author's like, yeah, you're just a bird doing bird shit, whatever. I don't care. His poems spread word of mouth or retyped. And like all Samizdat, they entered a sort of folk art tradition where they were subtly changed from person to person.

The closest comparison I can find is poetry and translation. You know, it's slightly different every time you read different translations of things. Soon enough, Samizdat is a culture. In the 1960s, it's mostly in Russia. It picked up in particular after the brief period of the more open Khrushchev came to an end in the early 1960s. Because for a little while, people didn't want to do Samizdat because they're like, well, I can probably get this published officially. Right. You know? Right. By the 1970s, it spreads to the satellite states.

And rather than presenting it, the CIA version of Samizdat is like the heroic struggle against Stalinism and, you know, Soviet oppression. But it was more a way to have fun. Mikhail Batin wrote an essay that Samizdat was basically homebrew alcohol. He said that boredom led to, quote, "...binge drinking and its variants, binge sexual activity and binge reading."

Binge reading. I kind of love that as a cultural idea. I do too. Like, watch out, it's going to lead to binge reading. Yeah. I have read homebrew as a description of the stuff in a number of places. Like, so I think it was usually called samizdat, but I think it was, I think literally people sometimes just calling it homebrew, basically. Okay. Often it was a parody of the official channels. The official newspaper was called Pravda or Truth. And so they were like presenting a counter-truth.

But mostly, they wanted to critique the idea that there was such thing as one truth. They wanted to present that literature could in fact be divorced from politics and could be autonomous and ambiguous. So while they were, quote, neo-realists who challenged Soviet realism by offering counter-truths, which is kind of what you would say that Alexander's writing was doing, right? Is that you're like, he's like, no, I will present the real truth, you know?

A lot of people, especially younger writers, were like, what if we offer hypotheses instead of goals? What if we don't have answers? We have questions. And I think that's cool as shit. Yeah. Access to copy machines was tightly controlled. So it was all this typewritten stuff, by and large, on carbon paper and tissue paper. Like literally toilet paper, I think, sometimes. And this was easier to conceal and therefore easier to destroy. Because, you know, you get caught with it. You're doing time.

Yeah. That's actually smart, delicate, but smart. Totally. Which is funny because it's getting passed around hand to hand, so it's probably getting all fucked up. And one of the aesthetic qualities of it is that often you're doing multiple layers of onion skin carbon paper. And so the last one is barely readable at all. Sometimes they would distribute things by photographing them and then printing photos, but photos were bulkier and harder to conceal. Yeah.

The aesthetics of Samizdat soon had their own value. A typewritten thing on carbon paper or tissue paper or whatever was inherently subversive and interesting. Here's where I get the joke I promised you. There's a Soviet-era joke that a grandmother can't get her granddaughter to read War and Peace, so she stays up late at night furiously and retypes it all as Samizdat. And then it no longer looks official, so her granddaughter reads it. That's really funny. I know.

Underground authors started writing so much that it started being called graphomania, an obsession with writing as much as possible. Wow. And I think this is interesting because when I was first reading about how Gulag Archipelago is 300,000 words long, and part of it is that he never got to write the whole thing at once. He couldn't look at the old pages while he was writing the new pages, right? And so I'm like, yeah, of course it's going to be longer and more repetitive and less... Yeah, he needs an editor very desperately.

And so it makes sense to me, this like graphomania thing. It also ties into the long Russian tradition of elevating the written word and the author and also elevating the idea of everyone writing unbearably long books. In fact, they started writing stories making fun of themselves for writing so long. That's good. And writing so much. There's a 1960 story called Graphomaniacs and the author Sinovitsky wrote...

I am born for poetry, insists a young man who looks like he should have been a boxer. Galkin laughs. We are all born for it. A general national penchant for refined letters. And do you know what we have to thank? Censorship. The government itself, damn it, gives you the right, the inalienable right, to consider yourself an unacknowledged genius. That's funny. Yeah.

I like some self-awareness. Yeah, totally. It kind of reminds me of how sometimes with punk or genres that are very political, you kind of put up with things that aren't quite as good because you agree with them. And I think that there's a certain amount of like, well, if it's Samus Dada, it doesn't have to be good because it's inherently edgy and radical because you wrote it. Right, right. Yeah, but I'm pro it no matter what. Yeah, totally. Yeah.

And some of this stuff that they wrote was very serious, too. There were entire newspapers and journals published this way. One was a bulletin called Chronicle of Current Events, and it started in April 1968. And it appeared every two weeks, and it collected human rights abuses within the Soviet regime. It stopped for a year and a half due to repression, but then it picked up again in 1972.

This more political Samizdat was actually the second wave of Samizdat. And it worked through the channels that had been built by artists. It reached a readership of somewhere between 10,000 and 100,000 readers per issue with roughly 1,000 to 10,000 copies being made of each edition. They estimated 10 people read each copy, right? Yeah, yeah. But each of those fucking 10,000 copies is fucking typed.

Wow. That is so much fucking work. And unfathomable amount of work. Yep. Besides a general, we don't like the dictatorship we live under journal, other political and religious positions started publishing Samizdat as well. There's one for Ukrainian independence. There's the Chronicle of the Lithuanian Catholic Church. There's the Zionist Herald of Exodus. There's

There's the Herald of the Evangelical Christian Baptists. There's a Russian nationalist journal. And there's one called Jews in the USSR, which I am guessing by the context because it's not the Zionist Herald of Exodus. It's the anti-Zionist Jewish paper of the time. Okay.

The typewritten thing became a style that everyone would imitate, including in the West. And the thing that I want to try and figure out, but I don't have any answer to yet. You know how in the 90s, like everything that was like edgy and grunge used a typewriter font? Yeah. I think that might come from Samizdat. Okay. Because typewriter became the like countercultural iconic thing to do. And that style got imitated in the West.

Fascinating. And you're probably right. Yeah, I mean, I could be wrong. It might also come from like zine culture, right? It could. Maybe it's a mixture of both. But, you know, it becomes a style that seeps over and then people start adopting it. Which came first, the chicken or the egg? Yeah. Good theory, though. And folks were ignoring design considerations when they made this stuff overall and tried to cram as much text onto the page as possible.

Anna Komoromy said, quote, And so you get a copy of Samizdat, and you would type up like four copies yourself sometimes. And then...

It seemed like on cursory reading, my cursory reading, it seems that the majority of the authors were men and the majority of the typists were women. And that women took a substantial chunk of the risk. Yeah. That's my own interpretation based on like what I read and then also a pattern I've seen time and time again. Well, knowing about that typist that was jailed and then committed suicide, that's a perfect example of it. Yeah, totally. Yeah.

And this is like absolutely still a thing to this day in the West. The publishing industry is like, hell, you can take podcasting. A lot of podcast producers are women and a lot of podcast voices are men, you know? Yeah, absolutely. But I mean, you know, I want to point this out and not to be like, and fuck these men who wrote stuff, like whatever. No, like they were also risking things and...

And so typists would also make editorial changes sometimes when they were typing these things. And so there's like kind of a fun playing around with it. A typist named Natalia Trauberg would translate works from English. Oh, yeah. Also just gets called a typist. She's a translator. Another Natalia. Natalia would translate works from English and would cut out the redundant passages in like G.K. Chesterton. Good for her. I know. I know.

Also, I saw some of the photos of there's a lot of Samizdat like collections and stuff like that. And sometimes the typewritten covers are basically like ASCII art where they would like do the title in big letters by just doing X's, you know, and like organizing them. Some folks resisted the Samizdat style and tried to make it look official like Alexander Ginsberg's. See, once again, another Alexander. Every time I do a Russian thing, there's like

Four names. Alexander Natalia. Yeah. Alexander Ginsburg did a book called Syntoxus, which looks like an art book. And it ran from 1960 to 1961. Or there would be poetry editions with hand-drawn covers and hand-sewn bindings. Authors would sometimes bind their books. Often they were signed. This is the thing that kind of surprised me. You would think that they would all be like...

I'm writing this shit anonymously because I don't want to spend my life in prison. Yeah. They mostly, I think because there's this like culture, this is my inference, because there's this culture of prestige around being a writer in Russian society. They were writing their name on these things and often their addresses. Yeah. They're like, I want the credit for this. Yeah. I know it might kill me, but I want the credit. Which I guess like tagging culture is like a little bit that, you know? Sure. It's human nature. Yeah. To a degree. Yeah.

Sometimes books were unbound so that multiple people could read them faster, each person passing the page they finished on to the next person. So you get like five people sitting in a circle and you just all people are reading the same book at the same time. That sounds kind of fun. It really does. Although what if you're the slower reader? You're just like, I know you got, I guess you got to go in the end. Yeah. You know, you just like arrange the sitting. We got to implement a speed reading test before we. Yeah.

I think as you go, you can be like, okay, clearly you're reading slower than you. Switch around. You're right. All are welcome here. Yeah, totally. And there were other spinoffs from Samizdat. Radizat were books and other such that were broadcast by foreign radio stations that Soviet dissidents would then dutifully transcribe.

And Magnazot was Samazot music recorded by tape recorder. I think the origin of the word is like magnet for like tape. You know, they record with magnets or whatever. I could be wrong. I don't know. I didn't actually look up the etymology. I'm saying as if I know. Yeah. Okay. Sounds good. And this music was sometimes foreign radio broadcasts. Sometimes it was like DIY production. People would like record songs in their living room and put it on tape and spread it around.

And then there was Tamizdat, which is the more famous after Samizdat. Tamizdat is anything that was smuggled out of Russia to be published elsewhere. Often, Tamizdat would then be smuggled back into Russia as Samizdat. Okay. You write a book, you put it on microfiche, you get it smuggled out, Paris publishes it, and then it comes back into Russia, and then someone hand-types it. Okay. Yeah.

It wasn't a perfect and happy underground and wasn't like everyone was like noble and good. I was going to tell an anecdote that I thought was going to go really differently until I read more about this man. Years ago, I was in Prague and I went to the punkest show that I felt like I'd ever been to in my life. It was a solo show by this round balled accordion player named Jim Chirt. And I think that means like Jim Devil.

I was there with a friend who had escaped across the Iron Curtain to the West when she was four years old. And she was then living back in Prague. So we went to go see this accordion player who had been an illegal accordion player performing illegal shows during the Soviet era. And Jim Chert was screaming over this accordion while old guys with ponytails danced on tables bashing into the low ceiling of a literally underground pub.

And Jim Chaird wasn't singing like, I hate the government. He was singing like, most of it was in Czech, but some of it was in English. And it was like, I have to go to Mexico to smoke weed. You know, like, like, it's just like a guy, you know?

Sorry, you're just making me remember about how much weed I smoked in Prague. Yeah, no, yeah. It was amazing. That's a place to smoke weed, yeah. It was like the best time of my life. Very strong weed. Anyway, continue. I just drank an obscene amount in Prague. That too. The whole night, so I don't remember. Worst thing I ever did while I was drunk, which I will not say on air right now, I did in Prague. It wasn't morally bad. It was just embarrassing. No. Yeah. Anyway, so I was going to tell this story to be like,

And here's an example of a guy who made music illegally. And so then I was reading Czech Wikipedia about him through Autotranslate.

He was absolutely part of the Samizdat scene. Oh. And he snitched out one of his best friends who then spent 18 months in prison for publishing Samizdat. Okay. Yeah. Jim Cherit apologized for it since. That's good. You know, we've all read 1984. We all understand that sometimes people have rats in cages put on their face or whatever. Yeah. In a complicated time, things. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

Taking accountability. Not the worst person in the world then. Yeah. His friend who went to prison died four years before he apologized. Before his official letter of apology was published. That is something that you probably don't get over. Yeah, totally. But to your point, you know, you said it's not like it was all roses, this movement, it's complicated. And do you think that that

People get so easily dissuaded from different movements because of infighting or complications or not. You expect that, oh, I've designated myself as a part of this. Well, we all immediately agree on something. That's not true. Yeah, totally. You know, you can't get so worked up that you're turning your back on all of it just because there's different factions within it. And there's no perfect movement is my point. We're all human beings with different opinions. And that's a good thing. Totally.

There's this quote by a science fiction author who I can't remember his name, and I remember not particularly liking him as a person. But he has a quote that I think about all the time, which is that there's no ideology so pure that you cannot find assholes practicing it. Exactly. Yeah. And then like, and this guy wasn't even necessarily an asshole. He just gave in to state pressure. He definitely made a mistake. Yeah. Or yeah, maybe. I don't know the calculations at the moment. I don't either. You gave it. Right. Yeah. So.

For some weird reason, the paragraph I read through auto-translate in Wikipedia from Czech didn't give me enough context to make a moral judgment about this man. You know, even though he shouldn't have done that and you shouldn't do it. But yeah. And then after, so like the first wave of Samizdat is just like poetry and art. The second wave is more of this political stuff from all different corners. And then academia is sort of the third wave of Samizdat because...

you couldn't really do certain types of science in Soviet times, right? Which feels really accurate to right now when suddenly all of the funding is being cut if it literally has the word gay in it. If transition's in the word, it is out of here. It doesn't matter what the context is. Diversity? Nope, you're done. Yeah. And so they started publishing anyway. And historical studies were published. Legal studies were published.

One writer, Georgi Vladimov, put it, quote, And so, like,

Yeah, by and large, as far as I can tell, people, when they look at the literature of Soviet era, they're like, well, the underground shit was kind of the real shit. Yeah.

It was different in every country. We've mostly focused on Russia. In Poland, folks actually had access to more copy machines. And so there was Xerox Samus dot there. And a lot of it was political as hell. They had things like the Committee for the Defense of the Workers. Because once again, politics against the USSR is often fucking socialist. Anyway. Yeah. And they were putting out a bimonthly bulletin. There were at least 30 of these radical newspapers running by the late 70s in Poland. Wow.

In the Czech Republic, there was this more professional vibe. It was like hand-bound and like hand-typed art manuscripts and shit. And they would literally say in the front, like, this is mine, don't copy it. You know? Oh, wild. Yeah, different. And the typists were generally paid and they were like sold. But even though they were like bougier and artsier, they were still going to prison over this. Like...

If you have this in a safe hidden in your house and they catch you, you're going to fucking jail. Right. In China, there was this whole other culture of it that I won't be able to get into as much as I'd like. And they used posters where they would paint in huge letters and hang them up around the city because there was a specific provision in the 1975 constitution that said basically like, yeah, you can't do a lot of stuff, but you can hang up posters with giant letters in public places if you need to say something. They're like, got it.

And then by 1979, they were like, wait, no, we didn't mean like that. Never mind, we'll take it back. And so they started putting people in prison over it. And then in 1980, the Constitution was like, no, just kidding. You can't do that at all. Wow. And also in China, they would make like political journals and they would use hand-cut stencils for mimeograph machines. And I have studied a lot about various methods of printing, and I could not tell you exactly what that means. Something about printing. Yeah, yeah, exactly. Mm-hmm.

Radical journals there often had print runs in the thousands or tens of thousands, but people were regularly getting like 15-year sentences for running them. Wow. Samizdat has been used as a way to describe self-publishing against official censorship, not just in communist countries, but in places like Iran or Chile and various dictatorships in general, whether right-wing, left-wing, or theological. Yeah.

It ebbed and flowed, though. By 1982, Samizdat was pretty successfully repressed by the USSR. But then in 1987, Mikhail Gorbachev, the last leader of the USSR,

started breaking down the systems of censorship and what was called glasnot and samizdat became less necessary because you could publish again. I did read about one piece of samizdat after 1987, though. Or rather, I've read two sources and one claims that this was samizdat and one claims that it was officially allowed to be printed. And I don't know which one's true. Okay. But this piece...

In 1962, there was this big strike in Russia. 14,000 workers, after their pay was docked by a third, went on strike for days, and they were massacred. 26 strikers were killed, hundreds were wounded, seven of the organizers or people accused of being organizers were later sentenced to death, and tons of people served years in prison.

The bodies of the slain were buried in a secret grave, the location of which wasn't revealed to their families until fucking 1994. What? Yeah. Wow. And so it's like, we never hear about strikes in the USSR. Largely because they didn't happen, because you all got killed if you did it. I mean, just kidding. It was a glorious workers' republic, and everyone was paid equally, so it didn't matter, and no one needed to strike. And if they did strike, it's their fault for being counter-revolutionaries. They're probably capitalists. Anyway.

There was no news about this in the official press of Russia. And one of the participants was an anarcho-syndicalist worker named Peter Suda, who spent years in prison after the strike. In 1998, when Samizdat supposedly had stopped because censorship had lifted, the anarcho-syndicalist group he worked with, KAS, still had to put out their journal in an underground fashion. According to one thing I read, the other thing was that they could finally do it because of whatever, glasnost.

Either way, in 1988, Peter was finally able to publish his account of what he'd experienced at the state 26 years earlier in 1962. But, probably related to that, in 1990, a year before the end of the USSR, Peter was beaten to death by the KGB.

So anyway. Right. Like, was it? Yeah. Finally able to. And then he dies. Yeah. I know. And it's like, well, he could have been killed also just for being an anarchist organizer. I don't know. But like the implication in both things I read was. Yeah. That like. Because he's the one who like kind of broke the news on this thing. Years, decades later. Anyway, getting around censors is cool and good. And it rules that people were able to do so much with it.

They tracked the abuses of the dictatorial system, despite official attempts to claim that no repression was ever happening. They kept entire legacies of literature and art alive. And they kept their spirits up with their homebrew reading mania, their binge reading just like their binge sex. And they probably got really, really tired of typing all the time.

I'm sure they did. I'm sure they were over it, but it was so vital. I know. This is a beautiful story and it's such an important one. Inspiring. I mean, the long period of time to be navigating different versions of censorship and imprisonment and death.

and the stakes and exile. But the spirit feels pretty unbreakable, and that's why they were ultimately able to make some changes, although I'm not positive that rushes. No, it didn't work out great. You feel super free to say whatever. I'm sure in theory, but you're watching your back if you're saying whatever you want right now. Yeah. But, you know, the journey continues. But it is a super inspiring and important reminder right now

I felt vital art is and sharing of information and organizing. Yeah. And that's why librarians are fucking crucial and important. Keep archives of things. Archivists are fucking crucial and important and encrypting your hard drive. My final plug of this show is learn about encrypting your hard drive and especially any kind of backup drive you have.

encrypt it not just with like a the kind of password you want to type in every day all the time but like six or seven randomly picked dictionary words something that I will forget and never remember well what you have to do is you create a mnemonic around it it's like you have to actually practice to do it this is actually why I say that like although in a weird way actually if you do it as your like regular open your computer thing then you can remember it because you type it every day right but yeah like

Preserve information. It's important. Much like... I was actually thinking I'm probably going to download most of Coolzone Media and keep it on an encrypted hard drive somewhere. Not a bad idea. Got to be an archive. Yeah. But...

In the meantime, you don't need that. You can just use your regular podcast app or subscribe to Cooler Zone Media and get all of the same content without the ads. Because maybe for good we live in a society where you can do that. But at least right now you can. Yep. Take advantage of it. Yeah. The kind of thing that I took for fucking granted. Yeah. While you still can. Yeah. You got anything you want to plug?

my goodness. Well, we ourselves over at some more news do have a Patreon that you can subscribe to and get ad free versions of all of our things and some bonus content. Yeah, do that. But you know, some more news, even more news, our shows watch, listen, you can do both to all the shows. Hell yeah. Watch it or listen, whatever you prefer while it lasts. Let's see.

If you're not listening to It Could Happen Here, It Could Happen Here is also on the Cool Zone Media Network. And there's been a bunch of good episodes recently about things like, should you leave the country? And the answer is like, probably not. Unless the answer is yes. But, you know. I will definitely listen to that episode because that's a conversation I keep having. It's a good breakdown of it. It's a good breakdown of like, look, like for most people, that's not going to be the answer. You know.

Surround yourself with things that don't inspire despair, but also don't inspire you to stick your head in the sand is what I would have to say. And that's my plug. Yeah, mine too. Sophie, you got anything? Yeah, I mean, just listen to our every Friday on It Could Happen Here. We do episodes called Executive Disorder. Listen to that if you want to be the most up to date on things going on politically.

Do you think that there's a joke that could be made, a sort of schoolhouse age level crude joke around...

ED? I keep trying to get us sponsored by a thing that goes with that joke. That would rule. That feels like a gimme. And I just need them to do their jobs. It'll happen. I'm manifesting it. It's gonna happen. Sometimes we get the ads for like the girl version of...

pills for... I just, once we're off recording, I'll tell you a very funny thing about this entire situation. Ha ha! And what's gonna happen after we stop recording is I'm gonna say the most embarrassing thing I've ever done while drunk. But you don't get to listen to it! Oh yeah! Ha ha ha! Bye bye! Bye! Bye! ... ...

Cool People Who Did Cool Stuff is a production of Cool Zone Media. For more podcasts from Cool Zone Media, visit our website, coolzonemedia.com. Or check us out on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

Hey, all you women's hoops fans and folks who just don't know yet that they're women's hoops fans. We've got a big week over at Good Game with Sarah Spain as we near the end of one of the most exciting women's college basketball seasons ever. The most parody we've seen in years with games coming down to the wire and everyone wondering which team will be crowned national champions this weekend in Tampa. Listen to Good Game with Sarah Spain on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

My husband cheated on me with two women. He wants to stay together because he has cancer. Should I stay? Okay, Sam, that has to be the craziest story in OK Storytime podcast history. Well, John, that's because it's Dump It Week, and this user writes, Last week, we had an attempted break-in. I asked my husband, who was supposed to be at his mom's, to come over and change the locks, but his mom told me he wasn't with her. And it took me less than an

hour to find the first two women he was cheating on me with. Did she leave him? Well, to find out how this story ends, follow the OK Storytime podcast on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. What's up? I'm Laura, host of the podcast Courtside with Laura Carrente, a masterclass case study of the business of women's sports. I'll be chatting with leaders like tennis icon Alana Kloss.

I don't do what I do only for women. I do it for everyone. And I want the whole market. And innovators like Jenny Nguyen. I would say 50% of the people that come visit the sports bra aren't sports fans. They come to be in community. They come to be part of this culture. Courtside with Laura Karenti is an iHeart Women's Sports production in partnership with Deep Blue Sports and Entertainment. Listen to Courtside with Laura Karenti on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

Presented by Elf Beauty, founding partner of iHeart Women's Sports. Dressing. Dressing. Oh, French dressing. Exactly. Ha, ha.

I'm AJ Jacobs, and my current obsession is puzzles. And that has given birth to my podcast, The Puzzler. Something about Mary Poppins? Exactly. This is fun. You can get your daily puzzle nuggets delivered straight to your ears. Listen to The Puzzler every day on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.