831: Lists!!!
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A quick warning, there are curse words that are unbeaped in today's episode of the show. If you prefer a beeped version, you can find that at our website, thisamericanlife.org. The People's Almanac came out in the mid-1970s. It's hard to imagine a more eccentric bestseller, over 1,400 pages long, 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.

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.

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 them what parts of the book they liked and disliked. So we eventually received thousands of letters, each of which I read. David Woloczynski was one of the authors of The People's Almanac. And because of that, I was able to determine that the most popular chapter in The People's Almanac was lists. Lists. Lists.

Of all the knowledge in the world, people most loved 25 pages out of the 1,400-page book that had some lists. Some of those lists were boring stuff like the world's 15 biggest cities and 10 tallest buildings and 10 longest rivers. But there were weirder lists. 20 historical figures who were born as illegitimate children. 15 people who had an absurd number of spouses. And this one, it was maybe a little more edgy in 1975 when this was published. 20 celebrities who've been psychoanalyzed.

From the letters they got, Walachinsky says that they learned that one list that readers really loved was... Famous people who never existed but live today, like Sherlock Holmes, Superman, Wonder Woman, Scrooge McDuck. Scrooge McDuck, not technically a person, but you get the idea. And the most popular list was nine breeds of dog that bite the most. So based on that, we decided to do the first book of lists.

The first Book of Bliss was an even bigger, even more ridiculously huge bestseller, a pop culture phenomenon. It sold over 3 million copies, had four sequels, a short-lived TV spinoff, and a board game. I was a teenager in the 1970s. 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. And looking back on it now, reading the Book of Bliss today,

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

Basically, it was a way to leaf through impossibly random stuff until something catchy grabbed your eye. We had different kinds of lists, and people were responding to all of them. We had the celebrity lists, you know, where we would ask Ronald Reagan, what are the events in history you wish you could have witnessed? Then there was a straight list that were statistical, you know, what were the worst airlines in the world based on deaths per miles flown?

And then my favorite kind were what we called the annotated lists, where you'd actually have to do some research and then put a paragraph describing the entry. The most popular list they ever did was like that. 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. Okay, here we go. 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.

14 men who became units of measurement and the units named after them. Benjamin Franklin's Eight Reasons to Marry an Older Woman. A lot of competition there. So what was in that most popular list? 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.

And maybe this is obvious on its face, but just lay out why that would be such a big deal in the 70s. I think it was a big deal because nobody talked about it. It wasn't in print. And I think a lot of people only thought there was one sexual position. No. Yeah. 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, they read it at a time when they were teenagers. Right.

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. Yeah. 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 terse. It's two pages total. Yeah, yeah, yeah. It's not the Kama Sutra. The Book of Lists and the success of the Book of Lists

demonstrate so clearly that putting something on a list can have such power. It can reach people. But of course, most of the lists in our lives are the ones we write for ourselves. And it's interesting. People put all kinds of things on them. God, I feel nervous. Why do you feel nervous? Because I was just looking through my lists and I just feel like a freak.

This is Aviva de Kornfeld, a producer at our show here. And I learned about the very personal and idiosyncratic list that she keeps in a staff meeting where I talked about Walachinsky and different kinds of lists. And at that meeting, Aviva started talking about her lists. And so I was offering this, kind of assuming everyone, I would like start saying my list and then everyone else would be like, yeah, yeah, me too. And then they would share their list and it would be kind of like this bonding moment. That's what you thought was going to happen. Yeah. 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? In fact, Laura, our coworker, messaged in the chat Aviva'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. Aviva does keep some lists that lots of people keep. Practical stuff like books she wants to read or gift ideas for people she loves.

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. So, a list that is just like organizing my brain is, let me look, things that are off-brand for me, or common things I've never done, or 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. Read me that list. Okay. I'm bad at jumping. I'm inconsistent with my birth control. You mean you're not taking a pill every day that you should? No. Why is that off-brand? Because I'm organized. The other thing that's embarrassing about reading these lists is that they're so private. But whatever, I don't care. I can't rollerblade.

I hate pita, even though I was vegan for a year and vegetarian for a bunch of years. I just really don't like them. I don't love bowling. That's a new addition. The last one I really don't want to share but will, but...

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. Because you're how old? 30. And so you've kissed a bunch of people. 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. No, that is not famous. No. Yeah. His name was Jay. Jay.

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. With a list, where I feel the emotions that I feel on my body. With a list, times people have referred to me as neurodivergent, even though I don't think I am. All these lists are different ways that Aviva's sort of naming parts of herself for herself.

Yeah, yeah, I'm just trying to make sense of who I am and what is going on in my brain. In list form. 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. With that in mind, Aviva still keeps old defunct lists, because they're like a record of who she was.

Listen 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. 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, 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? 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.

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. 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? And then once you put it on the list, you're like, I know what it means. It means it's on this list. Yeah, totally. That's true. Like I exist and this is a thing about me. Today on our program, lists. I know they tame the chaos of the world. I have to say I feel very aware in putting together everything that I've said to you so far today. 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

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. 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 can end the thing. 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. So today, lists, how they run the world and everything in it,

For WBEZ Chicago, it's This American Life. I'm Ira Glass. And hold on. I have a list right here. Number one, stay with us. Number two, stay with us. Number three, stay with us. Number one, list for life. So let's start 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. Or anyway, that's what this list was supposed to do. The story comes to us from John Fasile. You ready to talk about the list? Sure. Sure.

You want to see it? It's right, this is it right here. What do you want to ask me about it? 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. It's one of the last pieces of Mike's writing that we have. What do you think should be done with this list? I don't care. If you burned it, I wouldn't feel sad. I wouldn't be angry. I'd say, why'd you burn it without me?

My brother Mike died in 2015. That's almost 10 years ago now. Jeez. And, you know, trigger warning and all that, he died because of a suicidal act. It's unclear why he did what he did. There were stories his roommates told about paranoia, hallucinations, Mike becoming obsessed with aliens. 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. Mike wrote the list the summer he was about to be a sophomore in high school. Sixteen principles to live his life by, titled Goals for Success, double underlined on a rectangular piece of poster board. They were corny bro-isms, if I'm being honest. Make a commitment. Be unselfish. Create unity. Come together as never before. As you can see, Mike was a real overachiever. Type A type. ♪

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. Give great effort. Be enthusiastic. Eliminate mistakes. Don't beat yourself. 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. I first noticed 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. And my feelings about the list were immediately complicated. I felt like it was somehow judging me. 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.

I was Mr. Been-Arrested-Twice, Mr. Smoking-Weed-Out-Of-An-Aluminum-Can-And-Probably-Doing-Irreparable-Damage-To-My-Lungs-In-The-Woods. And Mike knew he was better than me. He even wrote a poem in English class about how disappointed he was in me. I'm not kidding. It was titled Second Chances. 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.

But after he died, I actually saw these principles as something I should live up to. Because at that point, I was spiraling. Mike was 24 when he died. I was 26. I couldn't get myself together. Drinking, depression, a simmering, futile anger at the universe. 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. 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. It just bothered me, the toxic positivity, therapist waiting room posterness of it all. But I also couldn't bear to get rid of it. Which is why I called up Pat to finally figure out what to do with it. If anything, I would think the list would be cursed. So you can keep it if it makes you...

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

And he had neat handwriting, like, that was one thing that struck me looking at the list is how neat his handwriting is. Doesn't look neat. Not to me. Yeah, way. Are those straight lines? Are we looking at the same photo? Yeah, yeah. No, that's not neat. That's neat. Look at the K. He doesn't even dot the I's. But he's consistently not dotting his I's. That says something. That he never learned how to write the letter I?

Pat saw something in the lists that I also felt, but I couldn't necessarily name. What role do you think the list played in his death? I mean, the list didn't play a role, but it's a reflection of his psychology, which played every role in his death and shows you the type of responsibility he felt. It shows you the type of pressure he put on himself.

There's nothing about self-care in it. And there's nothing about being true to yourself either. It shows you a lot of what was going on with him and this mindset that he got trapped in and that made him very sick. 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.

His roommates noticed, and they were talking about how to get him help. And I think, this is just my opinion, I guess, that Mike didn't want to be found out. I mean, 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. No, he was not. Are there any bullet points that stand out to you in particular? There's a bunch.

Eliminate mistakes. That's one of the ones that's just so stupid. Eliminate mistakes. You can't. That's why they're mistakes. Yeah. Create unity. Come together as never before. I mean, he's not just trying to get people to come together as never before. I like that one. That reminds me of he was a good unifier. He had friends across all the arbitrary social cliques.

After he passed, did you think about the list at all, or did you... I didn't give it a lot of thought until I went...

to the football banquet and heard Mr. Rickey speak and then I got pretty angry and then I was pretty annoyed at the list. One of the captains of our 2018 and a 2009 Garner Valley graduate, Mike Fasile, embodied the qualities of the coachable player.

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. 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. This is really the moment the list passed into lore, when it became the way my brother was remembered. The coach paid to have goals for success professionally matted and framed. That's the copy that I have. He also hung a replica of the list in our high school's weight room, next to a photo of Mike in football gear with his tough game face on to inspire future generations, which I appreciated. He was putting so much into memorializing Mike.

But later, I started worrying about the kids who saw it and whether they might judge themselves by it, the same way that I had. 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. In essence, we want them to be like Mike Fasile. The coach goes on to describe what happened to Mike. He says that he fell from the fourth floor balcony of his dorm and that it was an accident.

which he got from my parents. That was how they framed it. But Mike didn't fall. He jumped. The list still makes me feel sad, but that was when the list started making me feel angry. To me, it's like this obsession with image that is such a toxic quality of the community that we're from and the family that we're from.

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. And not even Mr. Golden Child was spared from it. 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 perfect.

And that's what the list is, a manifestation of his drive to be perfect. That's how Pat sees it, anyway. It's painful for me, the list, because it's about what trauma did to Mike. And now these adults are waving it around like it was some sort of thing to be proud of with him. And there's a lot of things that I'm very proud of that he did.

I'd rather those things be remembered than this insane pressure that he put on himself. What do you wish he was remembered for? What are the things you want him remembered for? I think just who he was, really. I mean, there's really nothing to be ashamed of. But 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. 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, whether it's funny or not funny. You know, I just want the truth remembered. I don't want to, I don't want to have to deal with these fake stories about Mike. When I was at the banquet, uh,

And they gave his, they gave a check to the kid that won his award and dad, and I'm with dad and a kid comes up and dad, dad says to him, it was awesome. Make sure you spend this on other people. That's what Mike would have done. And I look at the kid. That's what I said. And I looked at dad and I go, who are you talking about? Talking about Mike. And then I look at the kid and I'm just like,

Dude, my brother would have spent this on the dumbest shit. All right? You do whatever you want with that money, kid. Go have fun. Really? You said that? Yeah. I mean, he would have. He would have blown that money. He was greedy and also bad with money. He would buy like...

a $400 pair of sunglasses and then like accidentally leave them on top of a car and lose them. Didn't he put a subwoofer in his car too? Okay. The subwoofer was awesome. Okay. The subwoofer was such a deal and perfectly for the hatchback. The list doesn't just leave out Mike's flaws. It also misses really the best stuff about him.

He was warm, generous, extremely goofy. He was curious, and that was a really good quality that he had. He found people really interesting, so he liked to listen. Be curious would be a good one to be on here. Yeah.

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. And they said my brother would come around and he would comfort them and he would encourage them. And then I remember hearing from Alia Promola and she said when they were dating, Mike had a great relationship with her grandmother and he would watch TV with her grandmother.

I think it was like a game shows or something. Maybe it was Wheel of Fortune. And he would just watch TV with her and they would shoot the shit. And 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. Last year, Pat wrote to the football coach at 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. It says, 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. Now I'm the one looking at it every day. And I don't resent it anymore. Maybe it still makes me feel a little weird, okay? But I just, I see it for what it is.

I don't feel judged by it. And some of the lists I'm genuinely down with. Like, Create Unity is a beautiful idea. It reminds me of the best of Mike. But mostly, I just like looking at my brother's handwriting. John Fasile, he's a senior producer at the show Snap Judgment. His story was produced by Sean Cole. Coming up, over 100 dogs and one giant bear and his list of enemies. That's in a minute. I'm Chicago Public Radio when our program continues.

It's Just American Life from Hourglass. Today's program lists how they tame the chaos of the world. This list is all the dogs in my dog's life, kind of segmented by different criteria. This is Bobby Shorewood, 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. 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. 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.

Babi keeps this list because there are so many dogs where he lives. There are like 130 dogs on this list. And remember, he 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? Or how's your puppy? And he is not into the potential awkwardness of that. 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.

But the dog list, he also finds it helpful to rank all the dogs. So his dog Chewy's favorites are at the top, and his least favorites are at the bottom. Like there are some dogs that bully Chewy, so we throw them at the bottom of the list. And then we know, hey, this one is his who beats up Chewy. You might want to bleep that name. 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. I definitely think I recognize that dog.

The tall doodle over there? Walk me through what you're doing. So, see a big boy I'm sure Chewie's run into at this dog park before. Let me see. He scrolls down the list on his phone until he gets to the dog park section, searching for a dog with the description... Shaggy brown doodle, yeah. I don't know. He finds nothing. He'll have to add that one to the list. Bobby has no idea how other dog owners do it. Keep track of all the dogs.

Though I think it's entirely possible that other people are no better with their names than he is. They just don't care. When he and Chris get back to the house, they run into a neighbor's dog who somehow wasn't on the list yet. I've actually bumped into that dog many times. And he always says he's friendly. And it's like, yeah, I know. We've met like 10 times. You think he doesn't remember you? I don't know. I don't know. That guy needs a list, though, you know?

Act Two, Park It List. There's some list you definitely do not want to be on. This past Thanksgiving, Masha had people come stay with him at a house they affectionately call the Dacha, because it's out of the city and they're Russian. And that's just the word Russians use. We totally call it the Dacha. Masha is Masha Gessen. They write about Russia for The New Yorker and in books. And the day after Thanksgiving, two of their guests left for some other celebration and

And a bunch of the remaining guests, four or five people, went on a hike. Pretty vertical one, actually, up a nearby mountain. So they get to a spot way up high. Yeah, it's an overlook point. It's pretty tiny. We're all standing pretty close together, looking out at the Catskills and the little town where we live. And then two of us pulled out our phones. As one does. How much nature can you take?

And both of us saw a news item that one of the friends who had left that morning had been declared a foreign agent. Foreign agent. In other words, the Russian government just put him on an official list of people that it is not very fond of.

Foreign agent is not a good thing. And this is something that the Russian government does almost every Friday. They put out a list of foreign agents. Right. It's like this weird, weird spectator sport to see who is now a foreign agent. It's weird. It's like a sinister version of when Oscar nominations come out or something, you know?

Actually, that's not a bad simile because when Oscar nominations come out, then you have to wonder what's going to be the outcome for any one of these. 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. You're on our radar. We may launch a criminal case against you, which has much harsher consequences. Oh, you can graduate from this list to worse lists.

Yes. 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 reconfigures your world. So they're out on this mountain. Masha and one of the other Russians reads this on their phones that their friend who they just had Thanksgiving dinner with the night before is now a foreign agent. So we both say his last name, Vynavkin.

And this is something 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, Vignafkin has been named a foreign agent. Because we know it's Friday. Masha says Russia is now in an age of lists. It started when Vladimir Putin created the list of foreign agents, when he took the presidency for a second time in 2012. And he started clamping down on dissent.

At first, it 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. Russia actually modeled its foreign agent law on an American foreign agent law. It dates in the 1930s. 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. 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. Masha says this list and the way the Putin government's been using it are typical of the way he's operating these days. It's like very bureaucratic. And so all these lists have weird nomenclatures, right? It's foreign agents list or undesirable organizations or unfriendly countries.

So the United States, for example, is an unfriendly country to Russia. What they mean is like mortal enemy. 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. 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 and a country that has like

deeply, deeply bureaucratic self-understanding. So everything has to be somehow classified and put down on paper or in an Excel table. This resurgent totalitarianism in Russia, it's really focused on the bureaucracy. The bureaucracy is hard at its core. And that's why lists are so important.

Masha, are you on this list? I'm not. I'm on a different list. A worse list. What list is that? I'm on the wanted list because there's a criminal case against me. Masha 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 because it's unclear what's going to happen next. What is clear is that it's a permanent status change. 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. And Masha 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. 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. Here's Masha. 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.

That's one reason I've been sort of obsessed with the list. It's a day that changes your life. Just I was cutting the turkey, and I believe that I was in the midst of cutting my fourth turkey in a row. This is Ilya, my friend who was put on the list the Friday after Thanksgiving. Fourth turkey that weekend or fourth turkey that day? Probably that weekend. And then I saw my wife coming to me.

I realized that she was pale and just, I realized that something happened. And then she told me that I was declared a foreign agent. Here's Galina 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. 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. Believe it or not, for the first few seconds, I didn't realize that he's actually saying to me that my name appeared on the list. 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... Not a hypothetical. That he's actually informing me that my name is on the list.

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. Because there are all sorts of special rules that apply to foreign agents. And you have to decide whether you're going to comply. One rule. Every time you communicate anything publicly or semi-publicly, in the media, or in social media, or in a dating app even, you have to warn people that they're dealing with a foreign agent.

There's a special disclaimer you have to use, an extra large type. It's huge. It has to be like in font and letters twice bigger than the main text. Do you remember the exact words? You can say them in Russian if you want. Yes, I do.

The disclaimer says, "This message or information was created and/or disseminated by a foreign agent non-governmental organization." Which is quite like a big paragraph, considering the size. In social media, it would be like in caps lock. It's in all caps, yeah. 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. 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. The paperwork has to be perfect every time. But the rules are vague.

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. And all these games around it, it's like Tom and Jerry game. They are just running after us and we're trying to run away, trying to still do the job. ♪

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

So I knew that I'm not going to play by those rules, and I decided to just get rid of everything I had back there, including my apartment. 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. Yes. What did that feel like? It felt like nothing. I...

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

I found out about it from articles in Russian government media, and then my name appeared on the wanted list. In the hierarchy of lists, the wanted list is probably the worst. That we know about, anyway. 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. 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. 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. And when did you give money to the Navalny organization? Do you remember?

Well, for years. And that was, of course, it was long before they labeled Navalny Foundation as illegal or extremist or anything else. I was one of thousands of people, I believe, who supported Navalny and his foundation. Do you have any idea how much money you gave them?

Not that much. I believe a few hundred dollars total. 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. You know, any contact with the Russian state recently resembles more and more sort of contact with terrorists

hooligans back in elementary or middle school. Bullies. Yeah, like with bullies. This is a feeling that they are very strong, very hostile, and very... How do you say it? Small-minded. Yeah. Strong, hostile, and small-minded. Sort of feeling that they are like big...

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 let's just call this animal what it is you're describing a bear russian bear that's such a cliche come on with the russian bear on your heels you have to watch your step if you're gonna travel you have to ask is it safe can i go there

Ilya Krasilchik, a different Ilya, now divides all the countries in the world into three categories. Can go, maybe can go, can go with consequences. Can go with consequences really means don't go. You don't want the consequences. Ilya started a media outlet called Helpdesk, which reports on the war in Ukraine and helps Ukrainians flee the fighting. In the eyes of the Russian state, he has been a criminal for more than two years for posting about war crimes on Butcha.

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. Some countries will extradite people to Russia. Some countries might. And then there's Interpol, the international police, which Russia tries to use to have people detained and sometimes extradited. The planning that goes into traveling to other countries can get very granular. Sometimes it's not about where you go.

but about which company you fly. And this is really difficult because, for example, Turkish airlines have, if something will happen, 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. You could easily spend all your time, your entire life, perfecting the act.

being Jerry, who keeps evading Tom. So it's absurd, and absurd should be fun. I don't know, like Kafka. Kafka is funny in some way, but it's also awful. 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. At some point, that stopped feeling right.

I didn't feel proud. Not when my friends were put on a list, and not when I landed on Russia's wanted list. When that happened, my friend Ilya, 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. Help me understand the sadness. Because, you know, when I found out that there was a criminal case against me, and then later when I found out that I was arrested in absentia,

In a sense, intellectually, it's almost exciting. And as people often say, it's a sort of recognition. And I felt profoundly sad. I felt like I was carrying around another burden that hadn't been there before. What is it? It's a good one. If I'm telling you something rude...

if I'm telling you I hate you, it's okay to be sad about that because it's sad that someone hates me. And when I'm saying that, well, I'm honored by that or they're stupid, I feel that this reaction just shielding you from the sadness and tragedy of that. 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. Not even if there is a change of regime.

I doubt that the first, second or even third thing they're going to do after Putin is purge all the lists. So like the vast majority of Russians who are on these lists, I'm in exile for life. For many of us who live outside of Russia, this business of being on lists is really akin to having a troublesome chronic illness. You keep tabs on it, you modify your behavior as necessary, you hope it doesn't kill you. Other than that, you live a relatively normal American or German or Dutch life.

For those who are still in Russia, though, the condition can be much more serious. Zoya is one such person. Zoya is not her real name. 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. Zoya had been put on lists even before that, though. Internal lists circulated within government agencies. 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. Like a Freedom of Information Act request, but fast, unredacted, and for sale. You can just pay a very small amount, like $30, and download everything what they have on you, including these informal lists that police create for their work.

You will be able to see how these regimes see you, what do they have on you, do they follow your flights, do they, like, it's enough information. And what you get is an Excel document or PDF? PDF. PDF document. On the PDF, the lists you're on are marked in red. So her PDF said extremism and terrorism in red. But again, this wasn't the public list of extremists and terrorists. Yeah, it's two different lists.

If it's possible, I will say it in Russian. If you can translate it. So the reason you wanted to say it in Russian is not because you can't translate it, but because the word doesn't exist. Yeah. Right? So it's like if they added another...

suffix to the word suspect. So it's like, it's closest to if they called you suspectable in extremism and suspectable in terrorism. Yes. It's like this internal list is the draft of a list. Like eventually, Zoya will probably be brought up on charges. She'll be the suspect in a made-up crime. But for now, in draft form, she's merely suspectable.

Can you tell me why you were trying to buy this information? 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. And where you get this information, you understand that no, you cannot be in safe. You have to be prepared every day that you could be arrested. They could come to your flat and arrest.

It's not a question, will they come or not? They will. Just the question is when, and will you have time to leave country? Will you have time to say goodbye for your parents or not? And what did Zoya do after finding out she was on this list of people who would eventually, probably, be placed on the list of extremists and terrorists? She cried. She started making some plans for leaving the country someday.

And she made one very practical plan for staying. We bought a very good door. And when I came to the shop, I asked a guy to recommend me a door. The best, the best when police will come and they want to break this door, I need like 50 minutes, 20 minutes. And they choose this door for me. This was the main criteria.

When you were buying the door, what did they think you needed it for? They thought that I'm a drug dealer. And the guy told me that, OK, you will have time to throw away to the toilet everything that you have. I didn't explain to them why I need this door. I think that probably it's a more understandable reason for them. Police usually come in the morning.

Every evening before I'm going to sleep, I check the door. Everything, all this, everything should be closed. Because if not, then I will not have these 20 minutes. How many logs does the door have? Three. And why do you need 20 minutes? I need to clean my computer and contacts. Because if I will not do this, then all my friends will be in risk. And also, I have to fix my dog also.

My dog will protect me and they could shoot dog. So you have to put your dog in the other room? Yeah, in the bathroom and ask them and kindly ask them to not touch him. 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. Zoya's parents don't want to leave. Zoya's partner doesn't want to leave. Most important, Zoya doesn't want to leave. So she has decided that she will stay as long as she possibly can.

She believes the authorities will give her one final warning. Something like, leave the country now or go to jail. And then she'll leave. I'm not sure why she thinks there will be a warning. When it comes to her niece, though, Zoya is sure that the girl should leave the country as soon as she's old enough. I don't believe that she will have a future. I don't believe that life will be better in Russia. I see now how many people support Putin in these elections and how people celebrate it.

And I wish all the best for my niece. I want her to live in a free country with the possibility to choose partners, work, opinion, everything. What if I said all the same things to you? It's good if someone wishes me all the best. But my niece, this is what I wish for her. But of course she will decide. Just before we sat down for our interview,

Zoya told me something that was still pretty new to her, too. She was pregnant. I am in a huge crisis now because today, all morning, I just cry. And I feel it how I start to care not about myself, but about the child. It's like this child, when they're born, will already be on one of those lists. Hannah Arendt called bureaucracy the rule by nobody. Maybe that's why it feels so hopeless. 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. 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. And you're never not going to think about it. Masha Gessen is a staff writer at The New Yorker and the author of several books, most recently, The Future is History. The Future is History

A pair of stockings, a pair of shoes, a record Moody Blues, a bottle of number five, a poster live, silk negligee and a black garter belt, a book about how to get to know yourself, a shirt you adopted used to be mine, these are some of the things you left behind.

Today's program is produced and edited by Nancy Opdyke and me. Nancy also produced Masha Gessen's story. People who put together today's show today include Michael Kamate, Andrea Lopez-Cruzado, Aviva de Kornfeld, Bethel Hopti, Cassie Halle, Seth Wynn, Catherine Raimondo, Safia Riddle, Ryan Rumery, Alyssa Shipp, Christopher Sotala, Marisa Robertson-Textor, and Matt Tierney. Our managing editor, Sara Abdurahman. Our senior editor is David Kestenbaum. Our executive editor is Emmanuel Barre.

Special thanks today to Elijah Walachinsky, Lika Kremer, Janae West, Isaac Arnstorf, and Martine Powers. Our website, thisamericanlife.org. If you need something to listen to, you can stream our archive of over 800 episodes for absolutely free, thisamericanlife.org. This American Life is delivered to public radio stations by PRX, the public radio exchange. Thanks as always to our co-founder, Mr. Torrey Malatia. How does he describe his own management style? In a list with three main points. Strong.

and small-minded. All right, Glass, back next week with more stories of this American life. A rosary, a glassy bag, one word, tagged up on my door is one word, goodbye. Goodbye.