852: Pivot Point

Ira Glass

When Kirk and his wife MJ evacuated their house in LA on the second day of the fires, they could see the flames up the hill from their backyard. They packed their car full, got their seven and eight-year-old kids inside with the family cat, hit the road. And Kirk started recording.

Ira Glass

He records his kids a lot and just had a feeling like this is an important moment.

Ira Glass

Kirk is Kirk Johnson. He's been on our show before, talking about his experiences in the Iraq War, among other things. He thinks of himself as somebody who can usually handle a moment of crisis.

But he admits, he made mistakes in the car. He didn't bring the family tortoise, an animal he says his kids have ignored for over a year. It lives in a giant crate outside the house. In the car, he realized how upset his son August was about that.

But they drove. Looked at wind speeds and wind directions, made a guess about where it might be safe, booked a hotel. And things were feeling a little calmer in the car.

Ira Glass

That's August asking Kirk to tell a story from his childhood, which he does sometimes. Kirk grew up with chickens, goats, and animals.

Ira Glass

Kirk and his family were lucky, unlike so many families in Los Angeles right now. They're now back in their home. The tortoise is fine.

But in that moment, when it was so unclear what to do, and he and his wife MJ were trying to pretend that things were going to be fine when they really had no idea at all and were scared they were not going to be fine, when his brain searched for a story to tell the children, this one with the horse is the one that popped up.

Ira Glass

These kind of moments, when you feel the Earth shifting underneath you, and you just have to figure out what you're going to do in this new reality, that's what our show is about today-- people with different pivot points in their lives, between what was and what's about to happen. From WBEZ Chicago, it's This American Life. I'm Ira Glass. Stay with us.

Ira Glass

This American Life, Act One, Who's Laughing Now? So we start today with this story about somebody who's been thinking a lot about one particular pivot point that the world might go through. Nancy Updike went to meet him.

Nancy Updike

Got a question for you out there listening-- have you ever had a bloody nose? I ask because I got a bloody nose recently, when I went to do an interview with a British comedy writer and director named Armando Iannucci.

He made the TV show Veep for HBO, now MAX, with Julia Louis-Dreyfus playing the vice president. He made a movie called The Death of Stalin, a comedy-- somehow-- about the battle for succession in the Soviet Union after Stalin died. And he made a movie that I especially love called In the Loop, about the lead-up to a war that isn't identified as the Iraq War, but seems a lot like the Iraq War-- also a comedy.

Armando Iannucci gets called prescient a lot, but I think of him not so much as prescient as in tune. He follows the news. He is paying attention to now. Veep got into aspects of the political culture in Washington in a way no other show did-- the epic pettiness, the unglamorous maneuvering. I'm always interested to see, through his work, what he finds funny, and relevant, and sometimes frightening in the world.

So I went to London to interview him about one of his new projects, a new play, which I will get to. But right now, all you need to know is that I came to the interview as a fan, straight up. I didn't hide it, but I didn't lead with it either. We were both there to do our jobs.

I was told I would get an hour with him. To be safe, I was 15 minutes early. And while I was waiting, I got a bloody nose. I got the bloody nose while I was standing in the living room, type room, somewhere upstairs, at the Noel Coward Theater in London, a room that has a white carpet, and white upholstered chairs, and a silver upholstered couch.

I pulled a bunch of tissues from my bag-- pretty much always have tissues. And I was holding a pile of them to my bloody nose. Normal-- it happens. I get bloody noses sometimes. Then I ran out of tissues. So I started using paper towels from the kitchenette that was attached to the living room. And it was a lot of blood.

So I had a big wad of paper towels pressed to my nose, trying not to drip on the white rug, when Armando Iannucci walked through the kitchenette and into the living room. He and the publicist were concerned. He said, do you need a few minutes? He understood about bloody noses.

The publicist said, would you like to use the toilet? I said, yes, that would be great. Thank you so much. I am so sorry about this. Where is that toilet? And I went to the bathroom to wrap this mess up.

And I had what seemed to be a rolling series of bloody noses or one big one that had many phases-- I don't know. But what I do know from sad, gross experience is that a bloody nose means there's a clot somewhere high up in my nose that needs to come out for the bloody nose to stop.

So I was trying to blow my nose and blow the clot out, and it took me some time to realize that as I was doing that-- unsuccessfully-- I was spraying tiny droplets of blood all over-- the sink, the toilet seat, the floor, the mirror, the wallpaper-- the wallpaper.

I started wiping everywhere like it was a crime scene. And I rolled up a tight, little roll of toilet paper and stuck it up my right nostril to catch the blood. That's what I do at home when I have a bloody nose and no one's looking. And the little roll of toilet paper filled with blood and fell on the floor as I was wiping the floor.

I had to roll up another one. That filled with blood. Roll up a new one, take out the old one. Repeat, repeat. I went through an entire roll of toilet paper and had to start a new one. So I was pacing around this little bathroom with toilet paper in my nose, looking for tiny blood drops, and muttering to myself, you gotta wrap this up. Wrap it up. Wrap this up. And time was passing.

So I started thinking, maybe I could interview Armando Iannucci with rolled up toilet paper sticking out of my nose. Or-- or-- maybe I could stick a really tiny bit of toilet paper far enough up my nose that he wouldn't see it, but it would still block the blood.

This nosebleed went on for half an hour. It was a full-on anxiety dream come to life. And Armando Iannucci's movies and TV shows are full of awkward scenes that happen on the job-- a person trying to do a serious thing and getting thwarted by something dumb and embarrassing, like a pair of squeaky shoes. In one of his movies, an assistant secretary of state starts bleeding from her teeth in the middle of a meeting.

And what usually happens in these scenes is the person just gets pounced on, mocked without mercy by their colleagues, or rivals, or the press. Any vulnerability or misstep is noticed and weaponized.

But Armando Iannucci, the real person, in real life, did something completely different. I walked out of the bathroom, not even sure the interview was still possible. So much time had been lost. And he said, with perfect grace, I'm not in a rush.

He and the publicist, Nada, simply put the whole thing behind us. Nada said, look, he's got a photo shoot in half an hour, but he can come back after that. Armando said, we'll talk for a while. And then I'll go and come back, and we'll talk more. It was like he waved a wand over me and said, you had a nightmare, and now it's over-- which is the opposite of what happens in his new play.

I wanted to interview Armando because his work is so good at capturing things about now, about the present. And I saw that he was doing a stage version of an old Cold War film, Dr. Strangelove by Stanley Kubrick. And I found it alarming that this was his next project. I mean, it's a comedy, but the last scene is nuclear armageddon and the end of the world.

So what did he see in it that spoke to him about now? Why choose that particular story out of all possible stories at this moment? Well, part of the answer to why now is someone asked.

Nancy Updike

Ladies and gentlemen, Armando Iannucci. He got a call from the director and co-adapter of the play, Sean Foley, who asked Armando, did he want to work on it with him? And Armando quickly said, yes.

Nancy Updike

Us, as a species, being unable to save ourselves from our own behavior is the plot of Dr. Strangelove. The entire story lives in the minutes right before the world pivots from a planet full of life to a deathscape of ashes and poison.

The story is an American general goes quietly nuts. He's a conspiracy theorist who believes commies are poisoning America through fluoridation. To stop that, he sends US bombers off to start a nuclear war with the Soviet Union.

When reasonable people on both sides realize what's happening, they try to stop it. The US president gets so desperate that he gives the Soviets the information they need to shoot down the planes. But one bomber gets through anyway, triggering a cascade of nuclear bombs to fire automatically, destroying the world.

Nancy Updike

More than any one-to-one correspondence with the news now, there's a feeling to Strangelove that I found familiar, a sense that enormous danger is looming, but we're also wading through a sludge of ridiculousness. I feel some level of dread all the time for a while now. And I had a hunch, based on Armando's work, that he might have a similar feeling.

Nancy Updike

Once I got an answer to why make Strangelove now, we moved into a meandery but very enjoyable conversation about how to confront your dread these days, because I am taking suggestions, and Armando's work is something I've returned to again and again.

And what I'm thinking now is that, especially with his movies and with Strangelove, I come for the comedy, but maybe stay for the dread. So we talked about how do you go about making comedy out of catastrophe and fear?

Nancy Updike

The Great Dictator is a movie about Hitler that Charlie Chaplin put out, incredibly, in 1940.

Nancy Updike

Armando pulls it off because he doesn't skimp on either the bad in The Death of Stalin or the comedy. The bad is quite bad, and the funny is really funny. And one way I've noticed that he keeps those two moods aloft at the same time in many of his projects, he often focuses on people who work together.

In The Death of Stalin, there's this intense rivalry among the men around Stalin, all jockeying for power after he dies, scheming, and whingeing, and flailing. That workplace power struggle is what made Veep so funny, too.

In the Strangelove play, the president and his advisors are in the war room, gathered around a ludicrously large, circular table, mostly arguing. And one guy, a guy you may know from your own job, keeps throwing out bad ideas in a loud voice, in a sort of Roman Roy, "I'm the only one being real here" way.

For instance, he argues that maybe the thing to do is to lean into this attack the US has launched. Not bring back the bombers that are on their way, but send more planes with more bombs. Try to win this war, rather than try to stop it. It all makes sense under something called Plan R.

Nancy Updike

Pretaliate isn't in the Strangelove movie, but it was built out of logic that is in there, and that Armando and the director and co-adaptor Sean Foley expanded and riffed on.

Nancy Updike

But Armando says, sometimes, you really don't need to riff or invent. Sometimes comedy is just sitting there, waiting to be picked up, like a $100 bill on the sidewalk.

Nancy Updike

This is in the Kubrick archive, he says.

Nancy Updike

Like a scene that ended up in the movie about Stalin's son, Vasili.

Nancy Updike

I've now seen Dr. Strangelove a bunch of times, the movie and then the play, and every time I think, so no one wins in the end, the bad ideas don't prevail. Nothingness prevails. It's shocking. Many times in my life, I've looked back at a specific moment and thought, oh right, that was before, before I knew that, before this happened.

But it's much more unsettling to experience now, the moment you are currently in, as that before time. To look around and feel that you will look back on this moment as one that came before so many losses or changes or hardships. Dr. Strangelove, the play, gave the audience a chance to, sure, laugh, but also to feel that dread, to see ourselves as living in a time before, before something. It's not clear what.

Nuclear bombs have a narrative advantage that way. They have one iconic image associated with them-- a recognizable brand of destruction. What is the right image for what's on our horizon-- or mine? I'll just speak for myself, my dread. I rewatched the movie and saw the play during the hottest year on record, in the summer before the US presidential election.

I'm writing this story wondering how much of Los Angeles is going to burn and whether there's going to be a nationwide ban on abortion, mass deportations. I don't have a picture in my head to focus on. It feels more like a play-- a lot of dialogue, and I'm experiencing it live.

Ira Glass

Nancy Updike is a producer on our show.

The stage version of Dr. Strangelove-- which, by the way, stars Steve Coogan in several different roles-- is playing at the Noel Coward Theater in London through January 25 and will be in Dublin from February 5 to February 22.

Ira Glass

Act Two, The View from the Dugout. So one of the things that seems likely to change once Donald Trump is, again, in the White House is US policy toward Ukraine. His vice president, JD Vance, has called for an end to aid to Ukraine and describe a peace plan that basically lets Russia keep the territory it's gained. Donald Trump has been vaguer about his intentions, but he's been a skeptic of continued aid. He has said many times that he was going to end the war in 24 hours.

We wondered what it's like for Ukrainian soldiers, who depend on US arms right now, to see all of this at this pivot point, and how they're imagining what's going to happen next once Trump takes office. Our producer, Valerie Kipnis, spoke with a bunch of people on the front lines.

Valerie Kipnis

The first soldier I want to tell you about is Serhei. He's a former vegan chef from Kyiv. He'd quit his job to join the army a year ago. He's really proud of the fact that his unit recycles.

When I asked how he described what his unit looks like when they're in action, he said, like Hobbits in a bunker, Hobbits with mortars. Serhei told me that it's a strange feeling to live in this moment of time before things might change. Everyone around him believes in anything and everything, all at the same time. There's nothing that's not in the realm of possibility.

Valerie Kipnis

That's how long this war has been going on, long enough that there's an air attack, and you go brew yourself a cup of tea. When Donald Trump won the election, Serhei was sitting in a dugout on the front line. That's basically just a big square hole in the ground, 100 square feet, like in World War I, five guys all huddled together.

That night, they'd just finished firing at the Russians, sat down to rest, when one of the guys in his unit went on X, saw the news that Trump was winning, and read it aloud.

Valerie Kipnis

Could Trump just stop the war unilaterally? Stop sending aid they'd already promised? And what's the deal with the House and the Senate? Did he need their permission? Serhei and the other soldiers dug and dug for answers.

And here's where he came down. He concluded that Trump wouldn't have the power to reverse the aid Biden had already promised all at once-- which isn't exactly true, but that's what he told his unit.

Valerie Kipnis

These kinds of conversations have been happening on the Ukrainian front line for months now. Not all the time, but here and there. I talked to 10 people in a variety of positions on the front. They all laughed when I asked about Trump saying he could finish the war in 24 hours.

Of course, they remembered the first time he said it. They remembered where they were, what they were doing. But they didn't think much of it, except for the fact that Trump was a showman and that this was all part of his act.

But even so, that didn't stop them from wondering-- what in the world might he mean? Same thing happened a few days after Trump won the election in November. Joe Biden approved Ukraine's use of long-range missiles. The soldiers were excited. They'd been waiting for this for years.

But then Donald Trump said that he thought launching long-range missiles into Russia was actually a big mistake. One soldier told me that he was on the front line, just finished shooting mortars when he heard what Trump had said. And he looked at his crew like, what? What does this actually mean for us? Will they actually take away the approval they've just given us?

Another soldier who told me about trying to read the tea leaves of American politics is Vitaly, a drone operator. He's from a region of Ukraine that's been in the fight against Russian occupation since 2014. Vitaly has been fighting this war on and off since he was 24.

As a drone operator, he spends hours sitting in a bunker watching monitors. He's got two screens in front of him. On one is a live feed surveillance of the front line and the other, his phone-- social media, group chats, the news-- one right next to the other.

Valerie Kipnis

They talk about how Trump, the candidate, could be against funding for Ukraine. But Trump, the president, might not be.

Valerie Kipnis

Vitaly told me he actually finds this last scenario pretty convincing. Other times, he's less optimistic.

Valerie Kipnis

Elon Musk has said there's no way that Putin will lose. And he pitched a Ukraine, quote unquote, "peace plan" on X, which would cede Crimea to Russia.

Valerie Kipnis

Trump's victory has cracked open a space for conversations that were once totally off-limits. I heard about a moment like that from Artem, a soldier with a big personality. Artem is a volunteer fighter in a unit that calls themselves Peaky Blinders. He helps prepare ammunition for drones. He calls himself the Candy Maker.

Artem is a big believer that the war is nowhere near ending, Trump or no Trump, funding or no funding. But a few weeks ago, Artem went out with his commander, Zalizniak, and another guy in his unit.

Valerie Kipnis

Chyzh is a soldier in Artem's unit.

Valerie Kipnis

Artem couldn't believe that he was hearing his fellow brothers in arms talking about what they would do after the war ended-- going to travel, going back to their normal civilian lives.

Valerie Kipnis

To hear a fellow soldier even whisper the possibility that the fight could be over is still not something Artem is used to. The party line of any Ukrainian soldier, of any Ukrainian, really, is that they'll fight to the end, and the fight may never end. Expressing any sort of doubt feels almost unpatriotic.

But I talked to a Ukrainian expert who's in contact with many high-ranking officials in the army, who told me that while many soldiers remain diehard and committed to keep fighting till the end, another group, which is growing, is made up of people who are getting increasingly weary of this war. Ukraine's recently suffered a series of setbacks and defeats, and the expert says, this group likes that Trump is someone who will change things up.

Artem thought about this moment with his commander for a while. What had he meant by that? Did he actually think this war would end? Artem told me this. A few days later, in the midst of heavy bombardment, he studied his commanders face. He looked like he was all in. And so Artem decided that his commander didn't mean what he said. He told me he'd figured it out. His commander didn't actually think the war was ending. He was just testing his unit.

The truth is, these guys don't think about Trump all that much. They've got other things on their minds. One soldier told me that when you're in the rear, far from the front line, it's easy to imagine all the possibilities of what could happen next.

But when you're on the front, it's like all of that collapses into this one linear logic-- the weapon in front of you, the tank next to you, the amount of ammo you have left-- the present, no before and no after. Those are the moments, he said, that feel the greatest for him, when he just does what he can with what he has, when he's not speculating about what will be.

Ira Glass

Valerie Kipnis is a producer on our show. She reported this with help from Anastastassiia Mozhghova. Coming up, the power of a simple photograph in a moment of uncertainty. That's in a minute from Chicago Public Radio, when our program continues.

Ira Glass

It's This American Life. I'm Ira Glass. Today, on our program, Pivot Point. On this weekend, before a new presidency begins, we have stories of people living in these strange and often unsettling in-between moment, when you know things are right on the cusp of big, big changes. We've arrived at Act Three of our program. Act Three, Period Piece.

So when we were discussing this week's theme as a group here at the radio show, one of our co-workers, Susan Burton, started talking about a year-long pivot point. It lasts 12 months that many of our listeners have either gone through, or are in the middle of now, or will go through. Quick heads up-- Susan describes some bodily stuff in here. Here she is.

Susan Burton

I got my first period when I was 10, and then I continued to get it for the next 40 years. I didn't get it every month. There were exceptions, blackout dates-- pregnancy, breastfeeding, anorexia. But for most of the 40 years, each month, my period would come, and I'd open a calendar and mark the anticipated date of my next period with a TK, like a forthcoming fact in a piece I was reporting.

Sometimes, I would get my period and not have tampons, and then I would go online and order enough tampons so that I would never run out again. And then suddenly, I was about to turn 50, and I understood I would never get through all the tampons I had ordered.

What was the first day of your last period? Asked the nurse at the gynecologist's office. OK, I said. I mean, I think it was sometime last month, like August, but it's hard to tell. I'm at that age, you know? Like, I was kind of bleeding all summer. Not in an alarming way, just, it was hard to tell.

You are officially in menopause once you go one full year without a period. So I was not there yet. I was in perimenopause. During peri, my period had first come a lot, every 18 days. Over time, that changed-- 60 days between periods, then 90. I'd start thinking, this is it, and then I'd get my period again, and the clock would restart. Congratulations, a friend said to me one day when the counter reset to zero. She was kidding, but that was the feeling.

Peri was a safe zone, and I wanted to stay there. What made peri a safe zone was simply that it was not menopause. It was still the before time. Peri may have been a safe zone, but it was not a safe harbor.

During it, I had the common symptoms you hear about and other things you don't-- frozen shoulder, which was just what it sounded like, migraines I managed by digging my fingernails into my forehead. There were remedies for some of the symptoms, but what I tried or didn't is not what I want to get into here.

My point is that I had already been through a few rocky years, years of accelerated aging. I felt startled by how quickly my face was changing. According to the internet, this was on me. There was a punitive quality to the phrase "sun damage."

But the promise was that once you were officially in menopause, you would feel better because things would slow down, and your moods would level out. You would come into your own. You would give a shit less. In menopause, you would be sanguine. And yet, I wasn't eager to get there.

All along, I had so many fears about menopause. A short list of those fears might start with my associations to the word-- dry, wiry, papery. I was scared of what would happen to desire, like how much of it I would feel. The messaging on this was positive. Women in menopause can still be sexy and still want sex.

But the celebrities of menopause were hot and liberated, and you hardly heard from the regular women, who maybe did want less. And that was the information I was looking for, how it felt to still be sexual, but to have the volume just turned down a bit, because that was what I suspected was most true. I didn't know yet. I wasn't there. But I thought I might be closer than I'd ever been.

That period I'd had in August-- light, persistent-- I had a feeling it would be the last one. My bet was that once the hand on the clock circled through the year, that would be it. I would officially be in menopause. September, October, November, December-- no period. Still in the before time.

It was sort of like not wanting to move into a new decade, like wanting to linger in the last months of being 29, 39, 49, or 9. Even as a child, I'd had a sadness about aging, not wanting to cross into the double digits of 10. Getting a period at 10 was early, very early, in 1984. I'd felt horror at that advancement. Now, I recognize that this was happening again.

As the year ticked on-- now January, now February-- I found there were things I missed about menstruating. There was a stillness in my body without it. I missed the cycle, which began each month with a low, flat mood, and then continued with the rising action of ovulation, that mid-month surge of energy, some of it erotic. I missed the elevation in mood.

March. Earlier in my life, fearing pregnancy, I'd willed my period to come, but it wasn't like that now. I wasn't pulling down my underwear and hoping. April, May. I was still in the before time, though I was increasingly accepting of the idea that I would soon be in menopause, testing it out in my head.

Maybe this is partly because a whole new generation, Millennials, had discovered perimenopause and, once again, were shining up the scruffy territory we Gen Xers had claimed. Advertisers had gotten there, too. And now it seemed like everyone was talking about menopause. But most of them were not talking about it the right way. And this is probably always true. No one is ever talking about your own menopause, about exactly what it means to you.

June, month 10. By now, I was traveling without any supplies. There wasn't going to be an emergency. There wasn't going to be another period stain. For years, I dealt with period stains, kneeling by the washing machine, spraying stain remover into a seam, or looking at the back of a skirt and wondering if it could be saved.

But there's one stain I've never been able to get out, a stain on the pink upholstery of one of our dining room chairs. I sat there one early summer morning, for me, a singularly important morning. A book I'd written had been published. I sat there in a nightgown, reading a glowing review. I could feel that I was getting my period, but it didn't matter. A dream of my life was coming true. I wanted to sit there in it. I didn't want to move.

Now that stain is there, and I've tried to lift it, but it won't come out. And I don't mind that it's there. It's a marker of a moment of bliss and of an earlier self, too, one whose body still did that. For so many years, I tried to manage my period, make it invisible, get rid of evidence. Now, this strange, possibly even repulsive, kind of preservation. But it's a stain that makes me remember the feeling of the world opening up before me.

July came, and then it was August again. And it was official, one full year. Is it too pollyanna to say that I actually did feel the world opening up? There had been something trying about wanting to stay where I was. Once I crossed the threshold, there was no more resistance. And I was moving forward again.

When I went for my physical, my doctor said, what was the date of your last menstrual period? August 2023, I said. Menopause, she said, with an exclamation point, like Menopause, the musical, like a curtain rising on a new stage.

Ira Glass

Susan Burton is an editor on our show.

Ira Glass

Act Four, Since You've Been Gone. So the show today is about people at a pivot point, and one entire community in that situation is Altadena, California. It's one of the towns around LA that's so devastated that, for most of the last week and a half, nobody was allowed in. It's been surrounded by National Guard with barricades.

One of our producers, Miki Meek, talked to somebody who stayed at her house-- the fire stopped about a block away-- and, in the first days of the fires, came up with a mission for herself.

Miki Meek

Vanessa Prata is a nursing student, 25 years old, lives with her parents in the home she grew up in. In those first few days after the fires, she realized people who'd evacuated didn't have a way to figure out if their homes were still standing or not.

Miki Meek

So she went on to a community Facebook page for Altadena and posted this message.

Miki Meek

54 people messaged her their addresses. She wrote them down into a notebook, and then she and her dad got into their old Toyota minivan and started driving.

Miki Meek

Vanessa in the passenger seat and her father driving.

Miki Meek

That's their dog, Shelby, panting on her father's lap.

Miki Meek

They got to 10 houses on their first day, but it took them almost four hours. Altadena is a small place. The whole thing is only about 9 square miles. But the streets were blocked with downed power lines and fallen trees. When they did get to an address, Vanessa would snap a photo and text it right away.

Miki Meek

A few days after the fire started, when it was still only 3% contained, she and her father were trying to get to an address at the end of a cul-de-sac. That one house took them a couple days to get to. They kept trying different roads in.

Miki Meek

On their fourth attempt, they finally got closer to the address, but encountered another tree blocking the road. So Vanessa got out of the car and started walking. She sent me the video.

Miki Meek

Around her were charred trees and electrical poles dangling from power lines. The bottoms burn completely off.

Miki Meek

The rubble was still smoldering, and all she could see were remnants of stone walls and chimney columns, a burned out station wagon.

Miki Meek

One of the last messages I got from Vanessa was a rare bright moment in this terrible time.

Miki Meek

She and her dad found a house still standing.

Ira Glass

Miki Meek is a producer on our show.

Ira Glass

Well, our program was produced today by Emanuel Dzotsi. The people who put together today's show include Phia Bennin, Dana Chivvis, Michael Comite, Angela Gervasi, Cassie Howley, Chana Joffe-Walt, Henry Larson, Seth Lind, Katherine Rae Mondo, Stowe Nelson, Nadia Reiman, Ryan Rumery, Alissa Shipp, Laura Starcheski, Lilly Sullivan, Christopher Swetala, Marisa Robertson-Textor, and Diane Wu.

Our managing editor is Sarah Abdurrahman. Our senior editor is David Kestenbaum. Our executive editor is Emanuele Berry. Special thanks today to Tasia Plieshyvtseva, Eric Ciaramella, Katerina Sergatskova, Michael O'Hanlon, John Litchfield, Bennett Epstein, Vanessa Martinez, Ron Lin, Jeanette Marantos, and Hannah Fry at the LA Times. The actors performing the English translations for the Ukrainians in Act 2 of our show today were Oleksander Fuhrman and Ross Peleh.

This American Life is delivered to public radio stations by PRX, the Public Radio Exchange. To become a This American Life partner, which gets you bonus content, ad-free listening, and hundreds of our favorite episodes of the show that are going to show up right in your podcast feed, go to thisamericanlife.org/lifepartners. Your subscription also helps keep our program going.

Thanks this week to Life Partner Cici Chen Mengfei and Colette Spriggins. Thanks, as always, to our program's co-founder, Mr. Torey Malatia. He's been taking a figure drawing class. His drawings are pretty good, except for the hands. He does the shoulder, upper arm, forearm all great. And then gets to the end of the arm, and it's always--

Ira Glass

I'm Ira Glass. Back next week with more stories of This American Life.