Interview on "Counter Points"

Apologies to Racket readers for being incommunicado — I’ve been working on something — but I wanted to post the above interview with Emily Jashinsky and Ryan Grim of Counter Points, one of the few broadcast shows whose premise involves hosts with differing partisan perspectives behaving like human beings toward one another. Ryan and Emily asked about my career going back to early days in Russia. I can’t express how much of a relief it was to have someone ask the obvious question that puzzled me at the start of my career — Ryan, too, tried to imagine what it would look like if the Russians sent a reporter who didn’t speak English to cover the United States, which was what the U.S. press corps in Russia looked like to me in the 1990s. Emily later asked how I pick topics to cover here on Racket, and I got to ask them both how their experiment in independent media is working out. In any case, for those with questions about the background leading to this site, Emily and Ryan asked excellent questions, and thanks again to them both.