An emergency broadcast from bed. We talk about the secretive and surprising prisoner exchange between America and Russia and get into the details of some of the cases we’ve been following for years. Sweet dreams.

This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.nefariousrussians.com/subscribe

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit www.nefariousrussians.com

We are lying flat in our NY bed…back from Montreal. We talk about the latest political news, movies, the death of journalism, and about writing fiction vs. nonfiction. Also if you power through to the end you’ll find out which wildly successful writer Yasha calls “a cisgender white walrus.” Sweet dreams.

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit www.nefariousrussians.com

Yasha is back from San Francisco and we talk about his reaffirmed disdain towards the city where he became an American. We also talk about David Berman and his rabbinical poetry, the documentary about his 2007 Israel tour, and the newly surfaced fan fights about whether he’d be supporting Israel or not right now. We do all this under the spell of Biden’s contagious senility, which seems to be affecting our entire society, like something out of the Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch.

Have a good night!

Evgenia

David Berman and the Third Temple

We talk about Daniel Simonsen, a Norwegian comic who is blowing up in the New York comedy world. We also talk about another Norwegian, Kris Borgli, who is blowing up in the movie world with recent films like Sick of Myself and Dream Scenario. We discuss how dark Nordic humor is similar to Russian humor. We also answer a reader question about why we don’t live in Russia. All from bed in a hotel room in SoHo.

Have a good morning!

This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.nefariousrussians.com/subscribe

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit www.nefariousrussians.com

We react to the debate, live from Manhattan, sitting on a couch. Yasha gets infected by Biden’s dementia and babbles incoherently while Evgenia tries to shoo him off the mic and into bed.

Sweet dreams,

The Russians

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit www.nefariousrussians.com

We chat about the trauma of immigration. Yasha likens it to a traumatic brain injury, like a stroke and reminisces about his immigrant circle in San Francisco and why they were so heavily into psychedelics, which was a kind of attempt at self-therapy. Evgenia talks about her own “internal immigrant” experience — and about how Russians who stayed in Russia display the same traumatic cultural symptoms as those that left. It all has to do with the denial of their Soviet past. As a way of getting into this topic we talk about the Soviet immigrant music festival that we crashed this weekend in the Catskills, where we camped out with our daughter surrounded by huge speakers blasting techno music until five in the morning.

—The Russians

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit www.nefariousrussians.com

We answer a couple of listener questions and mostly digress a lot.

* Is NYC still cool?

* Where do you find fulfillment and purpose within a culture that hyper-individualizes every aspect the journey?

We didn’t have nearly enough time to get through all the q’s you sent in. But we’ll keep answering one or two in every future episode, so keep them coming.

Sweet dreams.

PS: audio problems should be fixed now.

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit www.nefariousrussians.com

We tried to be professional and recorded an episode after an intense petty marital fight, which usually happens after we put Eya to bed and then bicker like lowly employees whose boss has caused a rift between.

I manage to gather some thoughts about an indie play I saw in NYC last week while Yasha was stuck on a roof with childless Greenpoint burnouts who complained about shitty roommates and room rents going up, thus witnessing in real life a similar play of maybe more merit than the one I was watching.

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit www.nefariousrussians.com

Even though Yasha was annoyed to be recording a podcast rather than sleeping we manage to have a quite robust discussion from bed — real poisonings, fake mushrooms and fake prophets, my life as an investment banker and a single mother in a parallel reality, the now more visible evil doings of the American Empire, Sayiidi Qutb, Black Iron Prison and other concepts from PKD’s Book of Revelations aka The Exegesis…

—Evgenia

To go on our bedtime journey you must be a paying subscriber.

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit www.nefariousrussians.com

It’s a bit uncomfortable to have to write this because we only vaguely recall what we talked about before falling asleep last night. As far as we remember we chatted about Yasha’s theory of the Dentist’ Plot, decrepit parents, our recent visit to the now-cleared CUNY encampment, 1990s Russia and the docuseries that’s being released by Navalny’s people (we talked about it last week), Evgenia’s thoughts on the “Patriots,” which is a Broadway show about Boris Berezovsky that’s currently playing, and…there’s more but that’s all that we remember. Eavesdrop on us doing free association podcasting while lying down — the psychoanalytic method in action!