Nancy Rommelmann was fortunate, through accident and the fog of war, to stay with Oksana Hutnyk and her family in Lviv, Ukraine this past March, two weeks after Russian forces invaded the country. Now, in mid-September, Oksana and her daughters, ages 13 and 7, have received special permission to leave Ukraine and visit America. First stop: Nancy's cramped apartment in NYC, where Oksana has a chance talk about why Ukraine banded together so quickly to fight Russia (hint: super-not interested to again live under a murderous Communist regime), why Ukrainian schoolchildren draw chalk pictures of "dead Putin," and what up with all the Boris Johnson adulation?

Man, did things get testy in 2006 when I quizzed him about Vladimir Putin!

Is there a single movie more tied up with lousy government policy than "Field of Dreams"?

It's an Orban-twofer! From Matt Welch. First, Kleptocratic Hungarian leader, under fire for "mixed race" speech, condemns America for weaponizing energy, antagonizing Russia, and incubating gender "lunacy" ("U.S. Conservatives Set To Applaud Viktor Orbán's Paranoid Anti-Americanism"), and second, the Hungarian prime minister also makes the historically illiterate claim that Christians can't be racist ("Viktor Orbán Flatters Republicans With the Lie That Progressive Liberals and Communists Are 'the Same'"). Plus all the Welch-isms and asides and accent attempts you've come to love!

As I wrote a few months ago, with regard to true crime books, "All stories are worth telling well, but especially the difficult ones, when we need the writer's assurance as we walk down the dark passage."

As someone who occasionally takes on such stories, I'm interested in how and why other true crime writers approach the work. My lead-off interview is with Kathryn Miles, author of "TRAILED: One Woman's Quest to Solve the Shenandoah Murders," about the horrific unsolved 1996 murders of two young women with Shenandoah National Park.

Miles does what the best true crime writers do. She takes on the awesome responsibility of explaining murder, with compassion and clear-eyes and deeply empathetic reporting.

As she writes in TRAILED, "Maybe, just maybe, when two selfless, joyful, beautiful humans die in a place, what's left behind is not the agony of their deaths, but the brilliance of their lives."

I loved her book and have links to it and 13 other favorite true crime books in the show notes.

First, undo government harm.

San Diego schools chief demonstrates once again that Democratic-controlled urban districts will be the first to add COVID restrictions—and subtract students.

In America, social change often comes after a politician or government goes too heavily on offense against individuals wishing merely to stand their ground and assert their rights.

On divorce and Felicia Sonmez and why the cure for contempt is love

"A toothless woman screams. A legless man lights a pipe. A woman with a leg cast encrusted in grime rolls past in a desultory manner, toward and then away from several men also in wheelchairs, one of whom's foot is so badly infected my groin contracts and feels flash-burned."

Scene at the open-air drug market on San Francisco's UN Plaza, two days before the recall of SF DA Chesa Boudin