Welcome to the Making Sense Podcast. This is Sam Harris. Just a note to say that if you're

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My guest today is Masha Gessen. Masha is a writer for the New Yorker. She's been publishing

there since 2014 and joined the staff in 2017. She's the author of nine books, including

The Future Is History, How Totalitarianism Reclaimed Russia, which won the National Book Award

in 2017, and The Man Without A Face, the unlikely rise of Vladimir Putin. She writes for the New

York Review of Books as well on The New York Times, and she's also been a science journalist,

writing about AIDS and medical genetics, mathematics. She once wrote for a popular science magazine in

Russia, but then got fired for refusing to send a reporter to observe the great Vladimir Putin

hanglighting with Siberian cranes. She's a visiting professor at Amherst College. She's

won a Guggenheim Fellowship, a Carnegie Fellowship, a Neiman Fellowship, and I've long wanted to get

Masha on the podcast. I've been a fan of her writing for years. We cover many controversial topics

here, Russia and Putin and Trump, but also the Me Too movement, and we touch concerns about

immigration and the differences between Christian and Muslim intolerance, a bit fake news, the health

of journalism, and I found it very satisfying to get Masha's point of view on the podcast.

So, without further delay, I bring you Masha Gessen.

I am here with Masha Gessen. Masha, thanks for coming on the podcast.

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