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Hello, I'm Cleo Levin, one of the editors bringing members' exclusive Slate Plus content.

I recently spoke with host Josh Levine and senior producer Evan Chung about making this season of one year.

Here's a snippet from our conversation.

This is a good material for Plus, is that the Russian reporter, Yonet Andronov, who shows up in the man from Fifth Avenue episode, that this was not the first time we had encountered him in our research.

So our first season on 1977, I think you had pitched this idea, Evan, right?

Yeah, I'm trying to remember all the details, but there was a small

town in West Virginia, I believe, in 1977, with kind of this isolated community where there

was one bridge, I think, that connected them to the rest of the state or something, very poor

community, and this bridge had fallen into disrepair or maybe collapsed, and they couldn't get any funding

to replace it. And so as kind of a publicity stunt, the mayor of this tiny town appealed

to the Soviet Union, asking them to come in and fix their bridge. And this one person who

heard that plea was the same Russian reporter, Yonan Dronov,

who went down to West Virginia and covered it and turned it into this whole media spectacle

that kind of embarrassed, I think, the local authorities from the state of West Virginia.

And I think they ultimately got their bridge, not from the Soviet Union,

but they got their bridge from whatever local

government funding there was.

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