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 Trung about making this

season of one year.

Here's a snippet from our conversation.

Well, this is good material for Plus is that the Russian reporter, Yonet Andrana, 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, Yonet Andranav,

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 whenever local

government funding there was.

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