The core similarity is the same bargain that the Soviet people struck with the Communist Party.

Yes, I recognise that I live in a repressive regime, but in exchange for this loss of freedom,

you, the state, will provide for me and keep me safe.

And what happened in Chernobyl is that they realised that this bargain had been broken a long time ago.

Hello, welcome to Wise is Happening with me, your host Chris Hayes.

I don't get a ton of time to watch serialised television in my life.

I get home every night at 10 and then my wife Kate and I, we catch up on her days.

And a lot of times my brain is so fried that I just watch NBA basketball, so I don't have to think.

And so I'm very late often on whatever is like a hot prestige TV drama.

And that was the case for the HBO series Chernobyl, which debuted in the spring, I think,

of last year and May of last year.

And people were raving about it and saying, I'm credible was and I thought, I should watch that

and then time would find finally some point, I guess, in the fall when I was on the road

by myself in a hotel room, I watched the whole series and it was just incredible.

It takes you through the disaster at the Chernobyl nuclear reactor in the Soviet Union,

which is in present-day Ukraine.

It's incredibly well-written, incredibly well-acted.

And then afterwards I got really obsessed and interested with the actual disaster itself.

And I was sort of looking online, there were some critiques about some of the kind of characterizations

that happened, which is natural in any, you know, traumatization of anything.

And then I remembered that I had this book, I've been meeting to read, that was suggested to me by an old book editor of mine.

It was a husband's book, a guy named Adam Higginbottom, a written book called Midnight at Chernobyl.

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