Three Podcasts And Those Calls From Belarus March 10, 2019March 10, 2019 If you’ve been getting endless hang-up calls from Belarus, the British Virgin Islands, Slovenia — wherever — here’s why. (They hope you’ll call back and rack up phone charges.) If you can deal with a heavy French accent, listen to Tina Brown’s conversation with Bernard-Henri Lévy about his new book, The Empire and the Five Kings: America’s Abdication and the Fate of the World. It will redouble your commitment to saving democracy. How — to take just one tiny piece of it — can we have abandoned the Kurds? The exact sort of religiously tolerant, women-respecting democracy we hope all Muslim states might one day be. And here’s another of Tina’s podcasts, her conversation last month with Hillary Clinton. Whether or not you agree she would have made a great president, defending American exceptionalism and pushing back against the journalist-murdering autocrats Trump loves — and whether or not you can forgive her for not fully appreciating the enormity of Putin’s sneak attack that kept her from winning the popular vote by a wide enough margin to avoid the tragedy we now find ourselves in — her intellect and unique life experience may interest you. But she’s not running for president again, not least because a majority of Americans don’t want someone in his or her seventies, they are looking for new leadership. Stacey Abrams is probably not running for president either — Senate is more likely — but if you listen to this podcast with Chris Hayes, you may join her fan club, as I long ago did, and see one more example of youthful, sane, civil Democratic leadership. I know three podcasts could take almost your whole day. But desperate times call for disparate measures.* *I know: doesn’t quite work. But I couldn’t resist.