Podcast Preferences

Lately, several people have noticed the earbuds that are always in my ears, and asked me what podcasts I listen to. I started listening to podcasts a few years ago in the car and on the computer, but until I got a portable MP3 player (and thus finally entered the 21st century), I wasn't truly hooked. Now, podcasts are an excuse for long walks, an alibi for getting lost, and a way to justify taking my time in otherwise mindless tasks with the hope that I am learning something useful, or at least becoming a more interesting person as I absorb anecdotes to repeat later. I hope that it's worked, and not just given me more trivia to bring up on random occasions, but either way, I've gotten to know quite a few good podcasts, which I'd like to share.

The podcasts I listen to are typically carefully edited by experienced teams of Americans (and the occasional Canadian) who have worked closely together for years, as can be seen from the graph above, which I made several years ago (since then, things have gotten even more complex, with This American Life's spinoffs creating their own spinoffs, and even spawning a media company, Gimlet, which has begun to poach other former members of This American Life. Many podcasts are also created by people who started with, or are still part of, National Public Radio, which until recently was one of the few means of learning to create high-quality radio broadcasts according to a fixed schedule. What does this all mean? If you like a podcast, look up the names behind it, and you'll often find your favorite producer, host, or guest on several other podcasts!

Anyway, without further ado, I bring you short descriptions of the podcasts that have filled a good proportion of my waking hours, broken down into several categories (which naturally blend into each other): This American Life, storytelling, reporting, in-depth explorations, and podcasts I’m trying out.

This American Life (TAL)

The godfather of them all, the podcast combines all of the other categories in every episode, has several million podcast subscribers, and spawned a TV show. I've been listening to this show since I was little, and have, since 2011, listened to 413 out of its 539 hour-long episodes (the show celebrates its 20th birthday this week). I have even excitedly gone to see the host walk around on a stage by himself monologuing for two hours! Each episode has a theme explored via several "acts" (the show started as "Your Radio Playhouse") which are usually separate stories. These acts can be investigative reporting, memoirs, short stories, collected interviews, and have background music overlaid with people speaking to reflect mood, with a character-based anecdote-reflection-anecdote-reflection model adapted from storytelling. The themes vary widely, from bird-related mishaps to people making sudden and drastic changes in their lives, from coincidences to amusement parks. Some of the best episodes have focused on just one theme/place, such as a high school in inner-city Chicago, or an aircraft carrier, inmates putting on a performance of Shakespeare, to used-car salesmen competing for a prize. Many people got their start from appearances on this show, and it can be surprising to see John Hodgman working as a reporter, or OK Go serving as the show's house band during live tours in 2000 and 2003!

Here are some of my favorite episodes, although the official website has a similar list:

Serious/Investigative Journalism:

Petty Tyrant: The best serious episode: the head of a school district's maintenance department and his long-running rein of terror (space heaters! Tire slashing! Explosives!) 

Little War on the Prairie-A forgotten Indian war in Minnesota, and how it's remembered today.

Old Boys Network-Corruption in the modern-day South and Chicago.

What Kind of Country: The Recession and the Rise of the Tea Party.

Kid Politics: Kids rip into each other thanks to school politics, and other kids visit the Reagan presidential library and reenact his moments of crisis.

Funny:

Americans in China: The surreal, whimsical aspects of life for Americans in China.

All Poultry Slams: My favorite episodes. Listen with other people!

The Psychopath Test: TAL's staff freak out about being psychopaths, and Jon Ronson visits a CEO/psychopath's mansion.

#1 Party School: Life at Penn State.

Rest Stop: 24 hours at a rest stop in Delaware.

Scenes from a Mall: 24 hours in a mall (TAL has occasional episodes where the staff spends 24 hours at a typical American location, like a diner).

Fear of Sleep: The basis of Mike Birbiglia's recent film, produced by Ira Glass, the show's host.

Christmas and Commerce: Includes the stories that made David Sedaris and David Rakoff famous.

Superpowers: Chris Ware and John Hodgman discuss their childhoods, and what people would do with superpowers.

Enough fawning, let's move on to our first real category...

Storytelling

Wiretap: Run by This American Life alumnus Jonathan Goldstein, this Canadian show just aired its last episode this year, but its archive goes back many years. The show's central conceit is that Goldstein has an exceptionally dry, unsuccessful radio show, and is constantly interrupted in his daily life, especially when trying to record the show, by phone calls by friends and family (voiced by his actual friends and family, who show up in older episodes of This American Life, especially in one non-fiction segment where one of his friends turns out to be wildly successful with NYC's restaurant staff and deliverypeople!) Thus, the majority of the show is composed of telephone conversations. Think Seinfeld if George Costanza were the main character, Jewish, and everyone else was Kramer. There are also segments where Goldstein interviews children out of character, as he used to on This American Life. Goldstein's a pretty talented writer, and fond of the slow-build (as is clear from occasional standup segments in the show), but the show sticks to its central premise so well that it can feel repetitive, so I've found myself listening to this show off and on, even if a few of my friends are devoted fans. 

The Thrilling Adventure Hour: Another long-running show that wrapped up this year,  this show consisted of humorous radio plays in the style of classic radio plays, and was performed live on a stage in LA with a recurring cast and high-profile guest actors such as John Hodgman (a This American Life alum) and Felicia Day. Several recurring segments spawned comic books, especially the sketches that combined The Thin Man's alcoholic socialites with Ghostbusters, and "Sparks Nevada: Marshall on Mars," a melodrama Western set on, well, Mars. The script is brilliant, the voice actors talented, the live mistakes charming, and everyone on stage really gets into singing the theme songs. Plus there's a segment involving members of the Algonquin Round Table with superpowers, and one involving a Amelia Earhart traveling through time to fight Nazis, and one with combining Batman and Aquaman, and, and, and!

The Memory Palace: NPR veteran Nate DiMeo spends 5-10 minutes telling a story from American history, usually from the 19th century, almost always really obscure. The stories are moving, the endings reflective and thoughtful. I've heard people sometimes cry at the end, and used to save episodes for bed.  

Snap Judgment: Although the show came about when the host, Glenn Washington, won an NPR contest, this show owes a lot to This American Life. Producers tell people's stories via interviews, which are often more dramatic than on This American Life. There is also more fiction, with the host telling one of his short stories in many episodes (as well as actual bits from his life---they can be hard to tell apart!) The sound design is quite good, in part because the show has its own DJ. It was a bit shocking for me to see what everyone looked like (they're all so young!), but take a look at the biographies of the show's crew, and you'll get an idea of the experiences they bring with them, which come out in the show. As an example, here's part of Washington's biography, which misses some of the countries he spent years in: 

"educator, diplomat, community activist, actor, political strategist, fist-shaker, mountain-hollerer, and foot stomper. Glynn composed music for the Kunst Stoff dance performances in San Francisco, rocked live spoken word poetry in Detroit, joined a band in Indonesia, wrote several screenplays, painted a daring series of self portraits, released a blues album, and thinks his stories are best served with cocktails."

The Moth: Inspired by the host's tradition of getting together with friends and telling stories late into the night, this show consists of recordings from hundreds of live shows where people tell a 15-minute story from their lives in front of a large audience, usually tied to a theme, and sometimes as part of a competition. The show has spawned storytelling workshops which often work with youth or underprivileged demographics, and sometimes features regulars, such as Jon Ronson (who shows up on a lot of these podcasts), and a man from Savannah, Georgia who speaks in an unsettling accent that brings to mind a Hollywood vampire.

The Truth: Modern-day radio plays, with excellent sound design, and sometimes with horror aspects. I feel like it's gone downhill since its first two years, but it's definitely worth listening to!

Reporting

Radio Spätkauf: It's not especially well-done or good, but this podcast does help me keep track of news in Berlin better than Deutsche Welle's "Langsam gesprochene Nachrichten."

Love + Radio: I have a love/hate relationship with this one, and often skip episodes a few minutes in. Generally, the show consists of an extended interview with someone in the seedy underbelly of American society, from an investigative report to a strip club manager, from a dominatrix to a black musician who became famous for befriending and deradicalizing white supremacists. These interviews, several of which won awards, are almost entirely composed of monologues spliced together with no background information, and with excellent sound design, and sometimes stick in your head.

On the Media: I have a serious crush on this show. As recently stated in a mutual interview between one of the cohosts and Alec Baldwin, "We try to understand how the media works and figure out what's wrong with it ... we believe what's wrong with the media has nothing to do what people think, but ... laziness, stenography, false balance.." The hosts have the best vocabularies on-air, and are dogged in pursuit of the truth to an extent that's rare (witness one go after an Exxon spokesperson trying to skirt revelations that Exxon had discovered that fought to hide global warming since the 70s), but manage to retain a sense of humor throughout, which makes for consistently enjoyable interviews. The show serves as a media watchdog and commentator, but also features serious and in-depth, but still interesting discussions of media ethics, trends, and experiments. 

Wait Wait... Don't Tell Me! I wasn't really sure where to put this, the American/radio version of QI, this comedy news game show features a rotating panel of comedians who answer questions, crack jokes, and interact with contestants who call in from around the world to judge which of several unlikely stories is real, or to answer news-related questions in limerick form. The host shares Stephen Colbert's ability to think on his feet and think of a punchline for everything without seeming mean, while the other regulars help make this show the most consistently funny on air. (Fun fact: a show was recorded at my American alma mater during my first month there). 

The New Yorker: Politics and More: (AKA: "The Political Scene" until a few weeks ago). Low sound quality betrays this show's print roots as an extension of The New Yorker magazine. However, while the format is simply the hostess asking questions of 1-2 staff writers, these staff writers are among the best living journalists, and tend to have fairly accurate analysis. Still, I sometimes consider dropping this one. 

Planet Money: Itself a spinoff of This American Life's "Giant Pool of Money" episode, which won one of TAL's five Peabody Awards and spawned a surprisingly long Wikipedia article and four follow-up episodes further documenting the mortgage crisis (with the help of "Toxie," a toxic asset purchased by reporters), this show's producers have gone off to start the podcast company Gimlet and several podcasts. Despite the brain drain that has occurred in the 663 episodes since the "Giant Pool of Money," this show is going strong, as it takes obscure and seemingly uninteresting and complex parts of the economy, and renders them transparent and interesting. This show is a vital aid in understanding some economic aspects, and is also quite enjoyable in and of itself!

DecodeDC: Founded by a veteran NPR reporter, this podcast does what it says on the label. It has expanded to include several producers and reporters and has been bought out by the Scripps Washington Bureau. It's decent, but I keep considering dropping this one, too.

In-depth Exploration

Song Exploder: Musicians pick apart one of their songs, piece by piece, layer by layer, explaining where the effects come from, their motivations, the meaning of the song lyrics, and their inspirations and mistakes. When you finally hear all the pieces together in the end, as the full song plays, it's a great feeling. I've discovered some good music through this podcast.

99% Invisible: Podcasts feel intensely personal. You listen to someone's voice in your ear for hours, listen to them change and mature. In the case of host Roman Mars (real name!), whose initial episodes were delivered in a near-whisper so as not to disturb his sleeping baby, you even hear their children grow up (for years, the final ad included a clip from one of his precocious sons whose vocabularies grew and voices deepened as the show went on). With a nerdy enthusiasm for flags(!) and obscure but important bits of design, like lifesaving Plimsoll Lines, Mars(!) makes the hidden fascinating. Wildly successful Kickstarter campaigns have helped fund several other reporter/producers, and covered their insurance costs as well. 

StartUp: A side effect of the personal nature of podcasts are the sense of loyalty audiences feel with hosts. I began listening to this podcast despite having no interest in startups (I hadn't been in Estonia long enough yet) simply because the host was Alex Blumberg, cowriter of TAL's "The Big Pool of Money," and cofounder of Planet Money. Season 1 of this show was about the podcast itself, and the foundation of a podcast company, Gimlet Media, by the host, and included painful discussions with the founder's wife and potential investors, and the negotiations required at every step, especially when figuring out how to bring in a business partner. Season 2 changed the format a bit, following the creation of a dating startup run by women, and future seasons will follow other startups. It's also interesting to hear behind-the-scenes information of how the company is run as it expands and runs into new problems.

Mystery Show: Season 1 was only 6 shows, but it started out fairly strong, and quickly got so weak that I would have stopped listening had I not enjoyed host Starlee Kine's work for This American Life and Wiretap, and had the show not been a part of Gimlet. The show's premise is simple: Kine investigates a mystery that cannot be solved online. The charming episode about the belt buckle, which I listened to as I poked through the ruins of Liepaja, Latvia, helped me through a particularly bad day and convinced me to go keep going through the episodes about Jake Gyllenhaal and "Welcome Back Kotter."

Radiolab: One of NPR's flagship shows, nearing TAL's popularity, Radiolab has been in its current format for more than a decade, but only cranks out a few shows per year, plus some "shorts." Hosted by a veteran science reporter and an experimental musician, this show approaches complex scientific and philosophical subjects and makes them easily understandable in an imaginative and entertaining manner (such as explaining economic policy via a fictional opera), winning Peabodies and other awards in the process. Their live shows are pretty fantastic too. 

Invisibilia: What happens when you combine Radiolab and TAL (its hosts produced both shows), Invisibilia focuses on the invisible phenomena that shape human behavior. It's promising, but has only had a few episodes, released almost a year ago.

Reply All: A spinoff of On the Media's tech spinoff TLDR (Gimlet poached TLDR's producers, much as it has now shanghaied Planet Monday's original cohosts), this show is devoted to the internet. The hosts are lovely people who find interesting stories, and show much of what happens behind the scenes of their show and their company. Unlike most shows about the internet, this podcast isn't just two people chatting in a room, or with the occasional guest---the hosts travel to meet with people affected by the internet in interesting ways (like a family whose pug was "kidnapped by the internet.") In one memorable August show, one of the hosts looks out the window, talks about what a beautiful day it's been and how they've been too busy to enjoy it. For the rest of the episodes, the hosts wander around New York, interviewing random people, getting stuck on a boat on the Hudson, and jumping onto a rusty nail on the rooftop of an abandoned factory in Brooklyn late at night.

Serial: The final TAL spinoff on this list, this show became the most popular podcast of all time shortly after being released a year ago, with 40 million downloads by the time its first season wrapped up (it had 68 million downloads 5 months after the first episode aired). Serial investigates one story over the course of a season, in the eponymous serial format. Season 1 investigated a high schooler's murder in 1999, but ended inconclusively. What Season 2 will be is anyone's guess, but is unlikely to be another murder. 

Freakonomics Radio: The coauthors of the Freakonimics series of pop economics books are the cohosts of this weekly series, which shadows the aims of the books---trying to explain various phenomena with quantitative economics, and relies heavily on fairly entertaining interviews with professors. Although I am always considering dropping this podcast, it is sometimes the number 1 podcast on iTunes, getting up to 6 million downloads a week.

Under Evaluation

I am still trying out these newer podcasts. As you can imagine, despite all the time I spend walking and biking in circles around Berlin, the above podcasts don't leave me with much time!

Surprisingly Awesome, Serendipity, Reveal, The Duncan Trussel Family Hour, The Joe Rogan Experience, and How to Be Amazing with Michael Black.

Heine in Paris

"If anyone asks how I am tell him 'like a fish in water,' or rather, tell people that when one fish in the sea asks another how he is, he receives the reply: 'I am like Heine in Paris.'" -Heinrich Heine, 1832. Now replace "Heine" and "Paris" with "Axe" and "Berlin."

Here are some early observations, before I forget:

I'm moving into a flat in the most popular neighborhood (Neukölln) in the most popular city in the most popular country for refugees (ditto with hipsters). Booking an appointment to register with city officials was difficult since 550 people are officially moving in every day, plus a new app is booking and selling the other spots. The subway is full of people getting out with suitcases and bags, and I have no idea where they're going. As was the case with my last flat, my new flat's guest room may be busy---I'm hosting a Croatian friend for a week, and hopefully also a friend of an acquaintance (Estonian of course) who fell in love with this city, and like me, is trying to find a way to stay. I don't think I'll host any Couchsurfers for a while, if at all, unless my flatmate is also into that, although I really enjoyed doing so in Tartu.

As for me, everything came together very well, very quickly. All that's left now is to find a job that will grant me a residence permit (and thus get me past the last few obstacles, like insurance and banking). I've always heard that Berlin is a paradoxically hard place to be an artist. There are so many other artists, exhibitions, galleries, and parties that it's hard to get any word done! And now I know how that feels---there's so much in every direction! Hopefully the weather will get bad soon.

I went to Rigaerstrasse to get a haircut, and walked around for a while afterwards. It's on the edge of an area that got pretty clobbered by gentrification, but has some anarchist squats remaining, covered in defiant anti-fascist/gentrification/police messages and colorful paint, like their cousins on the other side of the city center. One even had shoes, shopping carts, and other random objects hanging from its walls. Naturally, the street's church had been converted into a free "Museum of Youthful Resisters."

I adore this city's political bent---Neukölln has representatives from the Green and Pirate parties, in part because it's nice to see people more to the left of me, so that I don't feel too extreme. It's still entertaining to see protesters blame the fighting in Ukraine on NATO and a bloodthirsty US, and even some people who stand in front of the Reichstag daily and ask for Putin to become president of Germany---clearly, the only way to wipe out fascism in Germany once and for all is to empower a strong leader who is above the law!

The flat I am currently in belongs to a Slovak I studied with during my first time in Germany, an undergraduate semester in Erfurt, in the exact center of Germany. She graciously offered to let me move into the flat even though we haven't met in five years, and the flat is truly beautiful---I feel like an immature slob after years of dorm rooms by comparison. It's in a section of the Lichtenberg (Light Mountain) district that, 25 years after Die Wende, is like what the DDR aspired to---young families, a few minutes from buses, trams, and a subway station, a school named after Orwell, and art depicting animals since East Berlin's zoo is just two blocks over. And yet every time I go biking (and I'm trying to only use the bike, like in Finland), I seem to take a different, and more circuitous route every time. I've been navigating by intuition, bus station maps, and through memorizing directions from Google Maps, and while it's a great exercise in problem-solving, I hope I manage to find and memorize a direct route before Thursday's date, or the next thunderstorm!

I got a decent bike for a decent price, and christened it Karjala/Karelia die Dritte. Hopefully it'll have a stronger constitution than my last bike, Karjala Kaks/White Thunder. I'm paranoid about having it stolen, but I bought a (hopefully) decent, and quite heavy, lock to go with it. After exploring an abandoned water park with an Estonian the other day, we found that someone had tried to snap her bike's lock, but merely scratched some paint, while my bike was untouched, so if locking a bike is like running from a bear, then hopefully my lock will be stronger, and my feet faster, than those of the person next to me! Berlin's public transport is the best I've ever seen, and I feel like a boss zipping across the city 24/7, but it's not cheap, and unless I get a job that pays for it, I'm going to try urban biking, even if I secretly fear that my chances of dying young spike whenever I head into the city center.

Hopefully I'll get around to that cheap travel guide I've been meaning to write for weeks, especially since I think I've finally caught up on sleep.

The Jews of the North

Chatting with Estonians, the feeling that I am living in an alternate-universe Wisconsin, where the US lost the Cold War, suburbs were replaced by Soviet apartments, the cows mysteriously vanished (famine? Stalinist whim?), and slightly more Finns settled, yet spring, fall, and all the barn swallows remained untouched, and wonder if I've instead found a different alternate universe, a colder Israel, a bit like Michael Chabon's Alaskan Zion.

The default state of the Estonian museum is to recount the endless history of Estonians in their native land. Again and again, in barely differing language, the visitor is reminded that archaeologists have established that proto-Estonians, growing bored of the Urals, settled in Estonia 11,000 years ago, making them "one of Europe's oldest peoples." It hardly matters if you're at the Estonian History Museum (with its exhibits asking questions like "Have Estonians been happy in their own land?" (the answer is, of course, "no.")), the Estonian National Museum(s), the Estonian Road Museum, or whatever the Maarjamäe Palace is, the same themes are eternally recurring, and likely will for the next 11,000 years. Estonian museums are hardly homogenous, and I'll merrily return to their quirky exhibits at a later time, but even the posterboard exhibits in the corners of malls are heartily nationalistic, and this is a common theme.

This theme also asserts itself in Jewish culture and memory. Even anti-Zionists are acutely aware of their ancient history in that awkward elbow of dry land so popular with hostile armies. American racists can only wish to have such an ancient claim on land, then take out their anger and jealousy by ranting about the Elders of Zion, or perhaps burning an Israeli flag. This ancient claim to land, made a bit ridiculous by having mostly left it for nearly two thousand years, is at the heart of Israel's existence and legitimacy.

So, the Estonians have managed to survive in one place since before history! That makes them more fortunate than their neighbors the Western Balts (such as the Prussians, whose vanquishers eventually took on their names), the Kreevins, the Livonians (as of two years ago), and perhaps soon the Izhorians. But while Estonia isn't all that small (everywhere looks tiny next to Estonia, which is larger than the Netherlands, Denmark, Switzerland, or West Virginia (with the panhandle cut off), it has only 900,000 Estonians, plus another 400,000, mostly Russophones. You see, Estonian history is a series of wars, famines, and deportations, mixed with slavery.

Aside from a few moderately wealthy Hanseatic ports, the territory has never been worth much, but has been a popular stop for armies marching elsewhere. Although Estonian islanders once raided the Vikings, they were conquered by Germanic Crusaders (the Danish flag comes from a victory outside what is now Tallinn, whose very name comes from "Taani linn," or "Danish Castle)." A series of rebellions never resulted in long-lasting victories, and Estonian territory was handed off to a series of independent bishops (Tartu was once an independent bishopric---most of my classes were where its castle/capitol once stood) and crusader states somewhat akin to those in the Holy Land. Danish, Swedish, German, Polish, and (especially) Russian armies wiped out huge segments of the populace, and explain why the only medieval buildings left in Estonia, save for a few isolated churches, are the remains of massive castles, several of which were once the largest in Northern Europe. The Livonian War between Ivan the Terrible and Sweden, Denmark-Norway, Poland-Lithuania, and local Livonian (Estonian/northern Latvian) lords was barely kinder than centuries of German noblemen who bought and sold Estonian serfs at lower prices than contemporary black slaves (at one point, one of Ivan the Terrible's officers reported that there was nothing left to burn or loot). Massive Swedish and Russian armies, the latter using scorched Earth tactics at Peter the Great's request, rendered much of Estonia wasteland, which led to a wave of Finnish settlers arriving to build homesteads in burned-down farms. The Revolution of 1905 was put down by bayonet, while many Estonian conscripts were sent to the front lines nine years later with little more than those same bayonets. The German invasion in 1917 was relatively bloodless for the locals, but independence came only via war with the Red Army, White Russians, and Baltic German Freikorps (random fun fact: Tartu is home to a British lord who wanders around wearing an expensive suit and backpack, financing memorials to the Royal Navy, which aided the Baltic States during this time, even housing the fledgling Latvian government on a destroyer after Baltic Germans took Riga following World War I). Although the next twenty years are seen as a golden age, when Estonia was slightly wealthier than Finland, it ended with a domestic dictatorship, a Soviet occupation so horrible that the locals greeted Nazi invaders as liberators shortly afterwards, followed by battles, massacres, and mass deportations that eventually broke the back of the "Forest Brothers," anti-Communist partisans that hid in bunkers and executed officials for years, holding out for an American invasion. The decades that followed are hardly viewed with joy.

And yet, the Estonians have persisted. Like the Jews, their history is a series of invaders trying to wipe them out, enslaving them, and outlawing their culture. And they love to remember this! Oh, sure, unlike with Jews, every holiday doesn't involve eating food that symbolizes the people who tried to kill them (surely charoset and hamantaschen will be replaced by edible swastikas and Hitler mustaches in a thousand year's time), but every historical film involves lost struggles with ancient enemies, every history museum features weeping elderly and rail carriages, and even the military recruitment ads feature fighters from the War of Independence charging at the Red Army, then turning into today's soldiers, running in the same direction, under the same fire. The current state was based upon the interwar state (although they didn't go so far as to adopt the interwar constitution, as the Latvians did). Reminders of the long and painful Estonian past are a big part of popular culture, although not always serious and depressing, as we'll see soon. The future seems far less clear, and perhaps a bit less important, than the past, which continues to weigh down upon people, almost literally in the case of the stooped, often osteoporotic elderly. Interestingly, the Nazis are not seen in as poor a light as the Soviets--Stalin obviously occupies the place in the American and Jewish mind as Hitler, but one can see books devoted to members of the Estonian Legion, a unit of the Waffen SS (it was largely, but not entirely, apolitical), and people dressed in t-shirts celebrating said unit, while Estonian awards often resemble their wartime German counterparts. Estonians fought on both sides of WWII, often against their will, and their story is a complicated one (if you can, hunt down the recent film "1944").

All of this can seem like a burden, and make one sympathetic to one interwar Italian proto-fascist/futurist who, calling Italy a pile of shit too obsessed with the past to proceed into the future, called for Italians to smash their statues and ruins, and "turn this pile of shit into a grand monument to the future." Fortunately, Estonians (at least the younger generations) are able to make fun of their past, even if the Estonian sense of humor isn't as celebrated or as self-deprecating as its Jewish counterpart. I'm going to link to two examples from Tujurikkuja ("Mood-killer,") a popular sketch comedy that airs on New Year's Eve, and makes fun of Estonian history, and the last year's events.

This first video mocks the Estonian obsession with how painful its past was as masochistic and self-centered, but also provides a neat little overview of that history. Estonia being a small town and all, I've also visited some of the places where it was filmed.

This second video is sillier, but portrays the Soviet deportations.

It's a bit ironic how many Estonians (and loud ex-pats online) are opposed to housing refugees. On a cold rainy night 70 years ago, penniless refugees fled war via aging and underpowered boats seeking refuge across a narrow but stormy sea (the boat pictured above was powered with oars and a car engine as it carried DPs to Sweden). Some fled to Finland to fight against the Soviets there, but many others made it to Sweden, and from there, to Canada and the US. With independence, they and their descendants returned, to teach my classes (both of my thesis supervisors were emigres), start businesses, and serve in the government (I interviewed several emigre ministers for my thesis, and the current president, Toomas Hendrik Ilves, grew up in New Jersey, and met Bruce Springsteen before either of them became famous). While the government-in-exile has been forgotten (it lasted from 1953 to 1992, but was mostly symbolic), the current government has prepared for a potential Russian resurgence and invasion by backing up the data of the state and its people in six embassies worldwide, so that the state can continue to function even if Tallinn is lost. During the Cold War, there was limited contact with emigres, but some trips were allowed in either direction across the Iron Curtain (as described by my thesis and many of its interviewees), which allowed the diaspora to keep tabs on its homeland. When the Singing Revolution began and Soviet control began to falter, emigre professionals began to flood in and make aliyah. Much like their young Israeli counterparts, young Estonians have been emigrating in large numbers in search of work and better living conditions, but if the large number of ex-pats in Estonia with foreign spouses and life partners is any guide, most Estonians only emigrate temporarily. Much like Israel, the large Estonian community in the US (although a bit smaller than the community in Canada, especially Toronto), has given the Estonian state strong ties with the US, improved by its economic and political foundations in American policy (its first elected prime minister famously based the economic on a book by Milton Friedman, while the head of its central bank is an American trained in Harvard formerly employed by the World Bank). An understandable obsession with hostile neighbors has made both Israel and Estonia recipients of American military aid, and made them willing allies, but has also brought about a siege mentality.

I learned a joke the other day: "The Russians complained that they were underrepresented in TV programming. Now the police TV show airs twice a week!"

While Estonia has always had an ethnic Russian population, especially in the corners which are now part of Russia, and along Peipsijärv, the lake where Alexander Nevsky defeated a Crusader/Estonian army crossing the lake's ice, where Old Believers latter settled as they fled Russian Orthodox reforms (the Estonians call them "Onion Russians"), this population exploded during the Soviet era, as massive industrial works and residential districts were built, then populated with workers from throughout the Soviet Union. While not all of these workers were ethnic Russians, they are referred to as such for simplicity. Fears that Estonians would become a minority in their own homeland helped trigger the "Singing Revolution," which began with protests against a strip mining project involving imported workers and massive environmental damage, and ended with the breakup of the Soviet Union. With its decisively national character, the fledgling Estonian government passed strict citizenship laws granting citizenship only to those whose ancestors were in Estonia in 1940, when the first Soviet occupation began. However, fears of secession, and strong outside pressure, resulted in these laws being relaxed and reformed, yet those without Estonian ancestry, or who were not born in Estonia, must still pass an Estonian language test to gain citizenship. While some elected to attain the Russian citizenship the Kremlin offered, many have remained stateless, able to work for Euros in Estonia, and shop in rubles next door. I've just blown past 2,000 words, so I'll save this topic for another day, but, much like Israel, Estonia has a large population that is disaffected, has a foreign mother-tongue, predates the establishment of the modern state, and is underrepresented. Yes, of course, the living standards of Ivan O. Ivanovich is far better than his Palestinian or Israeli Arab counterpart---hatred and fear of Russians hasn't translated into violence (save for the "Bronze Nights," when the movement of a Soviet war memorial triggered riots by Russophones and the shutdown of Estonia's internet by Russian hackers), toleration is increasing, and there is little interest in secession amongst the inhabitants of the border town of Narva (where 90-95% of the locals are Russophones), but Estonia's Russians remain an Other,

This is in part due to the siege mentality that the above situations have led to. A tiny nation with few real defensive features, a military lacking tanks and armed aircraft, and with an aggressive neighbor, the threat of invasion is a constant topic. I once met a member of the Kaitseliit ("Defense League,") a paramilitary force trained to support the regular military during war, and to serve as partisans once Estonia is invaded (half an hour or so after the first tank appears, why Russia would invade. What could it have that would be worth war? The man said, simply, "They always do." Tartu celebrated "Victory Day" earlier this month with a demonstration of the Kaitseliit defending a roadblock from "terrorists," while a conscript training base is literally just down the road from me, less than a kilometer away, within the ruins of a Soviet air base that once housed nuclear weapons. The foreign ministries of Russia and Estonia routinely trade barbs, and Russia answered Obama's visit to Tallinn by promptly kidnapping an Estonian intelligence officer from near the border, scarcely 48 hours later (the officer, charged with spying, is still awaiting trial). Although on the best possible terms with most of its neighbors, Estonia retains a siege mentality, with a nationalist government, museum exhibits, and recent memory driving fears and expectations. Much as in the case of Israel, the military is hardly a rare sight, and the threat of invasion and annihilation in the back of everyone's minds.

Each of these comparisons deserves a more comprehensive and balanced explanation, but this entry is already far too long. For your sake and for mine, future entries will be more pithy!

Tartu Hansapäevad

"Hansa Days" is clearly Tartu's biggest annual festival, and while the free food, Slovaks, strongmen, tanks, Soviet limos, soothsayers ("this is all fake, but don't you feel better now?"), 3D printers, cathedral concerts, party boats, and saunas were great, the most adorable part was the section with the public library's "reading dogs." Children who feel too nervous to practice reading out loud with people sit in a room with absurdly sedate (and possibly drugged) older dogs who lend a patient ear.

Estonia: The Biggest Small Town in the World

I just returned from an Estonian's birthday party out in the countryside. Her father and his long-term girlfriend hosted nearly twenty of us at their farm 30 kilometers west of Tartu, near Võrtsjärve, the big lake shaped like a hand axe cutting Tartu off from bohemian Viljandi, and aimed straight at the border towns of Valga and Valka, straddling the Estonian/Latvian border. We ate šašlõkk (Georgian shish-kebab, and the tenderest, juiciest meat I know of), slapped each other with birch branches (leaves still attached) in the sauna, and around 3 AM, the last four of us somehow fit into a sleeper sofa (feet facing away from the door, because, in Estonia, as in Ukraine, "only the dead leave the room feet first).

Oh, but I digress. I mentioned to the birthday girl, J., that two friends of mine (P. and R.) had just returned from Australia. As we talked, she realized that she knew these people as well, as she had once moved into a flat that they had inhabited. J. had herself just coincidentally moved into a flat inhabited by three friends of mine who had also lived with P., meaning that her last two flats in Estonia had both been full of people who had lived with P., in a city full of students and student housing. When I mentioned this, I was told, as I frequently am, that "Estonia is a small country."

This may be a stretch, and only interesting to myself, but it illustrates one of Estonia's most endearing (and occasionally alienating) qualities: with a population of 1.3 million (70% of whom are ethnically Estonian), everyone knows each other.

Perhaps I should have chosen better examples. Like when I interviewed a man for my thesis, and got picked up while hitchhiking a few minutes later by one of his coworkers, or all the other times I've stumbled across friends or friends of friends while travelling to remote parts of the country. Or how village gossip extends to the country's elite (affairs can't be kept secret for long, and one villager claimed that his village's most famous resident, the country's most divisive politician, is likely a true bastard, conceived when his supposed father was far away). One last example of Estonia's nation-wide rumor mill: in a private email to other parents planning Christmas events at her children's school, the first lady, Evelin Ilves, suggested that parents not give their children chocolates from the main national chocolate company, Kalev (most countries around here, from Finland to Lithuania, have a flagship chocolate company) because of their high levels of trans-fats. Naturally, this email spread from email inbox to outbox, became a national issue, caused an embarrassed Kalev to lose sales, and ultimately change its recipes. Or, as Mrs. Ilves wrote in one of those backwards apologies politicians are so fond of, "I am sorry if my reference to the ingredients of some products of Kalev that in the initial private letter simply expressed my own and my family's consumer preferences has been turned into a call for a boycott against the products of your enterprise as a result of misinterpretation of information." (http://www.eesti.ca/media-misinterpretation-of-information/article25481). 

Oh, sure, Littlewood's Law implies that astounding coincidences are bound to occur from time to time, such as when I met, on my first night in Germany, a good friend of a friend from college, or when I met an alum from my hometown who has gone on to have a career as an Estonian-language comedian, who claimed that he had once been an intern with my hometown's parliament, and witnessed my state's current governor (and Republic front-runner) having an affair with another intern. But these are regular events. Tartu is a small town, and its students are mostly concentrated in the center of the city, creating an effect somewhat akin to when I studied at a liberal-arts college with 1,250 students, and couldn't get to the library without running into friends, or leave dinner without spending two hours going from table to table, but this effect continues throughout the country. When I meet random Estonians by happenstance, they almost inevitably share Facebook friends with me.

Estonia is also a black hole, sucking in ex-pats, and never letting them leave, so there are a fair number of ex-pats who have come here for life, but Tartu is hardly Tübingen, and Tallinn no Berlin, so foreigners are still sufficiently rare that they stick together. Most Erasmus students don't mix with this crowd much, flitting around the bars of Rüütli like mayflies trying to fit their entire lives into a semester or two (and crashing into walls about as often), but whether they followed a wife or girlfriend to Tartumaa, arrived with the European Volunteer Service and never left, or are seeking their third degree in the country, the ex-pats know each other well, like a neighborhood within a village.

Oh, but there is another way in which the country of Estonia makes me think back to the Boazes, Akans, and Soldiers Groves of Wisconsin. While Estonians continue to move to the cities, which exploded during the Soviet era's mass industrialization and immigration (the notable exception being the Russophonic cities of the northeast, which imploded at independence), they still maintain a grip on the last 5,000 years spent farming the land around the cities. On Midsummer, the longest and biggest night of the year, the cities empty out, as people travel to their ancestral farms to sing, drink, and feed bonfires. There are no Manhattan children assuming milk is made in a factory here, as even a teen raised in the very center of Tallinn is barely an hour's walk from the countryside.

But, wait, perhaps I buried the lede. What's the hallmark of a small town in the US, and hopefully elsewhere? The parade! Back home, I stopped enjoying these years ago, but in Estonia, I've begun to seek them out. I find these parades sweet, sincere, and bursting in pride and cheery optimism--we're on our way to something good! The examples that pop into my mind first preceded song festivals, a German tradition that has become the foremost symbol of Estonian culture (Estonia's succession from the USSR was popularly labelled the "Singing Revolution.") Almost exactly a year ago, I attended the main song festival, which is held every five years in Tallinn. In 1988, 300,000 (about 1/3 of all ethnic Estonians) attended. Last year, 33,000 sang for 70,000 people at the first concert alone. This concert was preceded by a parade (pictured above and below) which included 10,000 taking part in a simultaneous national dance festival. As it turns out (these are the last statistics, I promise!), it takes five hours for 42,000 people to march, sing, and dance past oneself. Although the parade began with fog, the sun soon burnt through it, burning half of my face red, and leaving the other half pale, making my face resemble the flag of Bahrain (or maybe of Poland, on its side).

And yet, five hours in, people were still singing with gusto, throwing their dance partners in the air, and running up to friends and family in the crowd. Although there were more than a thousand foreign singers, and a few misplaced Hare Krishnas (halfway through the parade, they left, sat down behind me, and started chanting), most people wore colorful folk costumes, held streamers, stuffed animals, instruments, and symbols of their villages. Some sang patriotic anthems, but the Estonian translation of "If You're Happy and You Know It" was the parade's breakaway hit. People also broke away from their choruses, hugging friends and family, exchanging Estonian flags and cornflowers (another national symbol), while one boy with impressive stamina and hot pink clothes exhorted the marchers by shouting "Long live!" and then their town name. For hours.

The parade was somewhat self-consciously cheesy at times, and yet, the sense of pride was true and palpable. After centuries of being denied their language, their songs, people were singing the songs they chose. I've seen this pride in flowers, town names, local symbols in parades from Altenberg Germany's city festival (with its knights and skat players) to Stoughton, Wisconsin's celebration of Syttende Mai (the day Norway's constitution was signed), with its tractor-pulled longships sailed by horned Vikings. But I've never felt it so unabashedly and sincerely as here. There were no teenagers mocking faded paint here, and while the celebration was national, it retained a decidedly local character, as flashy Pärnu marched past with professionally-made signs, and children towing elephant toys on rollers, the students at the Life Sciences University wore undyed linens, the fraternies marched by with sabres in hand, the Setu waved their own national flag, singers from Ida-Viru County advanced with flails and mandolins...

I saw the same repeated on a smaller scale exactly a week ago. As I left a festival devoted to Tartu's Emajõgi (Mother-river), I followed the sound of a marching band to a parade held for the annual religious song festival. I saw the same costumes, similar signs, and the same happy-go-lucky cheer as thousands of singers descended from Cathedral Hill and marched on the city's song festival grounds (every town has one). Every few hundred meters, a brass band played a march, as people sang in Estonian, Latin, German, English, and Finnish. As the parade passed a wedding party, people cheered and sang wedding songs until drowned out by church bells. I stumbled across one of my thesis supervisors, who half-jokingly pointed out how many people in the parade were Finns (Estonia being so famously areligious), but the effect was the same. I followed the parade East, listened to people welcome the foreigners in their own languages, and reveled in the innocent joy in the crowd.

An Introduction

When I finished settling into my new room on my first day at Turku University, my head and judgement still woozy with jet lag and a cold, I registered this blog. The next day, I got swept away by the maelstrom of registration, exploration, and rampant socializing that mark an exchange semester, and no posts ever materialized.

Nearly a year later, I've found myself at a point where procrastination means reflection, introspection, and writing to the internet, instead of working on a thesis. Now's the time for new habits, good and bad, and perhaps this blog will be one of them.

I am an American who has spent two and a half years in Europe, mostly in Estonia, but also in Finland and Germany. God willing (and the creek don't rise), I'll be moving to Berlin in a few weeks, and finding a way to take advantage of my confusingly vague, yet oddly specific Master's degree (more on that later). If my dreams come to fruition, I will become too busy to spend much time in front of the computer, much less maintain a blog. If things come to pass the way they always do, (as the late Russian prime minister Viktor Chernomyrdin said, "Whatever organization we try to create, it always ends up looking like the Communist party," as well as, "it has never been like this, and now it is exactly the same again,") I'll have plenty of time to work on this project.

This blog will mainly feature observations and reflections on ex-pat life along the Baltic Rim, travel accounts, short essays, and perhaps occasional stabs at plumbing the Estonian psyche. And, yes, as frequently requested, the occasional axiom.

-Kevin Axe