For example, if you are a blogger who wrote something about a local official and you're going to prison for that, you're a political prisoner. If you're a businessman who has refused to cede his business to the local official and you're going to prison for that, you're not a political prisoner. In that second category there are hundreds of thousands of people in Russia.

Donald Trump creates word salads. And that is awful to language, because we try to parse out what he's saying and try to find meaning in it. Journalists don't have a choice about reporting what the president says. I find the idea - "Let's not write about his tweets" - to be absolutely ridiculous. I mean, he's the president! Of course, we have to write about his tweets and look at what they mean. The problem is, they're hollow. But we don't have the option of ignoring what he's saying because he's president. That's damaging to language, and to journalism.

The law in Russia bans "propaganda of homosexuality," which is defined as dissemination of information that can cause harm to the spiritual or physical development of children, including forming in them the erroneous impression of the social equality of traditional and nontraditional sexual relations. It's a law that actually enshrines second-class citizenship - it makes it a crime to claim social equality.

There's not a whole lot of similarity between the two societies, Russian and American. There are similarities behind psychological forces. One thing we can learn is that things can change pretty fast. And this idea that we know who we are and that things can only get so bad in this country - that's wrong.

There are several dozen political prisoners in Russia. When I cite that number people are often very surprised. They often think there are more. Well - there are hundreds of thousands of people who haven't had a fair trial, who are victims of the political system. But in the Amnesty International sense of the word, most of them are not political prisoners because they are not going to prison for protesting.

What has happened to protesters in the past was that, basically, the government in 2012 put an end to a series of mass protests by changing laws, by making it possible to arrest anybody for protests, and by making basically a show of imprisoning not just protest leaders, and not specifically protest leaders, but activists, rank-and-file protest participants. That gets across the idea that anybody who joins a protest without being an organizer, without being a visible leader, risks arrest, and not risks just arrest, but years in a Russian jail.

There's this American pretense, which is the pretense of the journalist with the view from nowhere - which has somehow morphed into the journalist who was born this morning. So, he doesn't know that Donald Trump lied yesterday, and the day before. So, he concludes that he doesn't know whether Trump lied accidentally or on purpose. You can only pretend not to know that if you don't know that he lied yesterday, and the day before. So, to my mind when NPR says they don't know if he's intentionally lying, they're lying. We have to be smarter about it.