Photograph by Bai Xueqi / Xinhua / Eyevine / Redux

Masha Gessen was born in Moscow, and came to this country with her family as a teen-ager. As an adult, she has moved back and forth between the United States and Russia. Her work as a journalist and as a gay-rights activist in both countries has made her uniquely positioned to write about Vladimir Putin’s Russia, Donald Trump’s America, and how they intersect at this very fraught moment. “It’s like I was gifted with this special pair of eyeglasses,” she tells David Remnick.

Gessen is as ferocious a critic of Putin as you’ll find, yet she’s skeptical of how much attention the Russia scandal has received in the media. “Every column inch that’s devoted to the Mueller probe is not devoted to some other thing that the Trump Administration is doing, that I think often is more important,” she said. When asked about the effects of Trumpism on American society, Gessen thinks that, though we’re having lots of conversations about politics, we’ve lost the capacity for political conversation: “A political conversation is a conversation in which people with different views come to agreements about how they’re going to inhabit this society together,” she says. “We don’t see that happening in Congress, we don’t see that happening in the streets, we don’t see that happening at kitchen tables.”