I met Naomi Marcus through a mutual friend in San Francisco last year. Speaking fluent Russian, Naomi shared that in her youth she’d spent many years in the Soviet Union as a tour guide and interpreter. A journalist by training, when she returned to the US in the 1990s, she translated a book by a veteran of the Soviet-Afghan war; more recently, she has been reporting for Mission Local and San Francisco Senior Beat and helping Ukrainian refugees find their footing in the US. She told me that as she first landed in the USSR back in 1979, Leningrad was experiencing purportedly the coldest winter since WWII, a shock for a Californian. She felt very scared and alone, but soon fell in with underground rock musicians, and they helped her survive that winter. On her guitar, Naomi played for me Boris Grebenshchikov and Bob Dylan in alternating couplets, illustrating the paths of “influence.”