I would watch a show where Tucker Carlson interviews Brittney Griner. It might be fun to see the cable-TV star squirm before the openly lesbian 6-foot-7 basketball player as she schools America’s leading Kremlin apologist on the realities of Vladimir Putin’s Russia that he missed during his slack-jawed tour of Moscow’s lavish subway stations and grocery stores.

At one point in Coming Home, Griner’s new memoir of her forced stay in Russia for most of 2022, the nine-time WNBA All-Star and two-time Olympic gold medalist quotes Nelson Mandela’s words: “No one truly knows a nation until one has been inside its jails.” By that measure, Griner knows Russia as well as almost any American.

Mandela’s remark appears as the epigraph for a chapter titled “Slave Camp,” which aptly describes the prison where Griner spent most of her 293 days in Russian lockups for the crime of accidentally bringing into the country two vape pens containing a total of 0.7 grams of medically prescribed cannabis—which prosecutors characterized as a “significant amount of narcotics.”