Natalia Antelava

6 days ago | codastory.com | Natalia Antelava

The girl in the black Audrey Hepburn dress was crying in the bathroom, mascara running down her cheeks. We found her by chance—a total stranger using the bathroom of a hotel where we were hosting a giant dinner party for our 200 guests. My ZEG co-founders and I, on a quick trip away from our sprawling table, gathered around her, wanting to understand what had happened. Through tears, she told us her boyfriend had just broken up with her and announced he was getting engaged to someone else.

1 month ago | codastory.com | Natalia Antelava

In early April, I found myself in the breathtaking Chiesa di San Francesco al Prato in Perugia, Italy talking about men who are on a mission to achieve immortality. As sunlight filtered through glass onto worn stone walls, Cambridge Analytica whistleblower Christopher Wylie recounted a dinner with a Silicon Valley mogul who believes drinking his son’s blood will help him live forever. “We’ve got it wrong,” Bryan Johnson told Chris. “God didn’t create us.

2 months ago | codastory.com | Natalia Antelava

Victor Orbán wants to adopt a zebra. Reading about the Hungarian Prime Minister’s bizarre request to become a “symbolic ‘adoptive parent’” of a zoo zebra, I had a feeling of déjà vu. Another oligarch, Bidzina Ivanishvili, who lives in a glass castle overlooking my hometown Tbilisi, is also obsessed with zebras. To be fair, he has a whole private menagerie. “Lemurs roamed free in my yard like cats,” Ivanishvili once boasted to journalists. He’s even taken selected reporters to meet his zebras.

2 months ago | codastory.com | Natalia Antelava

“What do we even do when the Justice Department ignores court orders?” reads one text from an American friend on my phone. “None of this feels real,” says another. As we navigate the whiplash-inducing headlines emerging daily from Trump’s Washington, I often find myself thinking of Oksana Baulina, who joined our team in 2019 to produce a documentary series about Stalin’s Gulag survivors.

Mar 7, 2025 | codastory.com | Natalia Antelava

“I signed an order,” Donald Trump declared in his address to Congress this week, “making it the official policy of the United States government that there are only two genders: male and female.” It wasn’t quite the victory for common sense he thought it was. President Trump, consciously or not, was following a playbook. One that we at Coda Story have tracked for years — a playbook that was written in Russia and is now being followed almost to the letter in America.