Explore every episode of the podcast Politics and Prose Presents

From the #1 New York Times bestselling author of Hidden Valley Road comes the heart-wrenching journey of a family facing an unthinkable destiny, whose flawed genetic code might hold the long-sought key to a cure for dementia.
In the idyllic American town of Pleasant Hills, Pennsylvania, there lived a family with nine siblings, the youngest a girl named Barb. As the older children headed off to college and started their lives, only Barb was home to see their beautiful, still-young mother fall under a gothic spell, changing into someone she didn’t recognize: withdrawn, neglectful, uncaring. Thus begins The Vanishing Family, journalist Robert Kolker’s superb follow-up to Hidden Valley Road (“Deeply compassionate and chilling,” wrote The Washington Post). This family, we learn, has a genetic mutation that causes dementia, but with an especially cruel twist. As early as their forties, formerly loving parents and hard-driving executives will lose their jobs, have affairs, take up drinking—shed all inhibitions and sense of responsibility—and become people their families hardly know. Their former personalities seem to vanish—and there is a fifty-fifty chance that it will happen to their children, too.
The Vanishing Family unfolds like a heartbreaking thriller as the siblings begin to realize that what happened to their mother is happening to them: first one, then two, three, four, and more begin to change. Sue, in search of a calling, finds her place in caring for the others. Barb sets out to find a cure. Alongside their story, Kolker weaves in the dramatic scientific fight against dementia; after decades of blind alleys, this this family’s rare form of FTD (frontotemporal dementia) might lead to a breakthrough in the prevention and treatment of all dementia—including the scourge of Alzheimer’s disease. Moving, intimate, unexpectedly hopeful and redemptive, The Vanishing Family is an enthralling narrative about one family’s fate, and a medical detective story that speaks to all of us who fear losing ourselves at the end.

Robert Kolker is a contributing writer at The New York Times Magazine and author of the #1 New York Times bestseller Hidden Valley Road, named an Oprah’s Book Club Pick, a New York Times Book Review Top 10 book of the year, a GQ Best Book of Literary Journalism of the 21st Century, and a Kirkus Reviews Best Nonfiction Book of the Century. His first book was Lost Girls, named a New York Times Notable Book and a Publishers Weekly Best Book of 2013.

PURCHASE:

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An acclaimed reporter takes us on an unforgettable journey, capturing the human capacity for love and connection against all odds.
We live in an era defined by crisis—whether it be war and displacement, climate collapse, or growing inequality, and how the powerful profit from violence and exploitation. Celebrated foreign correspondent Sally Hayden has spent her career on the frontlines, uncovering some of the darkest moments of our time. Yet even in the face of unimaginable adversity, she’s witnessed the incredible goodness of regular people.
In This Is Also a Love Story, Hayden reexamines catastrophe through the love stories she has come across. She introduces us to a mother in northeast Nigeria who risks everything to save her daughter from forced marriage to Boko Haram militants, and to a group of Syrian women who have tirelessly searched for their missing spouses and children, while launching a call for justice. We meet a couple separated by the Russian invasion of Ukraine and read letters from the bereaved to the dead, still being written over a decade after the tsunami that devastated Japan. Through these stories, which crisscross the globe, from Uganda to Lebanon, Ghana, Rwanda and Iraq, she challenges us to reconsider what it means to be alive on this planet today.
What if news was recounted through the prism of the actions and decisions people take for those they love? Would it become harder to dehumanize those who seem different to us? This Is Also a Love Story dares us to recognize how innate generosity and self-sacrifice can be found in even the most difficult of times, and—as a result—to question what might be needed to create a better world.

Sally Hayden is an Irish journalist focused on migration, conflict, and humanitarian crises. Sally’s work has been featured by The New York Times, the Irish Times, The Washington Post, Financial Times, The Guardian, CNN International, Al Jazeera, Time, BBC, and other outlets across the world. Sally’s first book My Fourth Time, We Drowned was the winner of the Orwell Prize and the Irish Book of the Year, and was a finalist for the Baillie Gifford Prize and the New York Public Library’s Helene Bernstein Book Award for excellence in journalism.

Hayden is in conversation with James Palmer. Palmer is a deputy editor at Foreign Policy and writes FP’s weekly China Brief newsletter. Palmer is the author of The Bloody White Baron: The Extraordinary Story of the Russian Nobleman Who Became the Last Khan of Mongolia and The Death of Mao: The Tangshan Earthquake and the Birth of the New China. He won the Shiva Naipaul prize for travel writing in 2003.

PURCHASE:

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10 portraits of Israelis from all backgrounds, depicting the war-torn landscape of recent Israeli history: complicated, polarized, lively, argumentative, and—increasingly—adrift.
Renowned journalist Ruth Margalit revisits 10 profiles of Israeli politicians, cultural figures, and iconoclasts spanning a decade of her reporting for The New Yorker and The New York Times Magazine to create a powerful mosaic of the clashing forces that have led to Israel’s current state.
To live in Israel today, Margalit writes, is to be either a whale or a Jonah—trying to make do in the belly of the whale. The profiles in this collection represent both: outsiders trying to make a life in a system designed against them, and insiders hatching plans and amassing power all while riding the twin waves of populism and jingoism.
Returning to these profiles from her current reality as a writer and mother living in Tel Aviv at a time of war, Margalit reexamines the texts in light of a transformed society and self, adding new updates and insights to journalistic portraits she has created over the course of a dozen years.
Incorporating perspectives of Israelis from all strata of society—Jews, Arabs, activists, artists, politicians, and academics alike—Margalit stitches an enlightening patchwork to help readers better understand the seemingly inscrutable politics of a nation in which so many have a deep and abiding interest.

Ruth Margalit is a Tel Aviv-based journalist and a contributing writer for the New York Times Magazine. Her writing regularly appears in the pages of The New Yorker, where she was a member of the editorial staff, and her book reviews and essays are frequently featured in the New York Review of Books. She has also written for the New York Times Book Review, the New Republic, Slate, Bookforum, the Columbia Journalism Review, Haaretz, and elsewhere. She is a graduate of Tel Aviv University and has a master's degree from Columbia University's School of Journalism. Raised in Jerusalem, she lived in New York between 2010-2019, before moving back to Israel with her family. She is the author of a children's book in Hebrew (2025).

Margalit is in conversation with Celeste Marcus, the executive editor of Liberties: A Journal of Culture and Politics, which she helped to found. Her biography of Chaim Soutine was published in October, 2025. She lives in Washington, DC. 

PURCHASE:

https://politics-prose.com/book/9781586424602?ic_referral=iO9bqcj8r1OG9sAwFuJQOaFKfSrDngORQpyzd4NjyH0wM_zEmOU_ImrNmCpWN8HDTV2R3y4wtPObyYQoQ1Q3JavJxbileMQ_3hG9lNicjj0rekbtZ7_rbo6Bq9JmV2MCHZWWaWk

It’s 1915. War rages in Europe while Armenians in the Ottoman Empire find themselves unfairly blamed for a major military defeat. Cooped up at home, fourteen-year-old Arakel tries to ignore rumors of arrests and beatings of Armenians by focusing on the journey with his two best friends, one Turkish and the other Armenian, on the Silk Road to China in two years, after high school, certain war will be over by then. 
His life is torn apart when Turkish officials order nearly every Armenian into exile in the desert. Tormented by armed guards, Arakel doesn’t grasp what’s happening until they strip his family of food, water, and their meagre possessions and force them across the Euphrates River where bloated corpses float by. He has crossed into the land of the dead. In a desperate attempt to survive, he must reach out to people of different faiths and backgrounds–Bedouins, Kurds, Arab camel drivers, Turks, Germans, and even a wandering dervish, people he considers enemies, but can he trust them? 
In a barbaric world, he confronts what lies deep within the human heart. With an elegance reaffirming our collective humanity, The Kaleidoscope of Destiny reveals the courage, hope, and ingenuity to survive the darkest of times during an overlooked part of history and will resonate in today’s challenges.

Before publishing her debut novel, The Kaleidoscope of Destiny, Sarah Ignatius worked for many years as a human rights lawyer and as a nonprofit executive director. She also taught immigration and asylum law at Boston College Law School for several years and is the co-author of Immigration Law and the Family. Previously, she authored a detailed report on the U.S. asylum system for Harvard Law School’s National Asylum Study Project, and her legal articles have appeared in the Harvard Human Rights Journal, Georgetown Immigration Law Journal, Benders Immigration Bulletin, and Immigration Briefings. She has received recognition from the New England Society of Children’s Books Writers & Illustrators and the National League of American Pen Women as well as Glimmer Train, and was selected as a Somerville Arts Council Literature Artist Fellow. She graduated from Stanford University and Georgetown University Law Center. She is half-Armenian and lives in Massachusetts with her family.

Ignatius is joined in conversation with David Ignatius, a prize-winning columnist for the Washington Post and has been covering the Middle East and the CIA for four decades. He has written several New York Times bestsellers. He lives in Washington, DC.

PURCHASE:

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A passionate and illuminating account of soul, the hard-won wisdom shepherded by Black people throughout generations

How did enslaved Africans turn America’s infamous failure into the greatest moral occasion of modern Western life? In this book, Christopher Freeburg answers that question with one word: soul. It was soul, Freeburg believes, which drove Black individuals and communities, grappling with horrific strife, to reimagine American life and equality in earnest.

Black cultural life contains a central and significant theme—a soul, or form of life—expressed in a variety of musical, religious, and political forms. Through the work and words of figures ranging from the poet Phillis Wheatley to President Barack Obama and musician Nina Simone to disco owner Jewel Thais-Williams, Freeburg shows how Black communities leaned time and again on soul and its four pillars: resonance, revelation, resilience, and transcendence. It is soul, what Freeburg calls a beautiful transaction between individual and community across time and place, that has allowed Black people over generations to transform feelings of defeat and alienation into moral courage and shared belonging.

Christopher Freeburg is the Presidential Humanities and Social Sciences Chair in English at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. His most recent book was Counterlife: Slavery after Resistance and Social Death.

Freeburg will be in conversation with Tamika Smith, the local host of All Things Considered on WAMU 88.5 and Consider This from WAMU.Tamika joined WAMU in 2014 as a part-time weekend host. She later joined WAMU full-time as a host and reporter for WAMU/DCist. She was named WAMU’s afternoon drive-time host in 2022.Tamika’s prior experience includes producing the nationally acclaimed Russ Parr Morning Show, and launching Question of the Day with Murray and Tamika, an award-winning interactive trivia game on Amazon Alexa.

PURCHASE:

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An inspiring account of how the US government built a start-up development program to fight AIDS called PEPFAR, which saved more than twenty-six million lives and created a new blueprint for results-oriented American foreign aid.

In 2002, more than two million Africans died of AIDS. Militaries reported HIV infection rates of more than twenty-five percent. Nearly four in ten pregnant women in some countries were infected. But in 2003, to the surprise of the world, President George W. Bush created PEPFAR, the President's Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief, which became his signature legacy for doing good in his eight years in office. PEPFAR has saved more than twenty-six million lives, prevented HIV from being transmitted to nearly eight million infants during birth, stabilized governments, and built back economies in Africa. It has been arguably America’s most successful foreign assistance program in history.

How did it succeed? Lifeline tells the remarkable fast-paced story of how a small core of Americans and Africans built AIDS treatment programs from scratch in many countries—and how they faced down people who tried to stop them with grit and ingenuity. Based on interviews with more than 200 people—from President Bush and Dr. Anthony Fauci to local physicians and patients in small villages across Africa—Lifeline demonstrates indisputably the essence of American leadership and how America has, and still can, tackle the world’s greatest challenges and be a force for good in the world.w

John Donnelly spent more than a decade covering the politics of AIDS and America’s response to the pandemic for The Boston Globe. He lived for several years in South Africa and traveled the continent of Africa for The Globe immediately following PEPFAR’s launch. After his career in journalism, he became an adviser to the President of the World Bank and received a Bellagio residency from the Rockefeller Foundation to write this book. He lives in Chevy Chase, Maryland.

Donnelly is joined in conversation with Sheryl Gay Stolberg, a Washington Correspondent for The New York Times, covering the intersection of health policy and politics. In nearly 30 years at The Times, she has also been a Congressional Correspondent, a White House Correspondent, a national political features writer, and a National Correspondent covering the mid-Atlantic region. Stolberg has written about HIV/ AIDS since the early 1990s, and covered PEPFAR since its creation.  Stolberg is currently working on a history of public health and politics, to be published by Random House.

PURCHASE:

https://politics-prose.com/book/9780063483088?ic_referral=VyBS2E93_bxdlCr2mUHFSBF0NXA-Vwf8wh_B3dmMdgQwM6TOJUaWTSWgx13za7zieVEeTR31VKd_ZFbmb9i11sP1FsMATiTjvfb2kSqb_MHWQ_e-5jA-s72cElJx9HrH_oTbkpg

From acclaimed journalist Anand Giridharadas, a groundbreaking feat of reporting on a tragic encounter in a New York subway car that held up a mirror to a troubled and divided nation
In 2023, the lives of two men—Jordan Neely, a homeless man known in better days for his Michael Jackson impersonations, and Daniel Penny, an ex-Marine who had moved to the big city seeking more than Long Island could offer—collided tragically in a New York subway car. In Man in the Mirror, award-winning reporter and bestselling author Anand Giridharadas renders this deadly encounter and its aftermath as a propulsive crime story that opens onto a larger human drama: the search for belonging in an age of estrangement.
Inhabiting the perspectives of an unforgettable cast of characters, Giridharadas immerses us in the places where this story plays out, from the corridors of power in City Hall to subway benches where New Yorkers spend the night, from a Marine Corps base to a Harlem church in mourning—and, ultimately, to a courtroom where a riveting battle unfolds. In his painstakingly reported, richly novelistic narrative, these characters’ strivings and struggles—to care for loved ones and strangers, to protect the public, to seek justice—reveal the humanity behind the headlines. Through one character’s eyes and then another’s, Giridharadas presents a chapter of American history too often reduced to divisive clickbait as something far more complex and full of life.

At once panoramic in its scope and finely detailed in its emotional immediacy, Man in the Mirror is a tour de force of narrative reporting and an indispensable portrait of an age.

Anand Giridharadas is the New York Times bestselling author of The Persuaders, Winners Take All, The True American, and India Calling. A former foreign correspondent and columnist for The New York Times for more than a decade, he has also written for The New Yorker, The Atlantic, and Time, and is the publisher of the newsletter The.Ink. He is an on-air political analyst for MS NOW. He has received the Radcliffe Fellowship, the Porchlight Business Book of the Year Award, Harvard University’s Outstanding Lifetime Achievement Award for Humanism in Culture, and the New York Public Library’s Helen Bernstein Book Award for Excellence in Journalism. He lives in Brooklyn, New York.

Giridharadas is joined in conversation with Terry Moran, an award-winning journalist, writer, and broadcaster who spent nearly three decades at ABC News, reporting from around the world and across America. Today, Moran is an independent journalist and the founder of Real Patriotism, where he writes, reports, and hosts conversations about American politics, culture, and civic life. His recent work has taken him back on the road, reporting from communities across the country and listening to Americans far from the political stages and studios of Washington.

PURCHASE:

https://politics-prose.com/book/9780593802014?ic_referral=aK7xGBBHKFFVQOyQ6DFhs7_83jlGFf7AloFBrquCcNswM32KCjSaCVGp7C9TeDZcIGTb6ef0G0oAHkg95d9M2Deyn22nogqD9MMZoSooXG3KOTXYKdj8dhJ8Y4_x9NYDY20VVmw

“I can’t teach you, but I can show you.” With these words, Kentucky balladeer Doc Hopkins shared his musical knowledge with a willing student, summoning an independent streak deeply embedded in the American character. His words capture the informal creativity and colloquial practice that marks folk tradition as it extends from the countryside to the city and back again.
Stephen Wade recounts creators and conservators like Doc Hopkins, many of them born in the closing years of the nineteenth century and the first decades of the twentieth. The figures include Sid Harkreader, Kirk McGee, Ola Belle Reed, Jewel Fagan Haynes, Cordell and Olean Kemp, Bill Monroe, Helen Marie Rowe, Virgil and Mabel Anderson, Joe and Odell Thompson, John Jackson, Huddie Ledbetter, Uncle Dave Macon, Dorris Macon, Raeburn Flerlage, David “Honeyboy” Edwards, Jim Schwall, Archie Green, Lloyd Lewis, Thaddeus Willingham, Jack Conroy, and Fleming Brown. As Will Keys, another of the musicians featured here, once told the author about his way of playing, it’s “AWYC, Any Way You Can.” These individuals and their stories demonstrate how folklore offers a way of understanding the world.
Thoughtfully written, filled with original research, and abundantly illustrated with both color and black and white photography, Our Common Life illuminates the truth that creative freedom within informal tradition, fundamental to the artists and their processes, speaks to a resourcefulness inscribed in the nation’s founding charter and expressed in its common life.

Stephen Wade is musician, author, and a Grammy-nominated recording artist best known for his long running stage performances of Banjo Dancing and On the Way Home. He is the author of the award-winning book The Beautiful Music All Around Us: Field Recordings and the American Experience.

Wade is in conversation with Tom Cole, who studied comparative literature at Grinnell College, where he began his radio career at 10-watt KDIC.  He went on to work overnights as a board operator at WAMU-FM while working afternoons at Voice of America, eventually becoming production manager at WAMU. He finally landed at NPR, where he spent 33 years as an editor and producer on the Arts & Culture Desk in the News Division.  For the past 49+ years, he has also hosted the Sunday morning program, G-Strings, for WPFW-FM.

PURCHASE BOOK:

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When a hit-and-run shatters more than his body, a writer is caught between revelation and madness as an uncanny pull toward a brilliant campus colleague ensnares him in a scandal that threatens to destroy them both. What begins as a provocative portrait of academic and cultural warfare deepens into erotic entanglement, the exposure of a family secret, and the mystery surrounding the narrator’s accident—both the violence and its aftermath.
Moving between rural America and Europe, Islam and Christianity, the intimate and the metaphysical, The Radiance is of our American moment and beyond it—asking not only what has broken, but what radiance remains.

Ayad Akhtar is a novelist and playwright. His work has been published and performed in over two dozen languages. He is the winner of the Pulitzer Prize for Drama, the Edith Wharton Citation of Merit for Fiction, and an award in literature from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, among other honors. Akhtar is the author of the novels American Dervish, a Kirkus Reviews Best Book of the Year, and Homeland Elegies, named one of 10 Best Books of 2020 by The New York Times. He has also authored the plays McNeal, Junk, Disgraced, The Who & The What, and The Invisible Hand. Akhtar was named the New York State Author in 2021.

Akhtar is in conversation with Jeffrey Goldberg. Goldberg is the editor in chief of The Atlantic and the moderator of Washington Week With The Atlantic. He joined The Atlantic in 2007 as a national correspondent and in 2016 was named editor in chief, the 15th person to serve as editor in The Atlantic's 168-year history. During his editorship, The Atlantic has set new audience and subscription records, and won its first-ever Pulitzer Prizes. In 2022, 2023, and 2024, The Atlantic received the National Magazine Award for General Excellence from the American Society of Magazine Editors, the top award in the industry.

Before joining The Atlantic, Goldberg served as the Middle East correspondent and then the Washington correspondent for The New Yorker. Earlier in his career, he was a writer for The New York Times Magazine. He began his career as a police reporter for The Washington Post. Goldberg is the author of Prisoners: A Story of Friendship and Terror and On Heroism: McCain, Milley, Mattis, and the Cowardice of Donald Trump. A former fellow of the American Academy in Berlin, he also served as a public-policy scholar at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars, and as the distinguished visiting fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. Goldberg is the recipient of numerous awards, including the National Magazine Award for Reporting; the Daniel Pearl Award for Reporting; the Overseas Press Club’s award for human-rights reporting; the John Chancellor Award for Excellence in Journalism, and the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists Prize for best investigative reporting.

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A powerful and authoritative account of how the Biden administration fueled atrocities in Gaza, from an award-winning foreign affairs journalist.

Following Hamas’s horrific October 7 attack, Israel launched an offensive of staggering violence in Gaza, saying it targeted militants while regularly striking hospitals, schools, and homes. Critically acclaimed journalist Akbar Shahid Ahmed offers extensive reporting and chilling new details about how the Biden administration enabled Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu—ignoring warnings from government experts and implicating Americans in thousands of apparent war crimes. Washington did little to free Israeli hostages or shield innocent Palestinians as protests grew nationwide and international human rights principles crumbled. Still, President Joe Biden denied he was giving Netanyahu a blank check. He set a “red line” over the town of Rafah, where more than 1 million Palestinians were sheltering, saying an assault there would risk Israel’s pipeline of American bombs. Yet after Netanyahu’s advance began, deepening Gaza’s humanitarian catastrophe, Biden’s team kept weapons flowing.

In vivid prose and with unparalleled access to insiders, Ahmed depicts a White House that resisted a course correction as its failures became undeniable. He probes Biden’s inner circle: a paranoid and imperious group shaped by the War on Terror, whose choices fueled tens of thousands of avoidable deaths among Palestinians, Lebanese, and Israelis, torpedoed long-time standards for warfare, and created a more dangerous world for us all. The Biden administration’s decisions drove voter backlash that helped Donald Trump regain power, and established patterns of impunity that have spurred wider bloodshed under Trump.

Crossing the Red Line is an urgent reckoning with Biden’s record on Gaza that is vital to understanding historic damage to America’s standing in the world, and a period whose dark consequences will resonate globally for decades to come.

Akbar Shahid Ahmed is the diplomatic correspondent at The Washington Sun. For his Gaza coverage, he has received a Writers Guild Award and a New York Press Club Award and has twice been named a finalist for the Livingston Award. Based in Washington, D.C., Ahmed previously covered foreign policy at HuffPost for twelve years. He is a Yale graduate who grew up in Karachi, Pakistan.

Ahmed is in conversation with Prem Thakker, a political correspondent and columnist at Zeteo, an independent media organization founded in 2024. He joined Zeteo after reporting at The Intercept, where he covered climate and the environment, corporate and political corruption, civil rights and justice, and labor. Thakker was also an associate writer for The New Republic. Thakker’s months of reporting on the U.S. State Department resulted in “One Year Since Israel Killed Hind Rajab. Why Has the US Ignored the Murder of a 6-Year-Old Child?” which won the Digital Video Storytelling, Long Form, Small/Medium Newsroom prize from the Online Journalism Awards.

PURCHASE BOOK:

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We’re living in an age of deep political anger and frustration. Where did it come from? All the Wrong Moves offers a new, eye-opening answer, rooted in history, business, and the author’s firsthand experience, that reveals the true origins of America’s current political crisis.
In All the Wrong Moves, Anthony Scaramucci charts how both political parties, over three decades, made a series of catastrophic decisions that quietly dismantled the system supporting the American dream. First came Bill Clinton’s trade deal with China, which opened U.S. markets while abandoning American workers. Next, George W. Bush’s choice to wage war while cutting taxes, exploding the deficit. Finally, Barack Obama’s bank bailout, which saved Wall Street but left millions of ordinary families behind. Each decision deepened inequality, corroded trust, and fueled the anger that empowered Donald Trump’s rise and his ongoing assault on democracy and the rule of law.
From the trading floors of Wall Street to the corridors of Washington, Scaramucci has witnessed how money, ambition, and hubris reshaped American politics. A product of the working class who rose to the heights of finance and power, he brings a rare insider’s perspective to how both parties lost touch with the people they once represented.
But All the Wrong Moves isn’t just about how we got here—it’s about how we get out. Scaramucci lays out practical solutions, including economic policies to rebuild opportunity for the working class and constitutional reforms to protect our democracy. It’s a sharp, surprising critique that cuts through partisanship and challenges readers on the left, right, and center to reclaim what the American dream was always meant to be.

Anthony Scaramucci is the founder and managing partner of SkyBridge Capital, a global alternative investment firm, and founder and chairman of SALT, a global thought leadership forum and venture studio. He also hosts the podcast The Rest Is Politics: US. A graduate of Tufts University and Harvard Law School, he lives in Manhasset, Long Island.

Scaramucci is joined in conversation with Katty Kay, an award-winning journalist with a unique perspective on American politics and global affairs, shaped by having lived and worked as a journalist around the world. Currently U.S. special correspondent for BBC Studios, Katty creates and hosts TV documentaries from both the U.S. and Europe. Katty co-hosts the extremely popular podcast The Rest is Politics US with Anthony Scaramucci. She also hosts her own limited-run podcast Doing it Anyway, which looks at how confidence is built, why it matters, and what prevents people from acting on their ambitions. She is a regular guest on MS NOW’s Morning Joe program. When she’s not broadcasting on politics, Katty writes successful books on women and leadership. She’s written four New York Times bestsellers, including Womenomics, The Confidence Code, and The Confidence Code for Girls.

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In a lyrical and profoundly moving memoir, Nobel Peace Prize Laureate Nadia Murad reclaims her extraordinary journey from the embers of devastation to a fight for freedom—and for what comes next when a young girl’s flame cannot be extinguished. 
In 2014, Nadia Murad was living in northern Iraq when her world was shattered. Fighters from the so-called Islamic State attacked her village, massacring hundreds—including her mother and six of her brothers—and forcing her, along with thousands of Yazidi women and girls, into ISIS’s system of sexual slavery. Her life since then has been split in two. In one she is a global symbol of courage —a survivor and activist who has stood before world leaders to demand justice. In the other, she is a woman learning how to be a friend, a student, a wife; a woman rediscovering ordinary joy.
In I Choose My Beginning, Nadia brings these two selves together. With honesty and grace, she transforms the pain of her past into a life defined not by what was done to her, but by strength, perseverance, and the freedom to choose happiness. From reshaping international law to building a life filled with friendship and love, Nadia carries the memory of those she lost and those who survived. Their presence reminds her—and all of us—that she has always been more than a victim.
Powerful and deeply inspiring, I Choose My Beginning is the story of an extraordinary woman reclaiming her humanity—and showing that survival is not the end of the story. It is the beginning. 

Nadia Murad is a human rights activist and Nobel Peace Prize Laureate dedicated to ending the use of sexual violence in conflict and supporting communities affected by genocide. Born in Kocho, a small village in northern Iraq, Nadia survived the 2014 Yazidi genocide committed by ISIS. After escaping captivity, she became a leading advocate for justice and recovery, sharing her story to raise global awareness of the impact of sexual violence and displacement. In 2018, Nadia received the Nobel Peace Prize for her efforts to secure justice for survivors and to promote peace and human rights. She is the founder and president of Nadia’s Initiative, a nonprofit organization that rebuilds communities in crisis and advances the rights of women and survivors worldwide.

Murad is in conversation with Marie Arana, a prizewinning author of eight books, nonfiction and fiction. Winner of an American Academy of Arts & Letters Award for Literature in 2020, she has been a former executive at two major publishing houses, a judge for both the National Book Award and the Pulitzer Prize, a guest columnist on Latin America for the New York Times, a television commentator on books and publishing, and editor in chief of Book World at the Washington Post. She is also the inaugural Literary Director of the Library of Congress. Marie is most recently the author of “LatinoLand: A Portrait of America’s Largest and Least Understood Minority,” chosen by the New Yorker as one of the 12 Must Read Books of the Year. She is president of the 152-year-old Literary Society of Washington.

PURCHASE BOOK:

https://politics-prose.com/book/9781668097052?ic_referral=yxqel-8cdF9VAPYEhXGec3tj6pcyWf4HqzwBYk-LOn8wM_riQhbtFndn-K2wqytXHr5OmdCpyXMNAsEGEY-8VR8vxp2mWDYKc0TN9fjgWukt2HpxfcKiGTBlbq8IQCb63CTJpqY

Ke Huy Quan’s Hollywood adventure began when he was twelve years old, a mere five years after his family escaped Communist Northern Vietnam and settled down to a relatively peaceful life in L.A.’s Chinatown. After attending an open call audition on a whim, he was unexpectedly swept up in the wild world of filmmaking: learning to swim from Harrison Ford on the set of Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom, receiving trucks full of toys from Steven Spielberg and George Lucas for his birthday, meeting Princess Leia and Luke Skywalker, and making lifelong friends on the set of The Goonies.
 
A star of two of the most beloved movies of the ‘80s, there appeared to be no limit to Ke’s rise. But just a few years later, the roles had dried up and it seemed like Hollywood no longer had a place for him. He eventually left acting to work odd jobs behind the scenes for directors like Wong Kar Wai. His confidence was badly shaken, but his love of performing never abated. It wasn’t until decades later, when he was 49 years old, that he stepped back in front of the camera to star in a strange little indie film called Everything Everywhere All at Once, which surprised everyone with its incredible box-office and awards season success. To call Ke’s Oscar-winning performance a triumphant return would be an understatement.
 
In this moving, inspirational memoir, Ke paints a vivid self-portrait, telling both heart-wrenching and funny stories of his early rise, slow fall from the spotlight, the resilience that kept him going through his darkest times, and his eventual resurrection on one of the biggest stages in Hollywood. Never Say Die is the story of Ke’s extraordinary life, a love letter to the movies and people that shaped him, and a powerful testament to never giving up on your dreams.

Ke Huy Quan is an Oscar-winning actor who immigrated to the United States as a child and grew up in Los Angeles. Discovered at an open casting call with no acting experience, he was cast at age 12 as Short Round in Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom, followed by his role as Data in the beloved adventure classic, Goonies. As opportunities became limited, he stepped away from acting to study at USC’s School of Cinematic Arts, graduating in 1999, and later worked behind the scenes as an action choreographer and assistant director. After more than two decades away from acting, he returned to the screen in Daniel Kwan and Daniel Scheinert’s Academy Award–winning Everything Everywhere All At Once, earning widespread acclaim along with the Academy Award, Golden Globe, and SAG Award for Best Supporting Actor. He has since appeared in Season 2 of the Disney+ series Loki, starred in Universal’s Love Hurts, and voiced Gary De’ Snake in Disney’s animated film Zootopia 2. He lives in Los Angeles with his wife, Echo.

Quan is in conversation with Mallory Yu. Yu is a producer and editor for NPR’s All Things Considered. In the decade-plus they’ve been at NPR, they have truly considered all things – from presidential elections to the geopolitical forces surrounding Taiwan to trends in the comic book industry – but they are especially interested in exploring the intersection for race and pop culture, as well as the joys – and limits – of on-screen representation. In their spare time, they cook, make ice cream and plan future scuba diving adventures.

PURCHASE BOOK:

https://politics-prose.com/book/9781538776995?ic_referral=VOWNn3UhiFfhjnP7htS4w0ZcNx7HhV_ihSiv5JnpZkswM6-JNL6gugCgPB5wdZP5wLLmMf1lbAyDmJgjJ0sMeOfaH0CevGc9IxowXrEjARY_xaoV8K0D3NzgAflXrpuJYkGvWFE

From the bestselling author of The Spy and the Traitor (“John le Carré’s nonfiction counterpart”—The New York Times) comes the ultimate true-life Cold War thriller: the story of a Russian double agent with a terrible secret—and the key to stopping a nuclear apocalypse. 
The year is 1981. Tehran is in violent turmoil in the wake of the Iranian Revolution. The Soviets are planning to overthrow the Ayatollah’s fledgling Islamist regime. If they do so, one response contemplated in the secret chambers of American power—unknown to the public—would be to strike with nuclear weapons. Redwood is the story of how, at the height of the Cold War, one mysterious double agent, whose intelligence reached the highest levels of American and British governments, cracked open the KGB, revealed the Kremlin’s secret plot, and prevented Armageddon.
“Redwood” was the MI6 codename for this unsung, hitherto-unknown hero of the Cold War, a highly trained, six-foot-four Russian intelligence officer who chose to expose the KGB’s deepest secrets, compelled to swap sides by a shaming secret of his own. Facing exposure, with both the Iranian Revolutionary Guards and his own KGB colleagues closing in, he demanded that MI6 try to smuggle him out of Iran in a high-stakes escape plan.
This is the gripping tale of one man’s courage, and its extraordinary unintended consequences that still shape our world today. It’s about a moving friendship between spies on opposite sides of the global conflict; about marriage, loyalty, betrayal and sexual dysfunction; and about how decisions made in secret can have huge, long-term ramifications. 
Drawing on never-before-seen material from archives in multiple countries, and interviews with the participants including officers from MI6 and MI5, the KGB and CIA, Redwood plunges readers back into the shadowy world of The Spy and the Traitor. It lifts the lid on an unknown and highly significant Cold War victory, on the machinations of history’s Great Game, and on how espionage really works. 
Without Redwood, our world would be very different—and might not exist at all.

Ben Macintyre is a writer-at-large for The Times (UK) and the bestselling author of Agent Sonya, The Spy and the Traitor, A Spy Among Friends, Double Cross, Operation Mincemeat, Agent Zigzag, Rogue Heroes, Prisoners of the Castle, and The Siege, among other books. Macintyre has also written and presented BBC documentaries of his work.

Macintyre is joined in conversation with David Ignatius, a prize-winning columnist for the Washington Post and has been covering the Middle East and the CIA for four decades. He has written several New York Times bestsellers. He lives in Washington, DC.

PURCHASE:

https://politics-prose.com/book/9780593728123?ic_referral=tWDr4cH91gKCB9KJv0G1n8aj4En6swvUi27kaP50D7QwM2Vg5pl0sGs9dVE_o8IPn7X3xzDYD0-L8WX9JN6CqlG75ruthROq9RVQN_L82IAJmNoELKuisblbG2yb9O41RWrpJOM

From the New York Times best-selling author, a tragic history of the United States’ war on terror across four presidential administrations.

2026 is the twenty-fifth anniversary of 9/11, the most devastating attack on American soil since Pearl Harbor. The resulting war on terror cost trillions of dollars and thousands of lives. And yet despite its blunders, this campaign has kept America safe from foreign attack. Based on hundreds of interviews, All the Presidents’ Wars focuses on critical decisions of four successive presidents—Bush, Obama, Trump, and Biden. One of the few journalists to interview Osama bin Laden and have unparalleled access to the US intelligence community, Peter Bergen explores the birth of ISIS; the many terrorist attacks by al-Qaeda and its affiliated groups; the rise of al-Qaeda in Iraq, largely responsible for the Iraqi civil war in the mid-2000s; the resurrection of Afghanistan's Taliban; and Trump’s war with Iran. All the Presidents’ Wars is essential reading for understanding the devastating history of America's war on terror and for avoiding the mistakes of the past. 

Peter Bergen is a journalist, documentary producer, professor, and author of seven books, including Manhunt, one of three New York Times bestsellers. He lives in Washington, DC.

Bergen is in conversation with Joby Warrick, a bestselling author, two-time Pulitzer Prize winner, and national security correspondent for The Washington Post, where he has served for almost three decades. He has written extensively on topics ranging from Middle East conflicts and terrorism to nuclear proliferation and climate change. Warrick is the author of three previous works of narrative nonfiction, including the 2016 Pulitzer Prize winner Black Flags: The Rise of ISIS. A native of North Carolina, he has two adult children and lives in the Virginia suburbs of Washington, DC.

PURCHASE:

https://politics-prose.com/book/9781324124061?ic_referral=Eu-hvvWWc3WoEdNJNPbpVol5ozETBydnLJGvft_1elYwMyc9R1_GjbC8XsJAnvOqSSBNq7IFxjcqjZ9ndt4b4FEClQVa_Yi98W7Vl6HhxHQLlRgFNDtbiEk0KfnHdiRrXLcia9s

A gripping, major new history of the explosion of the “Titanic of the Skies,” the rise of Nazism and the beginning of World War II
For thirty-seven seconds on May 6, 1937, the Hindenburg lit up the sky over Lakehurst, New Jersey in an indelible conflagration that shocked the world and brought the airship era to a close. 
In this definitive account, acclaimed historian Catherine Grace Katz brings together little-known research that unveils the disaster as a pivotal moment in time, at the crossroads of the rising tension between Germany (where the Hindenburg’s fateful trip began) and the US in the 1930s, as well as a rapidly changing age of aviation in which the airship had been deemed the future of air travel, a technology that would connect the world. While thirty-six people died in the explosion, many others crawled from the wreckage and survived to tell the tale. Katz traces the experiences of a captivating cast of characters: an heiress, a world-renowned acrobat, a German Jew working to save his family from the clutches of Nazism, a young cabin boy on his first voyage with the crew. Meanwhile, on the ground were two intrepid journalists whose reporting on the Hindenburg would invent breaking news as we now know it. 
In a deeply researched yet gripping, ticking-clock narrative, Shadow Before the Flame offers a portrait of an era—that brief suspended moment in time before war became an inevitability—tracing the rapid rise of fascism and march toward World War II. It is a story that begins with the promise of a future made bright by technological innovation and ends with caskets draped in swastikas in New York City.

Catherine Grace Katz is a writer and historian from Chicago and author of The Daughters of Yalta. She graduated from Harvard in 2013 with a BA in history and in 2014 received her MPhil in modern European history from Christ’s College, University of Cambridge, where she wrote her dissertation on the origins of modern counterintelligence practices. After graduating, Catherine worked in finance in New York City before a very fortuitous visit to the bookstore in the lobby of her office in Manhattan led her to return to history and writing. She received her JD from Harvard Law School in May 2023.

Katz is in conversation with Robert Costa, a national correspondent for "CBS News Sunday Morning" and chief Washington analyst for CBS News, where he has worked since 2022. He previously served as a national political reporter at The Washington Post and as moderator and managing editor of Washington Week on PBS. He holds a bachelor’s degree from the University of Notre Dame and a master’s degree from the University of Cambridge. He is from Bucks County, Pennsylvania. 

PURCHASE BOOK:

https://politics-prose.com/book/9780593832189?ic_referral=0b022rM9jg0hWhMrOyZtzlqxN6mxnrx1FSFwOp3eoj8wM5waSJE8GFVbp47hHaC6QE_3gI4W6PWHeCCq_yNDbMTE7c5PCMK6vSe3olPYaRiLQru1cvrTcqguGJNo1FNrl-6Jl0Q

The definitive, sure to be headline-making, investigation into how Putin successfully mounted a decade-long covert war on the United States and how Donald Trump aided and abetted the operation and upended America and the world.

How Russia Won tells the little-understood yet crucial story of how Vladimir Putin waged a secret campaign to subvert and weaken the United States—and how Trump, his MAGA movement, the Republican Party, and right-wing media have served as useful idiots for the tyrannical Russian leader, allowing him to succeed spectacularly.

David Corn, a bestselling author and seasoned journalist expert in American politics has investigated the story from the beginning of the first Trump Administration through the beginning of his second term. Corn offers fresh reporting and analysis on:

• The direct contacts between Trump aides, including Rudy Giuliani, and Russian intelligence operatives.
• Republican legislators’ and Trump Administration officials’ use of Russian disinformation to defend Trump and smear Democrats.
• The extensive yet little-known Senate report produced by then-Senator Marco Rubio—Trump’s current Secretary of State—that blew apart Trump’s claim the Russia investigation was a hoax.
• The massive propaganda campaign Trump and MAGA Republicans pursued to cover up the truth about Putin’s clandestine intervention in US politics.
• The never-ending effort of Russian operatives to flood America with disinformation spread across social media that boosted Trump’s odds in both the 2020 and 2024 elections.
• The many ties between Trump’s second administration and pro-Putin advocates.
• The business enterprises of the Trump clan and their possible links to Russia.

A compelling narrative with the verve and twists of a spy novel—yet it’s all true—How Russia Won makes crystal clear a truth hard to bear but necessary to see, and it explains a profoundly troubling reality: Putin has beaten America.

David Corn is a veteran Washington, DC, journalist who has written or co-written five New York Times bestsellers, including the number-one bestseller Russian Roulette: The Inside Story of Putin’s War on America and the Election of Donald Trump; Hubris: The Inside Story of Spin, Scandal, and the Selling of the Iraq War; and, most recently, American Psychosis: A Historical Investigation of How the Republican Party Went Crazy. He is the Washington, DC, bureau chief of Mother Jones and an MSNBC analyst. He has won the George Polk Award and a National Magazine Award.

PURCHASE BOOK:

https://politics-prose.com/book/9780063486201?ic_referral=BnPysOPMkEAUiYg8on6ifncpKNGoDJMhvq8teULJZMcwMxfOW_xG8t-6tNTzXEp8dns85CYWxaQ8rOdUUdSvTom8a-Tj0Vv7SqEtjQQds_7yLc2kGUkD9-VEu_Fm4F2navVaZTk

A spellbinding story of two young people whose fates intersect and diverge across continents and years—an epic of love and family, India and America, tradition and modernity, by the Booker Prize–winning author of The Inheritance of Loss

When Sonia and Sunny first glimpse each other on an overnight train, they are immediately captivated yet also embarrassed by the fact that their grandparents had once tried to matchmake them, a clumsy meddling that served only to drive Sonia and Sunny apart.
Sonia, an aspiring novelist who recently completed her studies in the snowy mountains of Vermont, has returned to her family in India. She fears that she is haunted by a dark spell cast by an artist to whom she had once turned for intimacy and inspiration. Sunny, a struggling journalist resettled in New York City, is attempting to flee his imperious mother and the violence of his warring clan. Uncertain of their future, Sonia and Sunny embark on a search for happiness together as they confront the many alienations of our modern world.
The Loneliness of Sonia and Sunny is the sweeping tale of two young people navigating the many forces that shape their lives: country, class, race, history, and the complicated bonds that link one generation to the next. A love story, a family saga, and a rich novel of ideas, it is the most ambitious and accomplished work yet by one of our greatest novelists.

Kiran Desai is the bestselling author of the novels Hullabaloo in the Guava Orchard and The Inheritance of Loss, which won both the Booker Prize and the National Book Critics Circle Award. Born in India, she came to the United States when she was sixteen and now lives in New York City.

Desai is in conversation with Aminatta Forna, a novelist, memoirist and essayist. Her novels are Happiness, The Hired Man, The Memory of Love and Ancestor Stones. She is currently at work on a volume about the nature, ecology and history of the East African Rift System. Aminatta is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature and was made OBE in the Queen’s 2017 New Year’s Honours list. Aminatta Forna is Director of the Lannan Center at Georgetown University. 

PURCHASE BOOK:

https://politics-prose.com/book/9780307744555?ic_referral=rvZjLEZCtTUWBn7cOYeRqlKtHw177zEWbhqQvX33IdAwM4-xW5BsvHh7hRBOun-R1skaR6mDkMKCMld56R5h3aofWJ127AZZSvNnqczaNoLt3SUFuvr8rt1r0vBP_VUz0gT_TaQ

Drawing on deep, exclusive reporting, a veteran national security correspondent reveals how a new military-industrial complex is arising from the cradle of Silicon Valley, with vast implications for American democracy and the global balance of power.
Elon Musk, Peter Thiel, and Alexander Karp. These tech titans are fast becoming some of the most powerful figures in the realm of national security, with enormous implications for us all. As Sharon Weinberger reveals in this gripping account, the American military and spy agencies helped to create Silicon Valley as we now know it, and some of its biggest and most valuable companies today owe much of their success to the Pentagon and CIA. Beginning with the War on Terror and accelerating under Donald Trump, however, the old alliance between elected leaders in Washington and the unelected CEOs of Silicon Valley has grown increasingly uneasy as power has shifted to the private sector and Big Tech exerts greater and greater influence over its old patrons. Companies such as SpaceX and Palantir, along with newer entrants to the field such as Anduril, are proudly supporting—and quietly shaping—US national defense, whether by providing spies and soldiers with AI and cloud-computing tools or actual military hardware such as microwave weapons, hypersonic missiles, and advanced drones. 
 
The implications of this historic shift are poorly understood and fraught with peril. What happens when mercurial billionaires like Elon Musk control weapons and technologies that were once the preserve of the US government? How will this new military-industrial complex affect the way wars are fought, or even which wars are fought? That is the urgent question before us today, at the dawn of this new era—and as Weinberger reveals, it is one on which our collective future might well hinge.

Sharon Weinberger is the editor in chief of the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists and the author of the book, Valley of Death: How Big Tech is Fueling the Future of War. She was previously the National Security and Foreign Policy Editor for The Wall Street Journal. Her previous books include The Imagineers of War: The Untold Story of DARPA, the Pentagon Agency That Changed the World, A Nuclear Family Vacation: Travels in the World of Atomic Weaponry, and Imaginary Weapons: A Journey Through the Pentagon's Scientific Underworld. She has held fellowships at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard University, MIT’s Knight Science Journalism program, the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars, the International Reporting Project at Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies, and Northwestern University’s Medill School of Journalism. Her writing has appeared in The Wall Street Journal, New York Times, New York Magazine, the Washington Post, Foreign Policy, WIRED magazine, Nature, BBC, Discover, and Slate, among other publications. She is a member of the Council on Foreign Relations and lives in Washington, D.C.

Weinberger is in conversation with Dustin Volz, he covers cybersecurity and intelligence for The New York Times in Washington. He was previously a reporter at The Wall Street Journal. His award-winning work focuses on the hackers and spies who work in the shadows to achieve geopolitical advantage, and how businesses and governments are often ill-equipped to address these evolving threats. 

PURCHASE:

https://politics-prose.com/book/9780316595933?ic_referral=SHm_kt5OquVIeeeyH3v0JByDFPRyysWuE7c7SSlSME0wM3_OmUWFo8nI8tvJyfCTuC8KodWng_ld4Zdi-ImeylHlrhTpEfgapWiYk9kBVHGgileioyoPXd2m47eVvoCxPo3Yddg

The outspoken liberal voice on the Fox News show The Five shows us how to stay true to our values, find common ground, and communicate with confidence when engaging across political and social divides.
Imagine you’re sitting down to Thanksgiving dinner, knowing it’s going to get heated. One uncle is ready to argue about politics, another relative has very different views, and you usually try to stay out of it, even though you have strong opinions yourself. Conversations like these have split some families up. Now imagine that dinner table debate broadcast daily to millions. 
Welcome to the world of Jessica Tarlov, an unflappable liberal voice on Fox News Channel’s The Five. When you’re outnumbered four to one on a daily basis, you better know your stuff. When you’re outnumbered four to one on the highest-rated show on cable news, you better have your beliefs on lockdown.
In the conservative fishbowl of The Five, Tarlov is no stranger to navigating thorny, often contentious debates with poise, authenticity, and conviction. In this riveting guide, Jessica Tarlov shows us how she does it. Because at some point or other, we all face disagreements—whether with colleagues, family, or friends—and want to walk away with both our values and our relationships intact.
Tarlov models an important and accessible route to building bravery for these conversations. She demonstrates that navigating contentious situations is a skill that requires radical honesty, knowing how to engage with numbers and statistics, understanding when to listen and when to talk, and articulating the common threads that unite us all. Tarlov has honed these skills with practice, and here, she reveals her tools of the trade for the first time.
Whether you find yourself at a charged debate with the in-laws, or in a tricky conversation with your boss, Jessica Tarlov will prepare you to stand up for what you believe in, even if it means standing alone—and why standing alone doesn’t mean standing apart.

Jessica Tarlov is a liberal co-host of The Five on FOX News, the most watched show in cable news. In addition to co-hosting The Five, Jessica plays an integral role in special coverage for the network and is a fixture on election nights and for breaking news. She also co-hosts the podcast Raging Moderates with NYU Professor Scott Galloway and previously worked as a Democratic pollster and researcher specializing in GenZ and Millennial trends. She holds a PhD in political science from the London School of Economics.

Tarlov is in conversation with Aaron Parnas, one of the leading Gen Z voices shaping how news is consumed today. An independent journalist, political commentator, strategist, and attorney, Aaron has quickly become a key figure in the national political conversation, offering sharp insights at the intersection of law, media, and policy. He first gained widespread attention through viral, educational content that breaks down complex political issues in a fast, accessible way—particularly resonating with younger, highly engaged audiences. His rapid-response analysis of major court decisions, legislative battles, and election narratives has made him a trusted voice for millions across platforms. He played a significant role in shaping the digital narrative around the 2022 and 2024 election cycles, with his rapid-response commentary consistently reaching millions. During Senator Cory Booker’s record-breaking 25-hour Senate speech protesting the Trump administration’s policies, Aaron conducted the second interview—following Rachel Maddow—highlighting how quickly he’s become part of the political conversation.

PURCHASE:

https://politics-prose.com/book/9798217154135?ic_referral=ZmoUfCeObMxICb-9xeOwiDVvv3URSRcdDL_l8fd9qWwwM4gFa_OCN-MKon3w_tjchZ4V2Gr9d8VOygwb5emGOyvKqLyuGxEv7tUPyMyvsEZT9IJlkVa2E9AxlKYNbWiro3TlrAo

From “one of the best writers in the English language” (The Washington Post), a sweeping yet intimate novel about one man’s life in the aftermath of the Civil War
“I knew as I made my way home that there was no home. All the old things...were gone forever.”
Born into bondage in Union-leaning northwestern Tennessee, Tennyson Bouguereau’s life revolves around his sister, Rosalee, his work in the Magan family’s tobacco fields, and keeping apart from his pro-Confederate neighbors. In the wake of emancipation, when a gang of defeated soldiers descends on the farm—now also home to Irish immigrant Thomas McNulty; his companion, John Cole; and their adopted Lakota daughter, Winona—Tennyson commits a deadly act. Tennyson will not now have the chance to till the ten acres Magan has given him and Rosalee as their own. Instead, he must leave everything he knows, and venture into the newer world.
Set against the rapidly shifting landscape of mid-19th century America, from a choir school in Nashville to an army camp in New Mexico, The Newer World is a lyrical, visceral novel about what it is to survive, and what might be lost along the way. Dreamlike and unforgettable, it is the work of a consummate storyteller at the height of his powers.

Sebastian Barry was born in Dublin in 1955. He is the author of nine previous novels, as well as numerous plays. He is the first novelist to twice win the Costa Book of the Year award, for Days Without End and The Secret Scripture, has twice been shortlisted for the Booker Prize, for A Long Long Way and The Secret Scripture, and has thrice been longlisted for the Booker Prize, for Old God's Time, Days Without End and On Canaan’s Side. The 2018-2021 Laureate for Irish Fiction, he lives in County Wicklow, Ireland.

Barry is in conversation with Marie Arana, a prizewinning author of eight books, nonfiction and fiction. Winner of an American Academy of Arts & Letters Award for Literature in 2020, she has been a former executive at two major publishing houses, a judge for both the National Book Award and the Pulitzer Prize, a guest columnist on Latin America for the New York Times, a television commentator on books and publishing, and editor in chief of Book World at the Washington Post. She is also the inaugural Literary Director of the Library of Congress. Marie is most recently the author of “LatinoLand: A Portrait of America’s Largest and Least Understood Minority,” chosen by the New Yorker as one of the 12 Must Read Books of the Year. She is president of the 152-year-old Literary Society of Washington.

PURCHASE:

https://politics-prose.com/book/9780593654613?ic_referral=_EiwxKWupIuyPXxQBQ7ItqrRjRM9usAA8xMRMVUyb8EwM0EL4-nkKtqhmCJB84FfVISHKkJRE0_nKsOIoJObQskXNvQD3R__dsG57HuqNmJperHugrkgoOw-Nxu6mJZnhVET89k

The panoramic story of the 1980s, exploring the triumphs and failures of the decade that shaped the 21st century more than any other, from a Pulitzer Prize winning reporter who witnessed the transformations firsthand
In January 1980, America seemed broken. Inflation raged. Interest rates topped 20 percent. Americans were held hostage in Iran. The Soviet Union invaded Afghanistan with impunity. Japan was eating American manufacturing alive. Three broadcast networks controlled what Americans watched. The idea of a Black president seemed fantasy. China had been closed for 30 years. The Berlin Wall seemed permanent.    
Ten years later, everything had changed. The economy was booming. The Soviet Empire was collapsing. American businesses were competitive again.  
In this immersive, character-driven narrative, Jonathan Kaufman lays bare the contending ideologies—and people—who battled for control of business, media and politics in the 1980s, shaping the way we live today. As Ronald Reagan and conservatives pummeled the Democratic party, as Jack Welch redefined what it meant to be the leader of a Fortune 500 company, and as deregulation spearheaded by Mark Fowler allowed television to become the hundreds of specialized and partisan channels we watch now, the groundwork was laid for our current economic and political conflicts. The decade also launched social and political movements whose victories transformed the country. Karen Nussbaum and Jane Fonda galvanized a struggling women’s movement, Evan Wolfson spearheaded the gay community’s legal fight against a hostile government, and Barack Obama cut his teeth as a community organizer in Chicago—all building long-lasting movements whose success progressives can learn from today.
From pivotal moments in board rooms and court rooms, to cultural touchstones like the birth of hip hop and of conservative talk radio, as well as the author’s eyewitness experiences in Tiananmen Square and Prague, When America Roared is the riveting story of how the 1980s built the world we live in, for better and for worse. It is the decade that made us—and the key to understanding where we go from here.

Jonathan Kaufman is a Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter whose long list of bylines includes The Boston Globe, The Wall Street Journal, Bloomberg News. His wide ranging work has covered topics such as labor, local activism, racism and job discrimination, and corporate tax dodging,  and has also been recognized with the Gerald Loeb Award, the George Polk Award, and the Columbia University School of Journalism, among others. He is the author of The Last Kings of Shanghai: The Rival Jewish Dynasties that Helped Create Modern China; A Hole in the Heart of the World: Being Jewish in Eastern Europe and Broken Alliance: The Turbulent Times Between Blacks and Jews in America, winner of the National Jewish Book Award. He is director of the School of Journalism at Northeastern University in Boston.

Kaufman is in conversation with David Wessel, a senior fellow in Economic Studies at Brookings and director of the Hutchins Center on Fiscal and Monetary Policy, the mission of which is to improve the quality of fiscal and monetary policies and public understanding of them. He joined Brookings in December 2013 after 30 years on the staff of The Wall Street Journal where, most recently, he was economics editor and wrote the weekly Capital column. He appears frequently on NPR’s Morning Edition and posts frequently on BlueSky at ‪@davidmwessel.bsky.social David is the author of two New York Times best-sellers: In Fed We Trust and Red Ink. His most recent book is Only the Rich Can Play, the story of Opportunity Zones.

PURCHASE:

https://politics-prose.com/book/9780593300206?ic_referral=GNbt1pkk0vLJejbV0iWLgoL3NhV-pwmYxeUL_VL8OtYwM4yzz_wdcbl53rfImZcKZB6JyKXEZqFEG-5qPw8YM0vvB5400kjLy8EEnTzlmEpI545Jva02yZgvWVz4EZRhSo3nRGo

Join Governor Andy Beshear for a hopeful conversation about reclaiming faith as a force for good instead of harm and healing a divided nation through our shared values. Centered around his new book, Go and Do Likewise: How We Heal a Broken Country, Governor Beshear will share stories of healing, justice, forgiveness, welcoming, and moral clarity.

In Go and Do Likewise, Governor Beshear shares what his own faith has meant to him, how it has informed his family and his public life—and serves as a rebuke to how faith has been hijacked, profaned, misused, and corrupted by Donald Trump and other public figures. By regrounding faith in compassion and kindness, Beshear believes we can start to heal as a country.

Whether you support organized religion or simply believe in the golden rule, this evening is a powerful reminder of the values that can truly unite us. 

Governor Andy Beshear is a born-and-raised Kentuckian. Before he was elected Governor in 2019, Andy served as the state’s Attorney General since 2015, working as a lawyer on behalf of the government for the people of Kentucky. Andy and his wife, Britainy, have two children, Will and Lila, and dog Winnie. His family attends Beargrass Christian Church, where both Andy and Britainy serve as deacons. He is a graduate of Vanderbilt with a bachelor’s in political science and anthropology and holds a Juris Doctorate from the University of Virginia law school.

Governor Beshear is in conversation with Governor Wes Moore. Gov. Wes Moore is the 63rd Governor of the state of Maryland. He is Maryland’s first Black Governor in the state’s 246-year history, and is just the third African American elected Governor in the history of the United States. Moore and his wife, First Lady Dawn Flythe Moore​, have two children – Mia and James –​ and a dog, Tucker Balti.

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https://politics-prose.com/book/9781250452719?ic_referral=vQ7S3xhy-s5OYFR4XgzxlEdUF-sKJ23kPiLYJN2PwOAwM-4UYcZG5xsVrx3gwkoq2Hv5W2xRS4o9W47czlxe5iVcGb_6RdK1UdVeyuKw52uuMLU-86jXJ1d9qfLMIJ8RoJeHL_w

Twelve short masterworks from this great American writer of catastrophe fiction, in which lives are upended as much by broken hearts as by collapsing dams, vainglorious wars, gargantuan wildfires, and shipwrecks
Across centuries and wildly diverse locations, Shepard holds us in his grip. We witness the devastating 1935 Labor Day hurricane in Florida from multiple points of view, read the 1864 letters between Lucy in Boone, NC (“Three privates are currently sleeping soundly on our porch in their muddy blankets”) and her great love William, on the march in Tennessee (“I can’t write much for it seems we are looking for a fight every minute”), and in the title story, meet the stubborn Constance, who had “no gift for flirtation” with men, preferring Minna, her best friend and “queen of bad influences” as their devotion unfolds in part on the doomed liner Lusitania.
With irony, compassion, and withering humor, these stories evoke the terrible ease with which catastrophe, human-engineered or otherwise, can sweep away all we find most precious and expose those limitations we’ve refused to address. At the same time, Shepard raises up what is best in us: the love and friendships that sustain, and the consolations and sacrifices we provide one another on a beleaguered planet.

Jim Shepard has written eight novels, including The Book of Aron, which won the Sophie Brody Medal, the PEN/New England Award, The Ribalow Prize, and the Clark Fiction Prize, as well as six story collections, including Like You’d Understand, Anyway, a finalist for the National Book Award and Story Prize winner. Eight of his stories have been selected for the Best American Short Stories, two for the PEN/O. Henry Prize Stories, and three for Pushcart Prizes. He’s the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship and lives in Williamstown with his wife, the fiction writer Karen Shepard, and two beagles.

Shepard is in conversation with Tania James, the author of four books of fiction. Her most recent novel Loot was longlisted for the 2023 National Book Award and the Carol Shields Prize. A 2025 Guggenheim fellow, she is an associate professor of English at George Mason University.

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https://politics-prose.com/book/9780593804414?ic_referral=CBoYUhX_DE1QosQa9jEJHvFa_ExnDW-tIce8QQ4aTQIwMwzChVmSU8BvssjEPfyYZpXv0SBH293romr-6yKFSnB3XJjkw7b-xmlnVIS_0p9c7Q5r2TOvpteBXQs144C2UBIonLE

Perfect for fans of Eat, Pray, Love, this soulful travel memoir blends poetry, global adventure, cultural connection and personal transformation with reflections on race, identity, and belonging.
In 2010, twenty-nine-year-old poet Ebony Walden quits her job to go to on an eight-month solo journey across fifteen countries and five continents. Propelled by a sense of purpose and adventure, she moves from teaching English and volunteering in places like Guatemala and India to conducting poetry workshops in Kenya, walking the ruins of Machu Picchu, and paragliding over the Swiss Alps.
Along the way, Ebony writes “Where I’m From” poems with the people she meets—intimate reflections that capture family, identity and culture, weaving their voices into her own unfolding journey. But each destination also challenges her in unexpected ways, forcing her to reckon with the hardships of growing up in New York in the ’80s and ’90s. Through breathtaking landscapes, unexpected setbacks, and profound encounters with strangers, Ebony begins to understand that travel is not just about seeing the world—it is about allowing the world to change you.
Part travel memoir, part coming-of-age story, Where I’m From invites readers to take their own journey beyond borders and come home to themselves.

Ebony Walden is an author, filmmaker, and speaker who has traveled to nearly fifty countries and all fifty US states. She is the founder of Ebony Walden Consulting, a racial equity–focused consulting firm, and the creator of Black Beyond Borders, a documentary series and podcast exploring culture, creativity, connection, and cuisine across the African diaspora. Ebony also writes Beyond Borders, a weekly Substack newsletter on travel and transformation. She lives in Richmond, Virginia.

Walden is in conversation with Robert J. Patterson, a professor of African American Studies and served as the inaugural chair of the Department of African American Studies at Georgetown University (2016-2019). He is the author of Destructive Desires: Rhythm and Blues Culture and the Politics of Racial Equality (Rutgers University Press, 2019) and Exodus Politics: Civil Rights and Leadership in African American Literature and Culture (UVA Press, 2013), co-editor of The Psychic Hold of Slavery: Legacies in American Expressive Culture (Rutgers University Press, 2016), and editor of the award-winning Black Cultural Production After Civil Rights (University of Illinois Press, 2019). Currently, he is working on a book titled Black Equity, Black Equality: Reparation and Black Communities and US Slave Narratives: A Very Short Introduction, which is under contract with Oxford University Press. 

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https://politics-prose.com/book/9798896361381?ic_referral=Zbpdg8F-XY9K_pbk8NugPKzX_JGuZF35VwNhaNmIHCowM0w1bRiDlMv2fB-SJhYnKAI0bIQa1ybg0Yq4-6Xuwah9YocbrJ4o92cBQa2MAm1B5nnKkbfO8tUk_Gv5f42Njm9CYpQ

The true, inspiring story of the new parents who spearheaded an unlikely climate victory.
From the rising climate advocate named to the Time100 Next list, for political junkies and anyone who cares about the environment.
They were perhaps an unlikely trio: the professor Leah Stokes, the policy wonk Sonia Aggarwal in the White House, and the DC insider Adrian Deveny in the Senate, but together, they crafted the boldest climate legislation of our times. In The Carbon Wave, Stokes chronicles the turbulent path of their climate bill as it veered between breakthrough and collapse—from the hopeful beginnings of the Green New Deal in 2018 to the bill’s near-certain defeat by Senator Joe Manchin in the winter of 2021 to the surprise passage of the landmark legislation in August of 2022. During this critical time, the author was pregnant or in the NICU by the side of her premature twins, and Aggarwal and Deveny were new parents too.
Interlacing personal narratives with stories from Congress, the White House, and outside activists, Stokes shows how dogged perseverance and collective action can still bend the course of history. The book concludes with an update from the second Trump administration, explaining the parts of the bill that were—and were not—rolled back, and why we should remain hopeful that progress is still being made.
Everyone has been told to shrink their carbon footprint and lighten their load on our planet by changing their behavior. But what if instead of making ourselves smaller, we joined with others to maximize our impact? That’s the carbon wave. And this book shows us how to make it.
“I have said before, and I will probably say again, that Leah Stokes understands the details of our energy policy dilemmas better than anyone.” —Bill McKibben, author of Here Comes the Sun

Leah C. Stokes is Anton Vonk Associate Professor of Environmental Politics at UC Santa Barbara. As a leading climate advocate, she has championed climate policy in the United States at all levels of government and was selected for Time Magazine’s Time100 Next list and Business Insider’s top 30 global climate leaders. A recipient of a Harvard University Radcliffe Fellowship, she is the author of the award-winning Short Circuiting Policy, which was listed as one of the top 5 climate books in 2020 by The New York Times.

Stokes is in conversation with Gary Petrella, Maxine Joselow, and Christy Goldfuss.  

Gerry Petrella was the Policy Director for Senate Majority Leader Charles Schumer, where he played a central role in legislative planning, negotiating, and executing landmark legislation like the Inflation Reduction Act and the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law. Over the course of his career, he has advised members of Congress, the White House, and companies on issues ranging from technology and environment to infrastructure and health care.

Maxine Joselow, a climate policy reporter for The New York Times, where she writes about how governments address climate change. Before joining The Times, she worked at The Washington Post, where she helped launch a daily climate newsletter and then served as the newspaper’s lead climate policy reporter. Before that, she worked for E&E News, an environmental publication owned by Politico. 

Christy Goldfuss, the Executive Director of the Natural Resources Defense Council. Before that, she served as the Center for American Progress's senior vice president for Energy and Environment Policy, where she convened a broad range of stakeholders to develop a climate investment strategy enshrined in the Inflation Reduction Act. She was formerly the managing director of the White House Council on Environmental Quality (CEQ).. 

PURCHASE:

https://politics-prose.com/book/9780262054775?ic_referral=NNdYjyeJzqUKYjOOXlreAXsXnX7L2U6x4frXDgwGpwcwM5Jd306gbm4n7nVQLUMmqtPszVhJKTR3kM8LERIJowXW0uMfFSNhqLN-ZXJ1F37OwLO1u-0fAMLoV6guZ41M5WcKKoM

For fans of Master Slave Husband Wife and Django Unchained comes the extraordinary forgotten story of an event known in its day as “the first shots of the Civil War,” from the New York Times bestselling author of Dr. Mütter’s Marvels.
The year, 1851. The place, a Quaker farming community turned Underground Railroad stronghold, where a Maryland enslaver had journeyed in pursuit of four men who’d fled his plantation years before. In a few hours, he’d be dead…and twenty-seven men from the village of Christiana would be rounded up and put on trial. Not for his murder, but for treason—for waging war against the United States, at a time when it was a crime against the government to obstruct an enslaver looking to reclaim his “property.”
This is story of what happened in Christiana that September morning—and in the ensuing “trial of the century,” which saw the president himself advise the prosecution on strategy and a sitting congressman serve as lead attorney for the defense. But The Ballad of the Fugitive William Parker is also a much larger tale, one spanning decades, following a whole startlingly diverse community of abolitionists in their fight to convince their fellow Americans of the subversive idea that now found itself on trial: that the nation ought to live up the ideals it was founded on, and respect all men as equals.
It’s a story that whisks readers from the quiet farmlands of Lancaster County—where a self-emancipated man named William Parker, whom legend had it bullets could not kill, rallied his neighbors to ride out each night to battle the slavecatchers who stalked their countryside—to Philadelphia’s genteel Society Hill, where socialite Harriet Forten Purvis had the ear of the mayor (and a cellar filled with fugitives). It’s stylish, propulsive, intimately human tale of bravery, ingenuity, and hope—and of ordinary people with little in common who came together to stand against injustice…and won.

Cristin O’Keefe Aptowicz is the New York Times bestselling author of Dr. Mütter’s Marvels, as well as eight collections of poetry. A seventh generation Pennsylvanian, she lives in Philadelphia with her husband, the novelist Ernest Cline, and their children.

Aptowicz is in conversation with Nikki M. Taylor, a professor of history at Howard University. Her research focuses on African-American history in the nineteenth century, particularly in Ohio and Kentucky. Her sub-specialties are in Urban, African American Women, and Intellectual History. Educated at the University of Pennsylvania and Duke University. She served as the Chair of the Department of History from 2017-2023. Taylor has won several fellowships including Fulbright, Social Science Research Council, and Woodrow Wilson. She is also the Principal Investigator of two institutional grants, including the $5 million Mellon Just Futures grant (2021) and the Mellon Mays Undergraduate Fellowship Program Grant ($480k in 2017).

PURCHASE BOOK:

https://politics-prose.com/book/9781668035931?ic_referral=xFZZpqr-DcAZKetzjP8bf2pOPpCnPqQepH6W_8R7tFowM0xHWqAdnTCCOrCoRxe6n1Z2TaZaJSPreHI7M6gwoit5vR0csJ2s2IyXBoSpoRX5Iad08svOpLU9xSdLdAH8CNGJUg8

The definitive history of go-go music and culture

Go-go is the heart and soul of Washington, DC's African American culture--a source of resilience for the community and a way to celebrate Black lives. As the soundtrack of the District since the mid-1970s, go-go was designated the official music of Washington in 2020, and it has been incorporated into music genres such as hip-hop and R&B for decades.

Crankin offers a rich narrative packed with photos that highlight go-go's key figures, bands, and moments--spanning fifty years from its beginnings all the way to its central role in the #BLM protests in 2020 and the #DontMuteDC and Moechella movements. This sweeping history of go-go music culture details the life of Chuck Brown, the "godfather of go-go," and documents the history of the genre's early pioneers, Trouble Funk, Rare Essence, and Experience Unlimited (EU). The book also covers EU's 1988 number one hit, "Da Butt," go-go's gospel and grown 'n' sexy subgenres, go-go's international impact, the bouncebeat sound, go-go lifestyles, activism, and, finally, the homecoming as go-go artists brought Chuck Brown's African-inspired beat to Africa.

Crankin will entertain and inform fans of go-go as well as African American and American-created music; musicologists; scholars of American culture and subcultures; and readers interested in DC history.

Alona Wartofsky is a former culture editor and reporter for The Washington Post. She has been reporting about go-go since the mid-'80s, and her stories about go-go culture have appeared in The Washington Post, Washington City Paper, the Village Voice, Spin magazine, and LA Weekly. 

Charles C. Stephenson Jr. is the coauthor of The Beat: Go-Go Music from Washington, DC, the original manager for Experience Unlimited, and former chairman of the DC Commission on the Arts and Humanities.

Kato Hammond is a go-go musician, author, publisher, and journalist. He is the owner and creator of Take Me Out To The Go-Go, Inc. (TMOTTGoGo)--the first website, magazine, and online radio station covering the go-go music culture.

Wartofsky, Stephenson, and Hammond are in conversation with Natalie Hopkinson.

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https://politics-prose.com/book/9781647127367?ic_referral=fYdGRS02Vb3JfOLXxqoTbGbNEBJiSkim1XqT4OXP3xMwM2eOiszilhJDkd5gZhu1FGxujMcg_PQVptGs0LSBk60IosdT5U2tUFKFzHK-l28bQLuR_tgYRBVlyaEeNvQcl2Dmn3g

In 1988, eight men in Kingston, Jamaica, begin rehearsals for a play. The men are strangers to one another and each has a different reason for being involved. But they all share one inescapable truth: All of them are gay―a “battyman” in Jamaican argot―and all of them must contend with the dangers that such a truth lays bare.

One night a mob savagely attacks them, killing one of the men. For the survivors, their recovery is as much emotional as it is physical. As their bodies heal, each man grapples with the violence, the hatred, and the rage that the attack made plain. Some try to ignore what the attack has unearthed, while others double down on retribution.

In The Disappearers, Marlon James has written a riveting and deeply human story of men forced to make compromises to survive what the society they live in demands. It is both a dramatic page-turner and an unflinching exploration of queer life in Jamaica during the 1980s and 1990s.

Marlon James is the Booker Prize–winning and New York Times bestselling author of A Brief History of Seven Killings; the bestselling and National Book Award finalist Black Leopard, Red Wolf; as well as the bestselling Moon Witch, Spider King; The Book of Night Women; and John Crow’s Devil. In addition to the Booker Prize, James’s novels have won the American Book Award, the Anisfield-Wolf Book Award, the Dayton Literary Peace Prize, the OCM Bocas Prize for Caribbean Literature, and the Los Angeles Times Ray Bradbury Prize for Science Fiction, and have been finalists for the National Book Critics Circle Award and the NAACP Image Award. In 2019, Time magazine named him one of the one hundred most influential people in the world. Born in Jamaica, James lives in New York City.

James is in conversation with Lily Meyer. Meyer is a translator, a critic, and the author of the novels The End of Romance (Viking, 2026) and Short War (Deep Vellum, 2024). She is a staff writer at The Atlantic. Her stories and translations can be found in The Dial, The Drift, The Sewanee Review, The Southern Review, and many other journals.

PURCHASE BOOK:

https://politics-prose.com/book/9780593717202?ic_referral=OQwG3SYX3GexNIaKumt6uedFQwLpbchSB7011UfgtH0wMxDxa-SmSvsCsnLBWXKC3Nvk9G8T6hmcKj9XrqIFajsyr-M1nUqyvMFBavYRzQhjyUF0FkV-WQ_C1sH3hvNe-9W1jGA

New tech is changing the contours of geopolitical stability—America must act now, or risk losing its global standing forever.
Technology has always driven political competition. For decades, the US set the international rules on innovation, standards, and export regulations, using soft power and federal funding to both develop cutting edge tech and prevent its rivals from acquiring it. But in the digital era, major breakthroughs in everything from AI systems to autonomous drones now come from private companies, not government labs. It is already too late for superpowers to stop the outward flow of research and expertise. The fallout from this shift could dramatically reshape our world, and America is running out of time to act.
Bytes and Bullets is an analytically rich account of how technology is upending global competition. Through engaging stories and original research, Carnegie Endowment senior fellow Steve Feldstein explains how America's primacy is being undercut at every turn by commercialization, China's growing capabilities, and new regional powers building their own spheres of influence. He offers eye-opening insights from modern conflicts and proposes concrete strategies that democracies must adopt to shape the future.

Steven Feldstein is a senior fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. An international expert on technology, democracy, and national security, he previously served as a senior official at the State Department and USAID. His first book, The Rise of Digital Repression, won the 2023 Grawemeyer Award for Ideas Improving World Order. He has appeared on CNBC, CSPAN, NPR, and BBC, and his writing has appeared in The Atlantic, Foreign Affairs, and Lawfare, among others.

Feldstein is in conversation with Marcus Weisgerber, a national security reporter for The Wall Street Journal in Washington, where he covers the Pentagon and defense industry. For nearly two decades, Marcus’ reporting has focused on the intersection of business and national security. He spent nine years as the business editor of Defense One, where in 2018 he won a Jesse H. Neal Award for his coverage of the Pentagon and defense industry.

PURCHASE:

https://politics-prose.com/book/9781250394088?ic_referral=9_Eoc_u1Zk05ugADc6srQkqMMkHFjxPasq3XzQETAagwM-OHjZS00WeVodPb8xZAlEwgziRlHkcZpXhJiUFaTFhmYTF5ySLdZNs1jn5ldSyCKFSUefx0dE4JxSjyJzG9_faUM00

From the leading political advisor and best-selling author, a revelatory account of how power is built and a blueprint for Democrats in 2026 and beyond.

Supermajorities used to be the norm in American politics, yet today it seems unimaginable that our nation could break hard for one party or the other. But as Adam Jentleson demonstrates in Supermajority, his follow up to the “truly excellent” (Ezra Klein) Kill Switch, periods of stasis almost always break and give way to dominant one-party rule. For most of the twentieth century, Democrats held overwhelming control of Congress—supermajorities so commanding that Republicans could do little more than mimic Democratic positions. These supermajorities didn’t just enable sweeping legislation, such as Social Security, but also made that legislation stick. Jentleson argues that today’s Democrats let interest groups and activists hold them back from building a supermajority, and that they forget that politicians need to be attentive to public opinion even as they seek to shape it. He shows that the party must learn the correct lessons from the successes of FDR, LBJ, and Barack Obama if they hope to usher in a new liberal realignment and forge lasting change.

Adam Jentleson is the former chief of staff to Senator John Fetterman, a former deputy chief of staff to Senator Harry Reid, and founder and president of the Searchlight Institute, a nonprofit dedicated to sparking a realignment through innovative policy ideas. A frequent contributor to the New York Times and political commentator on MSNBC, he is the author of Kill Switch: The Rise of the Modern Senate and the Crippling of American Democracy. He lives in Takoma Park, Maryland.

Jentleson is in conversation with Jerusalem Demsas, CEO, founder, and editor-in-chief of The Argument, a new magazine revitalizing liberalism through evidence-driven journalism and debate. The Argument covers politics, policy, and culture with original polling, and rigorous analysis. She was previously a staff writer at The Atlantic, a policy journalist at Vox, and author of On the Housing Crisis.

PURCHASE:

https://politics-prose.com/book/9781324092193?ic_referral=ATG3KJWSijG_DnDzmgnDcKx3XkrpJIf39AuLOy22kGwwM73GLtT5GcgAAsyU0iGbsUaILURtwRsO9M6G03FKfSLt2BzxX2SPdW3wFPKcw6tDIaiG_ytryRIOZRNHyb3TgcnY0H0

An inside account of the extraordinary effort by The New York Times to evacuate more than 200 Afghans after the fall of Kabul, highlighting four exceptional young women as they forge a new life in America.

Kabul; August 15, 2021: The Taliban were coming.

 
The world watched in shock: After the longest war in American history, the Taliban swept into Kabul in a morning. Desperation reigned as the US pulled out. Some clung to the wheels of departing airplanes, only to fall to certain death. Reprisal was near-certain for anyone who had worked with Americans.
 
Marwa, the 21-year-old sister of a Times reporter, was in the vanguard of a fast-modernizing Afghanistan. That morning, she had ironed her pink dress for the first day of medical school. Instead, she had 30 minutes to pack her life into a backpack and flee. 
Across the world, Rebecca Blumenstein, a top Times editor, and a determined team scrambled to evacuate Kabul bureau’s Afghan employees and families. After a harrowing two-week ordeal, the FIRST WAVE OF refugees landed in Houston, and became part of the largest wave of refugees since the Vietnam War.
THE LAST FREE WOMEN is an intimate portrait of the journey of four brave young women as they seek to rebuild their lives. Marwa, Maryam, Mursal and Samira try to make the most of their precious freedom in America. They start over -- learning English, repeating college and forging identities – while back home, the Taliban bans the education of girls past sixth grade and women from leaving their homes alone.
 “Why is it always about the women?” Mursal despairs. Their gripping account wrestles with women’s rights to basic freedoms and aspirations. It is also a meditation on duty – what we owe to those who work with Americans abroad, those who seek freedom, and the humanity that links us all.

Rebecca Blumenstein spent 22 years at THE WALL STREET JOURNAL, rising to Deputy Editor-in-Chief, before joining THE NEW YORK TIMES in 2017 as Deputy Managing Editor. She served as deputy editor, Publisher’s Office, from February 2021 to May 2022, working closely with NEW YORK TIMES Publisher A.G. Sulzberger to support the paper’s rapidly growing journalism operations. In 2023, she moved to NBC, where she is President, Editorial, of NBC News. She was named chair of the board of the Columbia Journalism Review in August 2022, and also serves on the board of the Wallace House/Center for Journalists at The University of Michigan and as a final judge of the Gerald Loeb Awards. She led the team that won the 2007 Pulitzer Prize for international reporting and received the New York Newswomen’s Award in 1993, the Gerald Loeb Award in 2003, and was named to the Aspen Institute’s Henry Crown Fellowship for 2009. More information is available here: https://www.nbcuniversal.com/leadership/rebecca-blumenstein.
 
Diana Kapp is a journalist who writes frequently about the intersection of women and modern culture, and has traveled in Afghanistan to report on the education of girls in the country’s rural northern provinces.

Blumenstein & Kapp are joined in conversation with Andrea Mitchell, NBC News’ Chief Washington and Chief Foreign Affairs Correspondent. A veteran political correspondent, Mitchell has covered every presidential campaign since 1980 as well as reporting on national security issues across all NBC News platforms. From 2008 to 2025, Mitchell hosted Andrea Mitchell Reports on MSNBC.

Mursal Rahim is a Cornell MPA graduate with a concentration in Human Rights and Social Justice and a bachelor’s degree in law from Afghanistan. She works in Immigration and Refugee Services. Her work focuses on human rights, refugee protection, and advocacy for Afghan women and girls. 

PURCHASE:

https://politics-prose.com/book/9781538779002?ic_referral=HvC14qDJC3jn1oDXLitzajJyXlaiflsDfygkX_7E3cswM9s5ILeaiiVSYSPvDrJEfss68MapyB97Ww5-GKKUtjNosj5tZmqtNbPJinJ4OtaEwIGilxiVLugS8vWH7Iy_zsq9nnc

From two acclaimed legal scholars, a new history of the Supreme Court that overturns our most basic assumptions about its role in our democracy, showing how it seized the power it now wields.

The Supreme Court claims the extraordinary power to strike down laws passed by Congress—and for more than a century now, it has used this power to undermine democracy. But does the Constitution force us to live under the rule of nine robed lawyers? In this remarkable work, Harvard Law professors Nikolas Bowie and Daphna Renan dismantle “judicial supremacy,” the myth that the Court should have the final say on what the Constitution means. Far from an eternal principle, judicial supremacy gained prominence only in response to Reconstruction, when the Court took it upon itself to safeguard the interests of capital and white supremacy.

Bowie and Renan trace how this distorted vision of constitutional authority has remade the country. Along the way, they challenge how liberals understand the Court’s most celebrated rulings, showing that the left has unwittingly subscribed to the very ideology that now threatens it. Recovering a lost constitutional tradition—one forged by abolitionists, labor leaders, and civil rights pioneers—Supremacy calls for power to be returned to where the Constitution put it: Congress.

Nikolas Bowie is the Louis D. Brandeis Professor of Law at Harvard Law School and a former clerk to Justice Sonia Sotomayor.
Daphna Renan is the Peter B. Munroe and Mary J. Munroe Professor of Law at Harvard Law School and a former clerk to Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg.

Bowie and Renan are in conversation with Sherrilyn Ifill.

PURCHASE:

https://politics-prose.com/book/9781324092803?ic_referral=j9PKF-nkcLDsNrDqkaZVpbl83udGansm7O2T5gU-TtMwM2t3_AGH_cXImEsMxv9AGE61SEpccxGDzIxO_nreiQtXSY0mwwwj-oxjy8TrwMFfUKAlio6WpDMfFFmovo-fx3o-3g8

A scathing investigation into the apocalyptic thinking of the Christian nationalists, tech-bro reactionaries, and populist survivalists who increasingly define the contemporary right—and a recipe for how to fight them. 
As the planet burns and shared reality melts, a new iteration of the far right is on the march. How can we understand this dangerous new development, and what resources can we draw on to resist it? In their scathing assessment of the contemporary scene, the celebrated activists and authors Naomi Klein and Astra Taylor explore how the religious fundamentalists, Silicon Valley technologists, and ethno-nationalists who make up this apocalyptic alliance share more than one might think: they are united in their belief that some kind of cleansing cataclysm is coming, whether through the manifestation of messianic prophecy, the rampages of a resource- and job-consuming artificial intelligence, or the purported existential threat of immigration and cultural replacement. Rather than avoiding this conflagration, they welcome it, convinced they will be among the saved on the other side.
“End Times Fascism” is the ideology of the actors who strive to make the world unlivable and then seek to protect themselves from the fallout—whether by repairing to luxurious private islands, rocketing off to Mars, or bunkering the nation to keep their enemies at bay. The new survivalists have accumulated power, but they are far from impregnable. As Klein and Taylor show via original reporting and analysis, their many internal conflicts and contradictions and their nihilistic inability to envision a shared future, even for their ostensible allies, leave them vulnerable to a new kind of “pro-life” politics—rooted in reverence for our shared existence and regard for the earth we inhabit and must protect.

Naomi Klein is an award-winning journalist and documentary filmmaker, and the bestselling author of Doppelganger, No Logo, The Shock Doctrine, and other classic books, which have been translated into thirty-five languages. She is an associate professor of geography and a codirector of the Centre for Climate Justice at the University of British Columbia, and she writes a regular column for The Guardian. Doppelganger won the Women’s Prize for Non-Fiction and was named one of the ten best books of the year by New York, Slate, and Time.

Astra Taylor is an award-winning writer, activist, and documentarian, and a co-founder of the Debt Collective. She is the author of The People’s Platform, which won the American Book Award; Democracy May Not Exist, but We’ll Miss It When It’s Gone; and The Age of Insecurity. Taylor regularly writes for publications including The New Yorker and The New York Times. Taylor toured with the band Neutral Milk Hotel and was the 2023 CBC Massey Lecturer.

Klein and Taylor will be in conversation with Wajahat Ali, a tired, middle aged father of 3 kids who drives an Honda Odyssey Minivan and is now a Costco Executive Member. Previously, when he had hair, he was a contributor to The New York Times and CNN, author of the play The Domestic Crusaders, and co-host of "The Stream" on Al Jazeera America. Now, he edits The Left Hook Substack and writes a column for The Progressive.

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Grief, the transformative power of art, the meaning of family, and housing affordability are the subjects of this story about a young theater director returning to her childhood home after her mother's unexpected death.

Gwen Rivlin, 27, wants to keep the big, shabby house with a turret in which she and her mother both grew up, but everyone tells her it's crazy: too expensive and too suburban for her. Her schemes to stay in the house keep running up against single-family zoning laws and the disapproval of the neighbors. To help the town wrestle with the way it's changing, and to assuage her grief, Gwen stages a production of Chekhov's The Cherry Orchard--a play about a family struggling to hold onto its own real estate--in the turret house, casting friends, coworkers from the local coffee shop, and various community members, including her estranged-best-friend's mother. Through the creation of this beautiful and transitory work of art, Gwen heals old breaches, reevaluates her relationship with her difficult mother, and weaves a new, non-traditional family for herself.

Rachel Pastan's novel, In the Field, based on the life of Nobel Prize-winning geneticist Barbara McClintock, won the inaugural Science + Literature award from the National Book Foundation in 2022. She has also published three other novels: Alena, Lady of the Snakes, and This Side of Married. She is the literary director of Celia Bookshop in Swarthmore, Pennsylvania, and former chair of Swarthmore's housing affordability task force.

Pastan is in conversation with Matthew Klam, a recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship, a Robert Bingham/PEN Award, a Whiting Writer’s Award, and a National Endowment of the Arts. His first book, Sam The Cat and Other Stories, a finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book of the Year in the category of first fiction, was selected as a Notable Book of the Year by The New York Times, Esquire Magazine, The Los Angeles Times, The Kansas City Star, and by the Borders for their New Voices series. His second book, Who Is Rich?, was selected as Notable Book of the Year by The New York Times and The Washington Post, was nominated for the Center for Fiction First Novel Prize, and was named a best book of the year by Vogue. His work has been featured in The New Yorker, Harper’s Magazine, Esquire, GQ Magazine, and The New York Times Magazine. He currently teaches at Stony Brook University, and in the New Directions Program in Washington, DC. He’s taught creative writing in many places including Johns Hopkins University, St. Albans School, American University, and Stockholm University in Sweden.  

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Matilda loves logic and order, and now her structured world is falling apart—in a bookstore.

Former economics major Matilda is moving back to her hometown of Washington D.C. to care for her ailing mother, and she’s desperate for money. She takes a job at her neighborhood bookstore and tries, in vain, to make sense of illogical business of books. To make things worse, she’s forced to team up with a new hire—the enigmatic, flaky, larger-than-life, Sage—who shows up on her first day of work with zero administrative skills and her tiny, puffy, incessantly urinating dog that resembles an underfed rat. 

Something in the chaos begins to remind Matilda of her long-neglected creative side, and she starts to rediscover the person she once was before so much got in the way. But things get even more unmanageable when Matilda and Sage are tasked with putting together an event for the reclusive and controversial Dr. Jordan Rutabaga, a windbag of a public intellectual with a cult following that includes a number of people who would like to literally and figuratively see him dead. Rutabaga has a long list of alleged misdeeds, from plagiarism to failure to pay child support to stiffing the nanny. 

As the event date approaches, Matilda and Sage discover that Sage and Rutabaga have their own not uncomplicated past, adding yet another person to list of people who do not wish him well. Add in a lawsuit and an impending snowstorm along with the potentially sinister presence of Rutabaga himself, and Matilda is about to come undone. 

Bestselling author Susan Coll’s gastric, bookish, laugh-out-loud comedy of manners reminds us that sometimes things have to completely fall apart for them to perfectly come together. 

Susan Coll is the best-selling author of eight novels, including The Literati, Real Life and Other Fictions, Bookish People, and The Stager, a New York Times and Chicago Tribune Editor’s Choice. Her novel Acceptance was made into a television movie starring Joan Cusack. Her work has appeared in publications including the New York Times Book Review, the Washington Post, Washingtonian Magazine, Moment Magazine, NPR.org, and Atlantic.com. She is the events advisor at Politics and Prose Bookstore.

Coll is in conversation with Tope Folarin, a Nigerian-American writer based in Washington DC, who serves as Director of the Institute for Policy Studies and the Lannan Visiting Lecturer in Creative Writing at Georgetown University. He is the recipient of the Caine Prize for African Writing, the Whiting Award for Fiction, and a fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts, among other awards. Tope serves as a board member of the Avalon Theater in Washington DC, the Pen/Faulkner Foundation, and as a member of the President’s Council of Pathfinder. In addition, he will serve as the inaugural critic-at-large for The Georgia Review in 2025.

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Not long ago, celebrated journalist Allison Aubrey was having breakfast with her youngest child, who suddenly turned to her and said: Stop looking at me. In that moment, as her daughter signaled a need for independence, Aubrey felt a sting, like she’d been fired. She reminded herself: teenager, individuation. It’s her job to separate. But…ouch!
That moment was a microcosm of what felt like a crisis of both identity and purpose. Many women come upon such moments of bewilderment at midlife: Beyond being a mother, beyond work, who am I? After years of striving, how do we broaden our horizons past parenting and a paycheck? What else is out there, now that the badges of achievement have started to feel less important?
Aubrey had watched colleagues retire, leaving behind the frenetic pace and excitement of work life, only to flail from a lack of purpose and connection. If the smartest people she knew were struggling, who was thriving? Who was getting it right? To find the answers, she took a sabbatical and set out on a curiosity tour. She tuned her searchlight toward people oozing with energy and adventure. Deep within, she feared she wouldn’t find them, or that she would be disappointed. Maybe the best years are behind us?
What she discovered “changed my life,” Aubrey says. The result is her first book, Your Turn: How to Create a Midlife You Love, which answers the question What’s next? with an electrifying message and a winning and deeply practical road map to reimagine your life.
Aubrey presents a captivating collection of women, ages 45 to 105, who centered creativity, connection, and joy showing how it's possible to find meaning and momentum in midlife. She takes what she’s learned, from scores of fascinating women she met both on this journey and in her decades of reporting as a journalist, to give readers a playbook for what could be next. She weaves together incredibly powerful tools of rediscovery to help you reignite your passions and hit your stride in midlife and beyond.
She curates all the best tools to help readers answer a key question: Who am I now? She walks us through strategies to excavate our passions and rediscover what lights us up. She cuts through the clutter of health and self-improvement advice and offers readers indispensable, evidence-backed strategies to thrive. A kind of What Color Is Your Parachute? for middle age, this book provides us surprisingly simple yet specific steps we can take now to make the most of our third turns.
Aubrey combines the rigor her audiences have come to expect with the attunement, curiosity, and sense of service that have made so many of her health stories go viral. This book is for everyone seeking meaning and momentum. It is the new blueprint for your midlife reawakening, with an empowering, essential message for women: the best time of your life starts now.

Allison Aubrey is an award-winning science and health correspondent for NPR and a contributor to CBS Sunday Morning. Her stories can be heard on Morning Edition and All Things Considered. She is a founding host of Life Kit and the creator of the How to Thrive as You Age project. Aubrey is the winner of two James Beard Broadcast Media Awards, a National Press Club award for consumer reporting, and a New York Press Club Award for Excellence in Journalism.

Aubrey will be joined in conversation with NPR's Rachel Martin, the co-creator and host of Wild Card, an interview game show about life's biggest questions. She invites notable guests to play a card game that lets them open up about the memories, insights, and beliefs that have shaped their lives.

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From Congressman Jared Huffman, a behind-the-scenes look at the shocking extent of Christian nationalism’s reach in our government—and the fight to defend church-state separation.

Sinclair Lewis is said to have predicted, “When fascism comes to America, it will be wrapped in the flag and carrying the cross.” Democratic congressman Jared Huffman witnessed something eerily like that vision on January 6, 2021. That was his wake-up call to the shocking power of Christian nationalism.

No Prophets argues that Christian nationalism is now America’s most dangerous political movement. Huffman uncovers the landscape of this movement—who they are, what they want, and how they plan to get it—and reveals how it has destabilized our nation more than most recognize. Blending deep research with untold stories from inside our government, he examines how this violent confederation of religious extremists is undermining science, education, foreign policy, and the very architecture of our democracy. But, Huffman argues, it’s not too late.

Provocative and clear-eyed, No Prophets exposes an existential threat to our democracy and compels us to reclaim the values core to our secular republic.

Jared Huffman is a US congressman representing California’s 2nd District and the only elected official in either house of Congress to admit that he does not believe in God. He founded the Congressional Freethought Caucus, which he cochairs with Congressman Jamie Raskin, to promote sound public policy based on reason, science, and moral values. He lives in San Rafael, California.

Huffman is in conversation with Congressman Jamie Raskin, who proudly represents Maryland’s 8th Congressional District in the U.S. House of Representatives. The district includes most of Montgomery County and a small part of Prince George's County. Congressman Raskin was sworn into his fifth Term at the start of the 119th Congress on January 6, 2025. Rep. Raskin was chosen by the Democratic Caucus to be the Ranking Member of the House Committee on the Judiciary in the 119th Congress. Prior to his time in Congress, Raskin was a three-term State Senator in Maryland, where he also served as the Senate Majority Whip. He was also a professor of constitutional law at American University’s Washington College of Law for more than 25 years. He has authored several books, including the Washington Post best-seller Overruling Democracy: The Supreme Court versus the American People, the highly-acclaimed We the Students: Supreme Court Cases For and About America’s Students, and the New York Times #1 best-seller Unthinkable: Trauma, Truth and the Trials of American Democracy. Congressman Raskin is a graduate of Harvard College and Harvard Law School and is a former editor of the Harvard Law Review.

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From a Pulitzer Prize finalist and central figure in American poetry, a landmark collection of new and selected poems chronicling five decades of work marked by moral courage, radical empathy, and unflinching witness.
Over half a century, Carolyn Forché has exemplified how a poet’s voice can cut through the cacophony of an age and speak to our inexhaustible responsibility to each other. Otherwhere spans her groundbreaking career, including the poems crafted in her early twenties from Gathering the Tribes (1976), a world of “horse-breath weather” and the whispering aspens of her grandmother’s Slovak; the “poetry of courage and compassion” (Margaret Atwood) in The Country Between Us (1981); and the elegiac realm of In the Lateness of the World (2020), with its bygone friends, besieged cities, and dreams of the displaced.
Otherwhere gathers the finest poems of Forché’s body of work, selected by the poet herself, and includes a short new collection “If there is ink,” which lights a signal fire in a state of emergency. In these new poems, Forché sifts through the new ruins of the present, conjuring the early days of an emergency where people “pretend to live / as we have always lived,” and cautioning “There are no secrets to staying completely invisible so they are not included here.”
As Hilton Als writes in The New Yorker, “Toni Morrison once observed that there is no such thing as bigger than life: life is big. Forché, in her profoundly ambitious work, aims to capture that bigness, line by line.”

Carolyn Forché is an American poet, translator, and memoirist. Her books of poetry are In the Lateness of the World, Blue Hour, The Angel of History, The Country Between Us, and Gathering the Tribes. She has also published her memoir, What You Have Heard Is True. In 2013, Forché received the Academy of American Poets Fellowship given for distinguished poetic achievement. In 2017, she became one of the first two poets to receive the Windham-Campbell Prize. She is a University Professor at Georgetown University. She lives in Maryland with her husband, photographer Harry Mattison.

Forché is in conversation with Maureen Corrigan, book critic for NPR's Fresh Air, and The Nicky and Jamie Grant Distinguished Professor of the Practice in Literary Criticism at Georgetown University. She is an associate editor of and contributor to Mystery and Suspense Writers (Scribner) and the winner of the 1999 Edgar Award for Criticism. She has received the 2019 Nona Balakian Citation for Excellence in Reviewing by the National Book Critics Circle, the 2023 John Seigenthaler "Legends Award" and the 2023 Kukula Award for Excellence in Non-Fiction Reviewing from Washington Monthly Magazine.

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From internationally acclaimed historian Timothy W. Ryback, the chilling chronicle of how Adolf Hitler overturned a constitutional democracy in less than eight weeks

On September 25, 1930, Adolf Hitler appeared before Germany’s Supreme Court and outlined his plans to destroy the Weimar Republic through democratic means. The judge asked, “So, only through constitutional means?” Hitler replied, “Jawohl!”

Barely two years later, on January 30, 1933, Hitler was appointed the fifteenth chancellor of the Weimar Republic. Within 53 days of that date, he had effected one of the most astonishing transformations in modern democracy, using the provisions of the Constitution to turn a democratic republic into an authoritarian state. Drawing from his 800-page political playbook, Mein Kampf, Hitler banned or neutered the print press and radio; purged the civil service and installed party loyalists; suspended civil liberties; compromised the courts; imposed Reich government control over the country’s seventeen federated states; slapped draconian tariffs on trading partners; co-opted, imprisoned, or drove political opponents into exile; assumed control over the central bank; and then compelled the Reichstag, the country’s legislative body, to pass an Enabling Act granting Hitler dictatorial power.

Charting the key events of those dramatic days in taut and compelling prose, Timothy W. Ryback evokes the raw political power and increasing inevitability of Hitler’s state capture, amid heroic efforts by journalists and social democrats to save the republic, underscoring the alarming observation in the introduction to Joseph Goebbels’ collected essays: “The big joke on democracy is that it provides its mortal enemies with the means to its own destruction.”

Timothy W. Ryback is director of the Institute for Historical Justice and Reconciliation in The Hague. He has written on the legacies of national socialism for The Atlantic, The New Yorker, The New York Times, and The Wall Street Journal. His books on Hitler, most recently Takeover: Hitler's Final Rise to Power, have been translated into more than 20 languages. He and his wife live in Europe.

Ryback is in conversation with Margaret Talbot, who has been a staff writer at The New Yorker since 2004, and was previously a Contributing Writer for The New York Times magazine, and executive editor of The New Republic.  She is the author of The Entertainer: Movies, Magic, and My Father's Twentieth Century and (with her brother David Talbot), By the Light of Burning Dreams: The Triumphs and Tragedies of the Second American Revolution. 

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From the celebrated author of the international bestseller The End of History and the Last Man and other books on the most important political questions of our time, comes a strikingly personal intellectual memoir.
Francis Fukuyama, a leading public intellectual, is well-known for his landmark, bestselling works of political philosophy and history. Here, for the first time, he charts his political and intellectual evolution across five transformative decades. We follow him from the circle of students around the conservative intellectual Allan Bloom at Cornell, into the halls of power in Washington and at the RAND Corporation, and into private conversations with world leaders from Muammar Qaddhafi to China’s powerful elite. Fukuyama touches on his family’s story, including his relatives’ internment during World War II along with other Japanese Americans. And, in surprisingly personal terms, he reflects on the experiences that led him to reevaluate his own thinking, most notably his dramatic public break with the neoconservative movement over the invasion of Iraq.
More than a conventional memoir, In the Realm of the Last Man is personal history as political history—the story of a life that illuminates the troubled fate of democracy and liberalism over the last fifty years. Returning to and developing the concepts that have been central to his work—recognition, thymos, trust, identity, human nature, institutions, and the Last Man—Fukuyama brings the depth and richness of personal experience and pathbreaking scholarship to illuminate the crises of the twenty-first century. 
Urgent, brilliant, and essential, Fukuyama’s In the Realm of the Last Man reveals a major thinker grappling in real time with the convulsions of history, and looking ahead to our possible future.

Francis Fukuyama is the Olivier Nomellini Senior Fellow at Stanford University’s Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies. He has previously taught at the Paul H. Nitze School of Advanced International Studies at Johns Hopkins University and at the George Mason University School of Public Policy. Fukuyama was a researcher at the RAND Corporation and served as the deputy director for the State Department’s policy planning staff. He is the author of Liberalism and Its Discontents, Identity, Political Order and Political Decay, The Origins of Political Order, The End of History and the Last Man, Trust, and America at the Crossroads: Democracy, Power, and the Neoconservative Legacy. He lives with his wife in California.

Fukuyama is joined in conversation with Laura K. Field, Scholar in Residence at the Niskanen Center in Washington, DC. A political theorist by training, she holds a PhD in government from the University of Texas at Austin, and has held faculty positions at Rhodes College in Memphis, Georgetown University, and American University. In addition to her academic work she has written for The New Republic, Politico, The Bulwark, Le Monde, The New York Times and The Atlantic. Her book Furious Minds: The Making of the MAGA New Right is now out with Princeton University Press. She lives in Washington, DC. 

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An urgent case that the survival of democracy depends on reinventing the press, with ten pioneering reforms to help journalism better serve the public—from the co-author of the classic The Elements of Journalism. 
The crisis in journalism reflects a crisis in American democracy. Faith in news outlets has dwindled, news deserts are expanding, and audiences are turning away from alarmist, partisan, and fragmented coverage.
In The Next Journalism, Tom Rosenstiel—veteran journalist, researcher, novelist, and co-author of The Elements of Journalism—argues that the roots of journalism’s failure are intellectual, not just financial or technological. He outlines ten fundamental ways journalism must change to become more useful, trustworthy, and collaborative with the communities it serves.
From redefining news as a service rather than a product, to embracing transparency, to harnessing AI responsibly, Rosenstiel provides a bold, practical framework for rebuilding a press that empowers citizens instead of alienating them. With case studies, historical insight, and forward-looking ideas, this book offers journalists, policymakers, and readers alike a roadmap to ensuring democracy’s survival in the twenty-first century.

Tom Rosenstiel is a journalist, media critic, researcher, novelist, and professor. He is the author of seven influential nonfiction books, including The Elements of Journalism, and four novels. Rosenstiel has been a press critic for the Los Angeles Times, chief congressional correspondent for Newsweek, press critic for MSNBC, and director of media studies at the Pew Research Center. He also led the American Press Institute and now serves as Eleanor Merrill Professor on the Future of Journalism at the University of Maryland. He lives in Washington, D.C.

Rosenstiel is joined in conversation with Asma Khalid & John Harwood. 

Asma Khalid is the co-host of a new daily news podcast that launched this September from the BBC called The Global Story. She’s based in Washington DC, with a co-host in London — and together they tell the stories of where the world and America meet. The show airs as a podcast here in the U.S. and around the world on the BBC World Service radio reaching tens of millions of people around the globe.  She got her start in journalism in her home state of Indiana, but fell in love with radio through an internship at the BBC Newshour in London during graduate school. She's a frequent guest on TV news programs such as ABC's This Week, CNN's Inside Politics and PBS's Washington Week. A native of Indiana, Asma is a graduate of Indiana University in Bloomington and the University of Cambridge. 

For four decades, John Harwood has covered the White House, Congress, national politics and the economy for America’s leading news organizations. He has interviewed every president from George H.W. Bush to Joe Biden. He was part of the Wall Street Journal team that won the Pulitzer Prize for coverage of 9/11, and received an Emmy nomination for his hour-long live CNBC town hall with President Barack Obama. Born in Louisville, KY, he grew up in suburban Washington and graduated from Duke University with a degree in history and economics. He spent a year as a Nieman Fellow at Harvard, and now chairs the Nieman Foundation Advisory Board.

A paradigm-shattering exploration of how we fight and how we build healthy conflict, from the author of The Art of Gathering
We say we want community. Successful teams. High-performing colleagues and workplaces. Dynamic friend groups. Yet many of us don’t understand the crucial element we need to forge long-lasting communities in our lives: healthy conflict.
In The Art of Fighting, Priya Parker explains that we can’t form and grow effective relationships without a fight. She rejects the idea that conflict is abnormal or that good groups don’t fight. All groups change and evolve; indeed, it’s because people disagree that good groups flourish.
As she did in the now-classic The Art of Gathering, Parker draws on her far-reaching experience as a conflict facilitator, her own detailed research, and real-world examples to lay out the ways that people can identify disputes, determine how to address them, and what to do if they are insurmountable. Whether people disagree in the boardroom or the locker room, on a playground or in church, online or in person, conflict is a part of life, and understanding healthy conflict and how to harness its power is more important than ever. The Art of Fighting is a vital primer to help all of us understand how to do that.

Priya Parker works to help people create collective meaning in their lives through gatherings. She is a master facilitator, strategic advisor, acclaimed author of The Art of Gathering: How We Meet and Why it Matters, and the host and executive producer of the New York Times podcast, Together Apart. Trained in the field of conflict resolution, Parker has worked on race relations on American college campuses and on peace processes in the Arab world, southern Africa, and India. She studied organizational design at M.I.T., public policy at the Harvard Kennedy School, and political and social thought at the University of Virginia. She lives with her husband and two children in Brooklyn, NY. @priyaparker

Parker is in conversation with Clint Smith, a staff writer at The Atlantic. He is the author of the narrative nonfiction book, How the Word Is Passed, and the poetry collections, Counting Descent and Above Ground.

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A unique look at Washington's landmark hotels and its cultural history

Any large city's marquee hotels are a great barometer of its social and cultural life. Washington DC, is exceptional in this regard, because visitors--from officials, diplomats, and lobbyists to everyday tourists--are so critical to the city's essential purpose as the nation's capital. The city's hotels have also been residences for locals and have served as important social centers, hosting events ranging from weddings and concerts to inaugural balls and the White House Correspondents Dinner.

Palaces of the Public is a lively, in-depth, highly illustrated, history and architectural tour of the city's hotels, past and present. John DeFerrari explores the fascinating evolution of hostelries, from the taverns of the eighteenth century, to the boarding houses of the pre-Civil War era, to the creation of the modern hotel. Special chapters address the history of hotels for women, tourist hotels, and hotels run by and for African Americans in the days of segregation. Later chapters highlight the rise of motels in the mid-twentieth century, boutique hotels in recent years, and the impact of historic preservation on saving old hotel buildings.

Readers interested in Washington's history, architecture, and historic preservation will be drawn to this book, with its unique perspective on how the city's culture and society developed over time.

John DeFerrari is a native Washingtonian with a lifelong passion for local history and historic preservation, which he writes about in his blog, "Streets of Washington." He is the coauthor of Sixteenth Street NW: Washington, DC's Avenue of Ambitions and several other books.

DeFerrari is in conversation with Carolyn Muraskin, founder of DC Design Tours. Trained as an architect, Carolyn worked as an architectural designer before founding DC Design Tours in 2015. She and her team of professional designers-turned-tour-guides lead tours and lectures exploring Washington's architecture, urban planning, and history through the built environment. Carolyn has partnered with organizations including the National Trust for Historic Preservation, the National Academy of Sciences, the Discovery Channel, and the Smithsonian Institution, where she also serves as a lecturer and guide.    

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https://politics-prose.com/book/9781647127305?ic_referral=gthi5IoONHvxngwvr7mw9t8M0N7Oyd1RMAqf4YEQ7lswM89pYB96r-le2LDQMyyUH19fdXo5AGMJPvqoMJNBK3hvz0YFYGoRq3cz2UPWh81f0BDhW1KlEwPH7F9kWvWNwi2O0UA

From the most celebrated translator of our time comes a visionary exploration of how translation reshapes and enriches our understanding of the ancient world.

Drawing on twenty years of scholarship and translation experience, Emily Wilson—renowned translator of Homer’s Odyssey and Iliad—explores the difficult choices that translators must make, the pleasures of finding new solutions to old problems, and the inevitable frustrations of never fully capturing what is in the original work. Across chapters that range from the politics of Helen of Troy to the obscenities of Aristophanes, from Roman imitation of Greek models to contemporary debates over “foreignizing” and “domesticizing” translation styles, Wilson examines how modern norms of gender, sexuality, violence, humor, and power complicate our readings of ancient works, and how translation always risks denaturing what is unique and strange about the ancient world. Brilliant, erudite, and yet accessible to readers with no classics background, Crossing the Wine-Dark Sea is at once an introduction to the wonders of Greek and Roman literature, a manifesto for the value of translation in a rapidly changing world, and an invitation to encounter ancient cultures anew.

"An enthralling and profoundly relevant book." —Salman Rushdie

"I adored reading these joyful, illuminating, and engrossing journeys through ancient literature." —Madeline Miller

Emily Wilson is a professor of classical studies at the University of Pennsylvania. She has been named a fellow of the American Academy in Rome, a Guggenheim Fellow, and a MacArthur Fellow. In addition to Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey, she has also published translations of Sophocles, Euripides, and Seneca. She lives in Philadelphia.

Wilson is in conversation with Claire Catenaccio, a scholar of Ancient Greek literature and its rich legacy in the modern world. She is the author of Monody in Euripides: Character and the Liberation of Form in Late Greek Tragedy (Cambridge University Press, 2023) and of numerous articles about ancient epic, drama, biography, and myth. As a dramaturg and director, she has worked extensively with contemporary productions of ancient plays. She teaches as a member of the faculty of Classics at Georgetown University.

PURCHASE:

https://politics-prose.com/book/9781324099406?ic_referral=SfXA6gw1K1Z660rR9kg7klSeP_fm8f4hJ0OyPP9R_iQwM6_ZZN7nyO0Xk9dFg7yNA9KlklyO5lxP9hetf-3DcWYOCRrDk_deQKOXvpFI4UFUchcCeu-t_xwGagXyuFDvL_pIw04

How Black painters use color to create meaning, provoke remembrance, stir emotion, and uplift the spirit

Color does more than capture a viewer's attention. It assaults one's equilibrium physically and psychologically. In this stunning book, Richard Powell draws on the concept of "colorstruck," a twentieth-century slang term describing prejudice toward people with darker skin complexions, to provide a new history of Black American art.

Powell charts the dynamics of paint and pigment in the works of artists such as Jacob Lawrence, Alma Thomas, Raymond Saunders, Sam Gilliam, Herv T l maque, Jean-Michel Basquiat, Lynette Yiadom-Boakye, Nina Chanel Abney, and Henry Taylor. Using blue, green, yellow, orange, black, red, brown, and their combinations, he considers the historical and cultural contexts in which these colors unleash their visual magic and shows how the artists' vibrant palettes collide with undercurrents of race in unanticipated and thought-provoking ways. Powell shares compelling insights into the powerful chromatic forces manifested through artists' actions and viewers' reactions.

A landmark work by an acclaimed art historian, this richly illustrated book offers a dazzling look at the transformative use of color by some of today's most exciting painters, revealing how hue and pigmentation strike a chord for freedom and reclamation in life as well as art.

Published in association with the Center for Advanced Study in the Visual Arts, National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC

Richard J. Powell is the John Spencer Bassett Distinguished Professor of Art and Art History at Duke University. His many books include Going There: Black Visual Satire, Cutting a Figure: Fashioning Black Portraiture, and Homecoming: The Art and Life of William H. Johnson.

Powell is in conversation with Tope Folarin, a Nigerian-American writer based in Washington DC, who serves as Director of the Institute for Policy Studies and the Lannan Visiting Lecturer in Creative Writing at Georgetown University. He is the recipient of the Caine Prize for African Writing, the Whiting Award for Fiction, and a fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts, among other awards. Tope serves as a board member of the Avalon Theater in Washington DC, the Pen/Faulkner Foundation, and as a member of the President’s Council of Pathfinder. In addition, he will serve as the inaugural critic-at-large for The Georgia Review in 2025.

PURCHASE:

https://politics-prose.com/book/9780691285160?ic_referral=Fwjj4aTQb5Zd7vWbbbLWNHhMB9gk9MYMbEqKoBLoaFcwM46F76ry-HUqYXkOR91-6cR98PKyjVhWVV-MZSb5u_RoLw1xXKwF_-gw-CMBK8-yd-LKzvooaLxX-nyxTnlEB3y3Ros

Following on the success of Tough Cases, called "A law buff's dream" by headbutler.com, Challenging Cases collects judges' firsthand stories of deciding cases when the world is watching

Most cases judges decide garner little public attention. But occasionally, a case is tried both in the courtroom and in the court of public opinion. In Challenging Cases, some of the country's leading jurists talk about the most high-profile cases they've handled--ones where the eyes of the world were upon them.

Whether the defendant was a beloved major league baseball player, a movie star, or a well-known sex-offender, or whether the topic addressed an especially contentious aspect of the culture wars, these cases played out before millions of on-lookers, adding a whole new dimension to what is already a Solomonic responsibility.

In their previous book, Tough Cases, called "an unprecedented view from the bench" by legal commentator Greta van Susteren, and "a genuine revelation" by Justin Driver in The Washington Post, Judges Canan, Mize, and Weisberg made us privy to the thought processes of judges making some of their hardest legal decisions. In Challenging Cases, over a dozen judges from courts in California, DC, Maine, Michigan, Minnesota, Virginia, Washington State, and even Kosovo speak to the added challenge of trials involving high-profile defendants. Cases include:

• The perjury trial of Roger Clemens
• The sentencing of January 6th rioters
• The case of Dr. Larry Nassar, accused of the sexual abuse of hundreds of female athletes
• The Kosovo international war crimes trial
• The Johnny Depp trial

Providing the fodder for a whole new season of Law and Order, Challenging Cases is for every actual and armchair legal beagle in the country.

Authors appearing in this talk include: Russell Canan, Regina Chu, Charles LaVerdiere, Reggie Walton, Dean Pineles, William Downing, Darlene Soltys, Gregory Mize, Dipti Pidikiti-Smith, Ana Reyes, and Fred Weisberg.

PURCHASE BOOK:

https://politics-prose.com/book/9798893850208?ic_referral=lY2m7wBaTu8YkcuqEkTaip1JBZFs7As5KJ9x2c-11R4wM3F_y_Qgq7Gu0AH__pGwdo4WTZzhBbw7A3decKliWif8Q-Mi6Qkge5zuCM6Z0qXU7agZMxqtd_MiwHL-OCYwoPXpI0k

From the beloved creator of the wildly popular Sam O’Nella Academy YouTube channel, an irreverent and timely science fiction collection that offers a wry look at the not-so-distant future
Sam A. Miller, the creator behind Sam O'Nella Academy, has spent ten years teaching his 4.8 million subscribers about the past and the present. Here, he turns towards fiction—and the future…
A hyper advanced alien race seemingly solves all existential threats—no climate change, no nuclear weapons, no singularity crisis...and yet, in crisis we remain. Because humans are their own existential threat in the not dys- or u-topian, but simply “topian” world of this interconnected collection: In “Four Little Words” scientists discover the shocking truth about grass. In “Eggs For Roman,” a baboon with human intelligence gets cyberbullied. And in “Beat,” a young man must save his own life from the music that’s taken it hostage. 
Often funny and always profound, Still Lost bends reality just enough for it to become a mirror and takes its readers on a daring and strange ride—an ultra-timely, sardonic collection that feasts on the follies and earnest absurdities of humanity.

Sam A. Miller is an educational comedic YouTuber and Shorty Awards finalist with 4.8 million subscribers, known for his sardonic, MS-paint-illustrated videos on everything from pirates to Pliny to presidential pets. A life-long reader, this is his debut publication.

PURCHASE:

https://politics-prose.com/book/9780143139553?ic_referral=6BJ_4Aw7d2ICKK32lXY-YI8dLxctkmEo2Ri30JTIDt8wM50xsFT6zM0WUEsqZ2WBaTAJMmWSa_Dsthjt0RuNiQ0PpwTtT_jV_EWPE03hejT9KYMwr61LlhXyaRLgNtPa82x53o8

A gripping historical account about the harrowing struggles of Japanese immigrants in the US during the years leading to World War II.
In 1872, a new Japanese government’s first diplomatic delegation to the United States was greeted with rapturous welcome in San Francisco. For over ten days of lavish parties, the city’s elite admired the emissaries’ silk robes and noble bearing and began forging what they expected would be a special relationship between ascendant Pacific nations. Three decades later, a young Japanese immigrant disembarked at the very same waterfront to a different reception. “I was baptized with horse dung,” Nisuke Mitsumori recalled. “This was my very first impression of America.” Mitsumori arrived in the first angry days of America’s war on Japanese immigrants, a populist convulsion that became one of the nation’s darkest episodes of ethnic strife. In the early 1900s, Japanese immigrants faced mob violence and property destruction. Exclusionary laws restricted Japanese immigrants’ rights to own property, vote, and marry outside their race. Tensions intensified until 120,000 Japanese Americans were imprisoned in camps during World War II.
The Distance Between Our Names is the story of the early battles over Japanese immigration—the less dramatic, more insidious chapter. Esteemed journalist Paul Richter researched hundreds of memoirs, public records, news reports, and oral histories to deliver an urgent account of immigration history. This highly relevant book is enlivened by intimate stories of the newcomers—high and humble—such as the children banned from public schools, farmers struggling in a system rigged against them, the women who were swindled into marriages resulting in lifetimes of hardship, immigrant leaders battling to forestall punitive laws. Taken together, The Distance Between Our Names is a stunning narrative of resilience and struggle, a gripping story of one community’s brave fight for dignity in the face of savage discrimination.

Paul Richter has written about national affairs and foreign policy for four decades. As a journalist for the Los Angeles Times, he was based in Los Angeles, New York, and Washington, DC, and reported from sixty countries. During his years in Los Angeles he was principal author of California and the American Tax Revolt: Proposition 13 Five Years Later. His last book was The Ambassadors: America’s Diplomats on the Front Lines. The volume won the American Academy of Diplomacy’s Douglas Dillon Award for Books of Distinction on the Practice of American Diplomacy. He lives in the Washington, DC, area.

Richter is in conversation with Kathryn Tolbert, a journalist with The Washington Post for more than 25 years, as an editor, reporter, and correspondent in Tokyo. She is the author of the oral history archive at www.warbrideproject.com and was a co-director of the documentary film Fall Seven Times Get Up Eight: The Japanese War Brides.  She is currently executive director of The War Bride Experience, Inc., a nonprofit organization that has partnered with the Smithsonian Institution Traveling Exhibition Service and the National Museum of American History to create the traveling exhibition “Japanese War Brides, Across a Wide Divide.”

PURCHASE:

https://politics-prose.com/book/9781668031186?ic_referral=UY__guJdERTgm6Affc8lxycuvcSMqkF4ToW6l4_q6TMwM1YoRJNXrMEhO3Fw0FIUfj2PhWLyu9gJGL_t8qPuQXroPeoO-NeIE1JwAwRNv3ge-HXDx1TKlYzYLNyLOZPdXjdmxdA

How the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire exposed New York City elites and laid the foundations for modern charity

Fire in the Heart of the City details the riveting story of what happened when a tragic fire in Greenwich Village threw Adolph Ochs, the ambitious new publisher of the New York Times, and Rose Schneiderman, a defiant young labor organizer, against each other in a momentous conflict. Following the 1911 Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire--the worst disaster New York City had ever experienced--a significant feud emerged between New York's wealthy elite and labor rights' activists over who should organize the city's response: a nascent charity sector led by the city's wealthiest bankers or the reform-focused unions of Lower Manhattan.

This revelatory account captures the rapid ascent of modern charity in America. David Conrad-Pérez details more than the disaster. He recreates what happened next, a watershed moment when a handful of charities on the brink of irrelevance were suddenly recast as New York's best answer to addressing the social and economic conditions responsible for the fire, a story long buried by destroyed files and hidden partnerships. Drawing on newly released archival documents, previously confidential reports, private diaries, and interviews, Conrad-Pérez uncovers the unprecedented campaign that advanced a small group of bankers and social elites and their idea for a new type of charity. The very people blamed for creating the problem became experts on the issues, saving the reputations of everyone involved--until now.

Fire in the Heart of the City is an absorbing portrait of an extraordinary moment in the formation of modern American charity, casting new light on its profoundly dangerous and misunderstood legacy.

David Conrad-Pérez is a media historian and the research director of the Center for Media & Social Impact at American University.

Conrad-Peréz is in conversation with Heather Boushey, a professor of practice at the Kleinman Center where she runs the EconClimate Lab. Boushey is one of the nation’s most influential voices on economic policy.

PURCHASE:

https://politics-prose.com/book/9781479837700?ic_referral=gc3lNo_QaWiezB5-fDiIzYfkMZLtKVk9SBwo7YVPl18wM72WE1Mvt1QD9VqBxDE7V7quAYYWuvpeLpgzPoMyxr1WSh8rqpcv8ISmQZRK2qD1t10OqYmU6fJaMWpp6p5DnFdny3g