Politics and Prose Presents

At the height of the civil rights movement, Charles C. Diggs Jr. (1922-1998) was the consummate power broker. In a political career spanning 1951 to 1980, Diggs, Michigan's first Black member of Congress, was the only federal official to attend the trial of Emmett Till's killers, worked behind the scenes with Martin Luther King Jr., and founded the Congressional Black Caucus. He was also t...

Epic and Lovely  is the swan song of Nina Simone Blaine, the daughter of a long-dead 1950s Vegas crooner and a Texas beauty queen forty years his junior. In the wake of her unexpected divorce, Nina returns to her hometown of Los Angeles to spend her final days with The Friends of the Good Thumb, a support group for patients with A12 Fibrillin Deficiency Syndrome, a genetic disorder that affects ch...

Lithium, a crucial input in the batteries powering electric vehicles, has the potential to save the world from climate change. But even green solutions come at a cost. Mining lithium is environmentally destructive. We therefore confront a dilemma: Is it possible to save the world by harming it in the process? Having spent over a decade researching mining and oil sectors in Latin America, Thea Riof...

Contrary to popular belief, the secret to living longer is not just about eating well, exercising, or getting regular checkups. Instead, successful aging depends on the nature of your relationships and your social connections. If you want to live a healthy and rewarding life, you need to start with  social health . In   Healthy to 100 , longevity expert Ken Stern takes us on a journey to some of t...

For three decades following World War II, the Great Lakes overtook Europe as the epicenter of global economic strength. The region was the beating heart of the world economy, possessing all the power and prestige Silicon Valley does today. And no ship represented the apex of the American Century better than the 729-foot-long  Edmund Fitzgerald --the biggest, best, and most profitable ship on the L...

June 2011: a man fleeing the Arab Spring on a refugee boat surrenders himself to Italian authorities. He claims that, as a terrorist, he is responsible for the deaths of American soldiers. This unexpected surrender sets off an unlikely chain of events and one of the most significant, but little-known, cases in American history. When federal prosecutors Dave Bitkower and Shreve Airial get the call...

This event will be in partnership with  Free DC . Attacks on schools and teachers have long been a hallmark of fascist regimes: One of Hitler's first tasks after taking power was to force every teacher in the country to pledge fealty to the Nazi Party. Fascists fear teachers because teachers foster an educated and empowered population that can see past propaganda and scare tactics. Fascists fe...

We're living through the Enshittocene, the Great Enshittening, a time in which the services that matter to us, that we rely on, are turning into giant piles of shit. It's frustrating. Demoralizing. Even terrifying. Enshittification   identifies the problem and proposes a solution. When Cory Doctorow coined the term  enshittification , he was not just finding a funner way to say "thing...

In eight unflinching and stunningly crafted stories, Kanza Javed unspools the lives of characters desperately trying to forge a path for themselves on the margins of society. An addict teaches his young son to shoot feral dogs on the streets of Lahore. A Christian nurse gets drawn into a plan to trap the ghost of her patient's former lover. A Pakistani student in a small Appalachian town grapp...

Jodi’s path was anything but ordinary.  ONE FROM EACH COLUMN: My 46-Year Trek From Abusive Childhood To Elusive Motherhood  is an extraordinary memoir that chronicles her tumultuous journey through psychological and emotional abuse as a child, sometimes life-threatening choices, and three marriages in eight years before turning forty. With grit, humor, and an indomitable spirit, Jodi defied the od...

Sometimes hilarious, sometimes sad, and always compelling, the stories in this collection explore the many manifestations of being Jewish in a modern and largely secular world. Jennifer Anne Moses creates characters, mostly American, who are struggling with love, relationships, faith, tradition, and most of all family and the ties that bind. A professor of Jewish literature buys a lake house in th...

As children in Central Illinois, Kate and Martin were never told much about their mother's childhood in East Germany. And they rarely asked questions. They were too busy grappling with the heartache left behind by an absent father and the tough love of a mother forced to raise them alone in a country not her own. Decades later, when the Berlin Wall falls, Kate and Martin are faced with a diffi...

In 1940, with the Nazis sweeping through France, Henri Matisse found himself at a personal and artistic crossroads. His 42-year marriage had ended, he was gravely ill, and after decades at the forefront of modern art, he was beset by doubt. As scores of famous figures escaped the country, Matisse took refuge in Nice, with his companion, Lydia Delectorskaya. By defiantly remaining, Matisse was a so...

Politics and Prose is pleased to announce the fourth in a series of discussions meant to keep our community informed and engaged during this exceptional period in our nation’s political history.  The Trump administration has wasted no time pushing an agenda that favors fossil fuel production over environmental regulation, and its actions threaten to quicken changes in our climate for the worse.  ...

Driven  brings a seasoned perspective to today's conversations about government, media, and the future of truth in the form of a long-awaited autobiography by Tom Johnson, an award-winning journalist who helped shape the twenty-four-hour news media as we know it. Johnson's storied career in politics and journalism spans the Lyndon B. Johnson administration, where he was privy to painful ne...

From pandemics to the climate crisis, humanity faces tougher challenges than ever. Whether it's the health of our people or the health of our planet, we know we are on an unsustainable path. But our efforts to effectively tackle these existential crises are now hampered by a common threat: politically and ideologically motivated opposition to science. Michael E. Mann and Peter J. Hotez are two...

On October 7, 2023, Hamas fighters killed more than eleven hundred Israelis and took more than two hundred hostages, prompting an Israeli response that has in turn taken tens of thousands of lives and devastated the Gaza Strip. Why did this happen, and can anything be done to grant peace and justice to Israelis and Palestinians alike? In  Tomorrow Is Yesterday , the analyst Hussein Agha and the di...

Jane Leavy has always loved baseball. Her grandmother lived one long, loud foul ball away from Yankee Stadium--the same grandmother who took young Jane to Saks Fifth Avenue and bought her her first baseball glove. It's no coincidence that Leavy was covering the game she loved for the Washington Post by the late 1970s. As a pioneering female sportswriter, she eventually turned her talent to boo...

Reality Winner was a twenty-five-year-old translator for the NSA when she saw a document that she assumed would make headlines: After public silence by the NSA and blatant lies by the Trump administration, the 2016 US election was far from secure. She impulsively printed the document--a breach of NSA protocol--stuffed it into her stockings, left the building, and mailed it to  The Intercept , whic...

The Tragedy of True Crime  is a first-person journalistic account of the lives of four men who have killed, written by a man who has killed. Lennon entered the New York prison system with a sentence of 28 years to life but after he stepped into a writing workshop at Attica Correctional Facility, his whole life changed. Reporting from the cell block and the prison yard, Lennon challenges our obsess...

In 2023, hundreds of AI luminaries signed an open letter warning that artificial intelligence poses a serious risk of human extinction. Since then, the AI race has only intensified. Companies and countries are rushing to build machines that will be smarter than any person. And the world is devastatingly unprepared for what would come next. For decades, two signatories of that letter--Eliezer Yudko...

In brutally repressive sixteenth-century England, artists had been frightened into dull conventionality; foreigners were suspect; popular entertainment largely consisted of coarse spectacles, animal fights, and hangings. Into this crude world came an ambitious cobbler's son with an uncanny ear for Latin poetry--a torment for most schoolboys, yet for a few, a secret portal to beauty, visionary...

Amid a global pandemic, one young woman is trying to keep the pieces together - of her family, stunned by a devastating loss, and of her mind, left mangled and misfiring from a mystifying disease. She's afraid of her own floorboards, and "WHAT IS LOVE? BABY DON'T HURT ME" plays over and over in her ears. She hates her friends, or more accurately, she doesn't know who they are...

Every discussion of sexual ethics revolves around  consent , but is this notion enough to help us understand good sex? How does the dominance of consent help or prevent us from negotiating the complexities of intimacy and pleasure? Georgetown professor Quill R Kukla argues that the idea that consent is the gatekeeper between the realms of good and bad sex does not give us the tools we need to navi...

Common knowledge is necessary for  coordination , for making arbitrary but complementary choices like driving on the right, using paper currency, and coalescing behind a political leader or movement. It's also necessary for  social  coordination: everything from rendezvousing at a time and place to speaking the same language to forming enduring relationships of friendship, romance, or authorit...