Politics and Prose Presents

Rachel Kolb was born profoundly deaf the same year that the Americans with Disabilities Act was passed, and she grew up as part of the first generation of deaf people with legal rights to accessibility services. Still, from a young age, she contorted herself to expectations set by a world that prioritizes hearing people. So even while she found clarity and meaning in American Sign Language (ASL) a...

In May 1894, President Grover Cleveland gave a speech thanking those who gathered “to worship at this national shrine.” He was not referring to the battlefields at Gettysburg or Antietam, nor to Mount Vernon, but to the gravesite of Mary Ball Washington, mother of George. While dedicating the new monument that marked it in Fredericksburg, Virginia, Cleveland honored “the woman who gave our Nation...

Surviving Paris  is not  Emily in Paris . It's not a story of moving to the City of Light, meeting a dashing Frenchman, and raising beret-wearing  enfants.  It is not a romantic fantasy. It is a true story about a young, Black single woman and what happens when your Paris dream turns into a Paris nightmare. After more than a decade as a journalist and television producer, Robin Allison Davis d...

This event will be in partnership with the  Washington Literacy Center .  Even before they were recognized as citizens of the United States, Black women understood that the fights for civil and human rights were inseparable. Over the course of two hundred years, they were at the forefront of national and international movements for social change. From worldwide travel and public advocacy in the gl...

Moon landings and space walks once captivated the public's attention. But, in recent decades, the U.S. space enterprise has felt moribund. Now, that's finally about to change. A fleet of powerful new rockets is poised to take humans into the cosmos more than ever before. A lunar land rush has sparked a geopolitical competition among nations. And the world's two richest men have engaged...

In  Breaking Chains, Building Futures: Pathways to Redemption, Education, and Excellence ,  activist and endocrinologist Dr. Stanley Andrisse brings together a profoundly moving collection of first-hand accounts from individuals impacted by various lengths of incarceration. This powerful book sheds light on the struggles, triumphs, and enduring hope of people navigating life under the weight of ha...

This is the inside story of one of the most extraordinary brands in the corporate world, the rare company that is driven by environmental activism instead of cutthroat capitalism. Founded in 1973, Patagonia has grown into a wildly popular producer of jackets, hats, and fleece vests, with a cultlike following among hardcore alpinists and Wall Street traders alike, posting sales of more than $1 bill...

Betty Jean, the author's grandmother, had a house along a bayou in Texas, a home paid for and run without a man by her side. This home served as the center of Bonét's family's universe, the one place that was a constant through all of life's changes. Mama Connie, one of Betty Jean's eleven children, vowed that her life would be different. And in many ways it was: she got marrie...

A few years ago, Trymaine Lee, though fit and only 38, nearly died of a heart attack. When his then five-year-old daughter, Nola, asked her daddy why, he realized that to answer her honestly, he had to confront what almost killed him--the weight of being a Black man in America; of bearing witness, as a journalist, to relentless Black death; and of a family history scarred by enslavement, lynching,...

Eric Foner has done more to shape the public and professional understanding of American history than any other scholar. The preeminent historian of the Civil War era, Foner's keynote has been American freedom and its changing meanings and boundaries. We see in his award-winning works how freedom has been a birthright for some and a struggle for others, that rights gained can also be lost, that...

Blue Opening , Chet'la Sebree's brilliant, illuminating poetry collection, grapples with origins--of illness, of language, of the universe--as the speaker contemplates whether she, too, can be a site of origin through motherhood. Navigating chronic health challenges alongside grief and questions about the nature of knowledge and religion, she searches personal history and the cosmos for an...

Jeannie Vanasco's mother starts using the silent treatment not long after moving into the renovated apartment within Jeannie's home. The silences begin at any perceived slight. Her shortest period of silence lasts two weeks. Her longest, six months. As Vanasco guides us through her mother's childhood, their shared past, and the devastating silence of their present, she paints a layered...

Over the fifty years that Lorne Michaels has been at the helm of  Saturday Night Live,  he has become a revered and inimitable presence in the entertainment world. He's a tastemaker, a mogul, a withholding father figure, a genius spotter of talent, a shrewd businessman, a name-dropper, a raconteur, the inspiration for Dr. Evil, the winner of more than a hundred Emmys--and, essentially, a myste...

Higher education is under assault from all sides. Scandals, protests, and dramatic resignations dominate the news cycle, and the pressure has grown so severe that the average tenure of university presidents has fallen to less than six years. Even so,  Peril and Promise  insists, American universities provide the solutions to the ignorance and division that plague our society--but only if wise, cou...

In 2015, world leaders came together in Paris and signed an agreement to save the planet. Ten years later, we have made little progress on the ground, and the climate crisis is worse than ever. We've mostly figured out  what  we need to do, but not  how  to get it done--and time is running out. In this groundbreaking new book, World Resources Institute President and CEO Ani Dasgupta explores ...

Told from the perspectives of those in and around the pathways of money and power,  High Finance   is a debut novel that takes us inside one of the most volatile periods in Wall Street's history through the lens of Jed Czincosca, who came to Wall Street from Chicago in 1977 to get rich and rise to the pinnacle of American success. He did what it takes to make it to the top, letting nothing hol...

For close to a decade, technology analyst Dan Wang--"a gifted observer of contemporary China" (Ross Douthat)--has been living through the country's astonishing, messy progress. China's towering bridges, gleaming railways, and sprawling factories have improved economic outcomes in record time. But rapid change has also sent ripples of pain throughout the society. This reality--pol...

Every year, we are dangerously warping the climate by putting gigantic amounts of carbon dioxide into the air. But CO2 isn't merely the by-product of burning fossil fuels--it is also fundamental to how our planet works. All life is ultimately made from CO2, and it has kept Earth bizarrely habitable for hundreds of millions of years. In short, it is the most important substance on Earth. But ho...

As heat waves, wildfires, storms, and floods become ever more deadly, it has become apparent that we have a shared stake in protecting the air, water, and climate--for ourselves and for future generations. There is a groundswell of action as citizens of all ages struggle to address the problem--some commit civil disobedience or move money out of fossil fuels. In  Common Ground , veteran Quaker act...

Alongside the rise of mass incarceration, a second profound and equally disturbing development has transpired. Since the 1980s, US policing and punishment have been remade into tools for stripping resources from the nation's most oppressed communities and turning them into public and private revenues.  Legal Plunder   analyzes this development's origins, operations, consequences, and the p...

On New Year's Eve, 1977, on a state visit to Iran, President Jimmy Carter toasted Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, King of Kings, Light of the Aryans, Shadow of God on Earth, praising Iran as "an island of stability " due to "your leadership and the respect and admiration and love which your people give to you." Iran had the world's fifth largest army and was awash in billio...

War changes every part of human culture: art, education, music, politics. Why should food be any different? For nearly twenty years, Michael Shaikh's job was investigating human rights abuses in conflict zones. Early on, he noticed how war not only changed the lives of victims and their societies, it also unexpectedly changed the way they ate, forcing people to alter their recipes or even stop...

As the seventeenth century burns to a close in Tidewater, Virginia, America's character is wrought in the fires of wealth, race, and freedom. Young Bless, the only child left to her enslaved mother, stubbornly crafts the terms of her vital existence. She stands as the lone bulwark between her mother and irreparable despair, her mother's only possibility of hope, as Bless reshapes the bound...

Nobody knows quite who Rudolph Sullivan is, or how he ascended so quickly to the glittering top of New York's art scene. When aspiring artist and struggling gallery assistant Ingrid meets the charismatic dealer at a party, she falls fast--Rudolph offers her a seductive taste of luxury and an escape from her humdrum existence.  But Rudolph is hiding much more than his dazzling facade lets on. W...

Ophelia Blue Rivers is a descendant of Cherokee Freedmen: Blacks formerly enslaved by rich southern Cherokee. She is "Black" but doesn't understand why that makes her different. She is "Cherokee" but struggles to know what that means. Their town of Etsi--once a reservation--still lives with the wounds of its disbanding. When the town, and the river that sustains it, are put...