Politics and Prose Presents

With Rax King's trademark blend of irreverent humor and heartfelt honesty comes a new collection of personal essays unpacking bad behavior. Sloppy explores sobriety, begrudging self-improvement, and the habits we cling to with clenched fists. In "Proud Alcoholic Stock," King examines her parents' unwavering dedication to 12 step programs and the texture her family history has lent to her own sobri...

Every premodern society, from Sumeria to China to seventeenth-century Europe, knew that bad words could destroy lives, undermine social order, and create political unrest. Given the obvious dangers of outspokenness, regulating speech and print was universally accepted as a necessary and proper activity of government. Only in the early 1700s did this old way begin to break down. In a brief span of...

Whatever the cause--and everyone has a theory--it's the Crime of the Decade when glamorous Georgia Cartwright, who was adopted as a newborn, is accused of killing the biological daughter of her wealthy, Southern family. Georgia is locked in a psychiatric institution where the most violent offenders are held while she awaits trial. The only words she whispers when her estranged twin sister Aman...

At the height of the Cold War, as a high school freshman, CNN's Jill Dougherty developed an obsession with Russia. Over the next half-century, she studied in Leningrad, traveled across the Soviet Union, lived in Moscow, and reported on the presidencies of Mikhail Gorbachev, Boris Yeltsin, and Vladimir Putin. Jill's life, and Putin's, intersected. They studied at the same Russian univer...

In recent years, the Nordic countries have been the envy of the world for their economic success, their institutional stability, and their consistently high levels of social happiness. But are they  socialist ? Some prominent members of the American Right certainly think so, and in this book they may find a surprising ally. Pelle Dragsted is a member of the Danish parliament and the leader of the...

 Ben Mattlin was born in 1962 with spinal muscular atrophy, a congenital and progressive neuromuscular weakness. He never stood or walked but grew up expecting a normal life. In this book of essays, he chronicles that life and also charts his growth as a reluctant disability activist and public intellectual. Mattlin's disability was from birth. Raised in a family that insisted that he be educa...

In 2019, the government of Prime Minister Narenda Modi revoked Aatish Taseer's Indian citizenship, thereby exiling him from the country where he grew up and lived for thirty years. This loss, both practical and spiritual, sent him on a journey of revisiting the places that formed his identity, and asking broader questions about the complex forces that make a culture and a nationality, in the p...

In this book of essays, over 40 successful writers in varied fields --poetry, science, the performing and visual arts, psychoanalysis, journalism, literature and more-- explore what drives them to write, and to work at their craft. In contributions arranged under three headings-- "Models and Mentors," "Urges and Traumas," and "Evidence and Experiences"--each writer ex...

This event is in partnership with  The Atlantic .  Exhibitionist:  In the early days of the pandemic, Peter Mendelsund and his family traveled up to a secluded New Hampshire farmhouse to weather the chaos. There began his journey through a crippling and seemingly intractable depression--which differed in degree but not in kind from episodes that have recurred periodically throughout his life--that...

Told with a page-turning pace,  New York Times  bestselling author and historian Scott Ellsworth has written the most compelling new book about the Civil War in years. Focusing on the last, desperate months of the war, when the outcome was far from certain,  Midnight on the Potomac  is a story of titanic battles, political upheaval, and the long-forgotten Confederate terror war against the loyal c...

Humanity has cleared a land mass the size of Asia plus Europe to grow food, and our food system generates a third of our carbon emissions. By 2050, we're going to need a lot more calories to fill nearly 10 billion bellies, but we can't feed the world without frying it if we keep tearing down an acre of rainforest every six seconds. We are eating the earth, an ingenious phrase coined by Mic...

From scraping patterns in sand to drawing intricate lines on vellum and paper, to charting every place on the planet, humans have used maps as a powerful storytelling medium. The advent of the digital age has revolutionized the creation, distribution, and consumption of maps. The web created enormous opportunities for storytelling, enabling maps to dance and weave, partnering with other multimedia...

This provocative debut from a bold new voice combines a fascinating range of research to show us the psychological and sociological factors that really shape our politics. Drawing from ancient philosophy to modern neuroscience and social science, Dr Sarah Stein Lubrano reveals the surprising truth about how people think and behave politically. From friendship to community organizing and social inf...

Decades after the end of World War II, the name Ravensbrück still evokes horror for those with knowledge of this infamous all-women's concentration camp, better known since it became the setting of Martha Hall Kelly's bestselling novel,  Lilac Girls . Particularly shocking were the medical experiments performed on some of the inmates. Ravensbrück was atypical in other ways as well, not jus...

For decades, Condé Nast and its glittering magazines defined how to live the good life in America. The brilliant, complicated, striving characters behind  Vogue ,  Vanity Fair ,  The New Yorker ,  GQ ,  Architectural Digest , and many other titles manufactured a vision of luxury and sophistication that shaped consumer habits, cultural trends, intellectual attitudes, and political beliefs the world...

A multifaceted genius, Toni Morrison transcended her role as an author, helping to shape an important period in American publishing and literature as an editor at one of the nation's most prestigious publishing houses. While Toni Morrison's literary achievements are widely celebrated, her editorial work is little known. Drawing on extensive research and firsthand accounts, this comprehensi...

From "brainrot" memes and incel slang to the trend of adding "-core" to different influencer aesthetics, the internet has ushered in an unprecedented linguistic upheaval. We're entering an entirely new era of etymology, heralded by the invisible forces driving social media algorithms. Thankfully,  Algospeak  is here to explain. As a professional linguist, Adam Aleksic under...

Michael Ansara was on the front lines. In this fascinating memoir, he traces an arc of discovery: from the hope and moral clarity of the Civil Rights Movement to the ten-year struggle to end the war in Vietnam, with its sit-ins, marches, confrontations, and antiwar riots. Ansara takes the reader into the minds of the activists detailing their successes as well as their mistakes.   The Hard Work of...

Grant's Enforcer   offers a gripping story of the early years after the Civil War and the campaign led by President Grant's attorney general Amos T. Akerman to destroy the Ku Klux Klan. Akerman, a former Georgia slaveholder and the only Southerner to serve in a Reconstruction cabinet, was the first federal lawman to propose using the Fourteenth Amendment to prosecute civil rights violation...

Few women of the American Revolution have come through 250 years of US history with such clarity and color as Angelica Schuyler Church. She was Alexander Hamilton's "saucy" sister-in-law, and the heart of Thomas Jefferson's "charming coterie" of artists and  salonnières  in Paris. Her transatlantic network of important friends spanned the political spectrum of her time...

For the teenaged Luc, his days are preoccupied with the daily dramas of high school. President John F. Kennedy's assassination seems a world away. But the winds of history find their way to his small Montana town as marijuana clouds rise in the hallways and the notices of neighborhood young men "Killed in Action" in Vietnam keep arriving at an increasing rate. Acclaimed novelist Jame...

At the turn of the century, the Central Intelligence Agency was in crisis. The end of the Cold War had robbed the agency of its mission. More than thirty overseas stations and bases had been shuttered, and scores that remained had been severely cut back. Many countries where surveillance was once deemed crucial went uncovered. Essential intelligence wasn't being collected. At the dawn of the i...

In the early hours of March 24th, 1976, the streets of Buenos Aires rumbled with tanks as soldiers seized the presidential palace and toppled Argentina's leader. The country was now under the control of a military junta, with army chief Jorge Rafael Videla at the helm. With quiet support from the United States and tacit approval from Argentina's people, who were tired of constant bombings...

When Iris Yvonne Bialosky died in an assisted care facility on March 29, 2020, it unleashed a torrent of emotions in her daughter, Jill Bialosky. Grief, of course, but also guilt, confusion, and doubt, all of which were compounded by the arrival of the COVID-19 pandemic which made it impossible for Jill to be with her mother as she was dying and to attend her mother's funeral. Now, with a poet...

The Bradford-Shmulkin family is falling apart. A very modern blend of Russian, Jewish, Korean, and New England WASP, they love one another deeply but the pressures of life in an unstable America are fraying their bonds. There's Daddy, a struggling, cash-thirsty editor whose Russian heritage gives him a surprising new currency in the upside-down world of twenty-first-century geopolitics; his wi...