Politics and Prose Presents

  When Jackie meets the charismatic congressman Jack Kennedy in Georgetown, she is twenty-one and dreaming of France. She has won an internship at  Vogue . Kennedy, she thinks, is not her kind of adventure: "Too American. Too good-looking. Too boy." Yet she is drawn to his mind, his humor, his drive. The chemistry between them ignites. During the White House years, the love between two i...

Desi Arnaz is a name that resonates with fans of classic television, but few understand the depth of his contributions to the entertainment industry. In  Desi Arnaz ,  Todd S. Purdum offers a captivating biography that dives into the groundbreaking Latino artist and businessman known to millions as Ricky Ricardo from  I Love Lucy . Beyond his iconic role, Arnaz was a pioneering entrepreneur who fu...

Mrs. Blossom has a knack for blending into the background, which was an asset during her days assisting private investigator Tess Monaghan. But when she finds a winning lottery ticket in a parking lot, everything changes. She is determined to see the world that she sometimes feels is passing her by. When Mrs. Blossom booked her cruise through France on the MS  Solitaire,  she did not expect to mee...

To many, the term "Black Capitalists" is oxymoronic. Black people were the labor force that built the infrastructure of American capitalism through the violent enforcement of legalized slavery, so they cannot, and should not, aspire to be the beneficiaries of it. But Wall Street professional and Yale-educated anthropologist Dr. Rachel Laryea poses a provocative question: What if there wa...

An arrest for cocaine possession on the last day of a sweltering New York summer leaves Smith, a queer Black Stanford graduate, in a state of turmoil. Pulled into the court system and mandated treatment, he finds himself in an absurd but dangerous situation: his class protects him, but his race does not. It's just weeks after the death of his beloved roommate Elle, the daughter of a famous sou...

Music and hula by  Halau Nohona Hawai'i . From an early age, Sara Kehaulani Goo was enchanted by her family's land in Hawai'i. The vast area on the rugged shores of Maui's east side--given by King Kamehameha III in 1848--extends from mountain to sea, encompassing ninety acres of lush, undeveloped rainforest jungle along the rocky coastline and a massive sixteenth-century temple wit...

Daily interactions between Jacob and Daniel are a powder keg of sexual tension and uncertainty. A recent Morehouse graduate and Brooklyn transplant, Jacob fears that accepting the truth of his sexuality will disappoint the hopes his parents have for him to lead a respectable life. Grieving the death of his mother while searching for answers about a father he has never known, Daniel, an Atlanta nat...

In  And Housing for All , founder of the National Homelessness Law Center Maria Foscarinis reveals the human impact of the housing crisis by sharing personal stories and examining the flawed policies that have perpetuated it. As millions face rising housing costs and encampments spread nationwide, she uncovers why past efforts have failed and what must change to achieve lasting solutions. Drawing...

María Fernanda  (she/hers) is a poet from DC. Her work explores the intimacy of sisterhood, the anchor of intergenerational coexistence, and grief. Awarded the Norma Elia Cantú Award in Creative Writing, her work appears in  The Healing Verse Poetry Line , Cave Canem’s  Dogbytes , Cheryl Clarke's  born in a bed of good lessons: poems inspired by the works of Lucille Clifton,  and more. She is...

Few people beyond South Carolina's Lowcountry knew of Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church in Charleston--Mother Emanuel--before the night of June 17, 2015, when a twenty-one-year-old white supremacist walked into Bible study and slaughtered the church's charismatic pastor and eight worshippers. Although the shooter had targeted the first AME church in the South in order to agitate r...

Is there a single change that could simultaneously protect democracy, spur progress on climate change, enact sane gun policies, and improve our response to the next pandemic? Yes: changing the class dynamics driving American politics. The far right manipulates class anger to undercut progressive goals and liberals often inadvertently play into their hands. In  Outclassed , Joan C. Williams explain...

In August 2017, over a thousand neo-Nazis, fascists, Klan members, and neo-Confederates descended on a small southern city to protest the pending removal of a statue of Robert E. Lee. Within an hour of their arrival, the city's historic downtown was a scene of bedlam as armored far right cadres battled activists in the streets. Before the weekend was over, a neo-Nazi had driven a car into a th...

They were crop dusters and debutantes, college girls and performers in flying circuses-all of them trained as pilots. Because they were women, they were denied the opportunity to fly for their country when the United States entered the Second World War. But Great Britain, desperately fighting for survival, would let anyone-even Americans, even women-transport warplanes. Thus, twenty-five daring yo...

The ultrarich hold more of America's wealth than they did in the heyday of the Carnegies and Rockefellers. Here, Evan Osnos's incisive reportage yields an unforgettable portrait of the tactics and obsessions driving this new Gilded Age, in which superyachts, luxury bunkers, elite tax dodges, and a torrent of political donations bespeak staggering disparities of wealth and power. With deft...

In 1983, Thomas Mallon was still unknown. A literature professor at Vassar College, he spent his days traveling from Manhattan to campus, reviewing books to make ends meet and searching the city for his own purpose and fulfillment. The AIDS epidemic was beginning to surge in New York City, the ever-bustling epicenter of literary culture and gay life, alive with parties, art, and sex. Though he did...

Juliet Bellow traces Rodin's interactions with dance makers and performers during his late career (1890-1912) through a series of interrelated case studies. His exchanges with Loïe Fuller, Vaslav Nijinsky, and members of the Cambodian Royal Ballet troupe were central to Rodin's development of a modern sculptural aesthetic and the construction of his artistic celebrity. But this was not a s...

When Emilia Fletcher finds herself trapped inside a Washington, DC Metro elevator, getting out is the least of her problems. Sharing the confined space with her are Em, a troubled teenager plagued by suicidal thoughts, and Millie, an elderly woman yearning to mend ties with her estranged daughter. As the hours drag on, hunger, exhaustion, and panic set in, revealing an almost incomprehensible trut...

Charles Sumner is mainly known as the abolitionist statesman who suffered a brutal caning on the Senate floor by the proslavery congressman Preston Brooks in 1856. This violent episode has obscured Sumner's status as the most passionate champion of equal rights and multiracial democracy of his time. A friend of Alexis de Tocqueville, an ally of Frederick Douglass, and an adviser to Abraham Lin...

In 1951, with the publication of  God and Man at Yale , a scathing attack on his alma mater, twenty-five-year-old William F. Buckley, Jr., seized the public stage--and commanded it for the next half century as he led a new generation of conservative activists and ideologues to the peak of political power and cultural influence. Ten years before his death in 2008, Buckley chose prize-winning biogra...

When a group of young Native Americans launches a series of protests against climate change and its effects on the waters and woods of Maine, veteran FBI agent Ryan Tapia is assigned to monitor the movement. The protestors, who become determined to split away from American society, are led by "Peeled Paul" Soco, a Malpense hermit who played a key role in one of Tapia's previous inves...

There is no flash of light, no crumbling, no quaking. Each person in New York wakes up on an unfamiliar block when the buildings all switch locations overnight. The power grid has snapped, thousands of residents are missing, and the Empire State Building is on Coney Island--for now. The next night, it happens again. Esme Green and Arjun Varma work for the City of New York's Emergency Managemen...

Hailed in the  New York Times  as "a naturalist who can unfurl a sentence with the breathless ease of a master angler," Robert Macfarlane brings his glittering style to a profound work of travel writing, reportage, and natural history.  Is a River Alive?  is a joyful, mind-expanding exploration of an ancient, urgent idea: that rivers are living beings who should be recognized as such in...

Seeking and achieving both a sense of self as an individual and a sense of belonging among others are two sides of the same coin. Our understanding and perception of these elements can have a profound effect on our lives, on our cultures, and on society as a whole. Writers often grapple with the nuances of the human condition, and indeed many of its mysteries can unfold in stories that explore ide...

Molly Jong-Fast is the only child of a famous woman, writer Erica Jong, whose sensational book  Fear of Flying  launched her into second-wave feminist stardom. She grew up yearning for a connection with her dreamy, glamorous, just out of reach mother, who always seemed to be heading somewhere that wasn't with Molly. When, in 2023, Erica was diagnosed with dementia just as Molly's husband d...

This event is in partnership with  WorldPride DC .  More than a century ago, Dr. Magnus Hirschfeld, dubbed the "Einstein of Sex," grew famous (and infamous) for his liberating theory of sexual relativity. Today, he's been largely forgotten. Journalist Daniel Brook retraces Hirschfeld's rollicking life and reinvigorates his legacy, recovering one of the great visionaries of the tw...