Politics and Prose Presents

This event is in partnership with  The Atlantic .  It takes tremendous biological creativity to be a plant. To survive and thrive while rooted in a single spot, plants have adapted ingenious methods of survival. In recent years, scientists have learned about their ability to communicate, recognize their kin and behave socially, hear sounds, morph their bodies to blend into their surroundings, stor...

When prize-winning reporter Sibylla Sumner checks into a monastery for a silent retreat, romance is the last thing on her mind. She plans to spend five meditative days surrounded by the beauty of the Shenandoah Valley – and apart from her famous husband and their crumbling marriage. James Fitzmaurice Kelly isn’t looking for romance either. He’s the Archbishop of Dublin, and has maintained a vow of...

This event will be in conversation with  The Atlantic .  When President Donald Trump returned to the White House in January 2025, news spread about his implementation of Project 2025, a nearly 1,000-page document published by the conservative think tank The Heritage Foundation. The debates--and anxiety--surrounding this initiative have only increased as authors of the Project assume positions of p...

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...

This event is in partnership with  The Atlantic . Every parent exists inside of two families simultaneously - the one she was born into, and the one she has made. Ten-year-old Margaret hides beneath a blackberry bush in her family's verdant backyard while her brother hunts for her in a game of flashlight tag. Hers is a childhood of sunlit swimming pools and Saturday morning pancakes and a devo...

Patriarchy has oppressed women and denied their contributions worldwide, but the United States of America has its own unique gendered hierarchy. Dr. Anna Malaika Tubbs applies her signature blend of approachable yet rigorous analysis in this definitive and groundbreaking history of American patriarchy. She proves that humanity in the United States is determined by gender in a limited and flawed bi...

Radical Reality   reveals how independent documentary makers around the world produce cinematic stories that speak truth to power-and why nonfiction storytelling matters for social justice. Pushing against increasingly difficult political and economic constraints, these tenacious filmmakers produce artistic nonfiction stories that stand up for freedom of expression, serve as witnesses to conflict...

When AI expert and investigative journalist Karen Hao first began covering OpenAI in 2019, she thought they were the good guys. Founded as a nonprofit with safety enshrined as its core mission, the organization was meant, its leader Sam Altman told us, to act as a check against more purely mercantile, and potentially dangerous, forces. What could go wrong? Over time, Hao began to wrestle ever more...

The ride was so wild that it forced a sitting president to drop his re-election bid, a once and future president to survive felony convictions and a would-be assassin's bullet, and a vice president, unexpectedly thrust into the arena, to mount an unprecedented 107-day campaign to lead the free world. Fight  is the backstage story of bloodsport politics in its rawest form--the clawing, backstab...

In  Freedom Season , acclaimed historian Peniel E. Joseph offers a stirring narrative history of 1963, marking it as the defining year of the Black freedom struggle--a year when America faced a deluge of political strife and violence and emerged transformed. Nineteen sixty-three opened with the centenary of the Emancipation Proclamation and ended with America in a state of mourning. The months in...

A food story to binge. A ghost story to devour. A love story to savor. Konstantin Duhovny is a haunted man. His father died when he was ten, and ghosts have been hovering around him ever since. Kostya can't exactly  see  the ghosts, but he can taste their favorite foods. Flavors of meals he's never eaten will flood his mouth, a sign that a spirit is present. Kostya has kept these  aftertastes  a s...

In the spring of 2024, former President Trump, flanked by his band of loyal supporters, was shuttled daily into a gloomy Manhattan courtroom to face a trial with monumental stakes -- for him, and for the country. Inside, a cast of larger-than-life characters awaited: tabloid impresario David Pecker; mess-making "fixer" Michael Cohen; counterpunching porn star Stormy Daniels; an enigmatic...

The 1980s are usually seen as a slick, shrill decade. The Ayatollah Khomeini and his followers urged "Death to America"; Ronald Reagan was in the White House, backed by the Moral Majority; John Paul II was asserting Catholic traditionalism and denouncing homosexuality, as were the televangelists on cable TV. And yet "crypto-religious" artists pushed back against the spirit of t...

In 2014, after losing several friends and relatives to cancer, an unassuming insurance underwriter in Hoosick Falls, New York, began to suspect that the local water supply was polluted. When he tested his tap water, he discovered dangerous levels of forever chemicals. This set off a chain of events that led to 100 million Americans learning their drinking water was tainted. Although the discovery...

From two of America's most respected journalists, an unflinching and explosive reckoning with one of the most fateful decisions in American political history: Joe Biden's run for reelection despite evidence of his serious decline--amid desperate efforts to hide the extent of that deterioration In Greek tragedy, the protagonist's effort to avoid his fate is what seals his fate. In 2024,...

Countries dealing with major conflict are rarely portrayed in a well-rounded light by the media. Images of disarray and decline saturate their narratives, ignoring the strength, resourcefulness, and ingenuity that arise from having to navigate conflict. With empathy, curiosity, and an insistence on sharing different aspects of human survival, Hawa Hassan gathers singular, multifaceted narratives f...

The   Battle for the Black Mind   is an explosive historical account of the struggle for educational justice in America. Drawing on over a decade of archival research, personal reflection, and keen sociological insight, this book traces a century of segregated schooling, examining how early efforts to control Black minds through education systems has laid the foundation for the systemic inequities...

In  On Muscle , Bonnie Tsui brings her signature blend of science, culture, immersive reporting, and personal narrative to examine not just what muscles are but what they mean to us. Cardiac, smooth, skeletal--these three different types of muscle in our bodies make our hearts beat; push food through our intestines, blood through our vessels, babies out the uterus; attach to our bones and allow fo...

Zbigniew Brzezinski was a key architect of the Soviet Union's demise, which ended the Cold War. A child of Warsaw--the heart of central Europe's bloodlands--Brzezinski turned his fierce resentment at his homeland's razing by Nazi Germany and the Red Army into a lifelong quest for liberty. Born the year that Joseph Stalin consolidated power, and dying a few months into Donald Trump'...

Nearly a millennium ago, Native Americans created lacrosse as a means of training warriors and settling disputes. Co-opted by whites in the late 1800s, played for a century largely at elite east coast colleges, over the past thirty years lacrosse has exploded around the world, becoming the fastest growing sport in the U.S. while exposing the fault lines of prejudice and privilege that continue to...

Pulitzer Prize-winning writer, editor, and TV host Jonathan Capehart on growing up, coming out, finding his voice, battles lost and won, and the path to a meaningful life Before meeting with success as a journalist, Jonathan Capehart struggled with his identity. Capehart grew up without his father and, as a child, lived with his mother in New Jersey and spent his summers living with relatives in N...

The struggle is universal: we work hard to lose weight, only to find that it slowly creeps back. In America, body weight has become a pain point shrouded in self-recrimination and shame, not to mention bias from the medical community. For many, this battle not only takes a mental toll but also becomes a physical threat: three-quarters of American adults struggle with weight-related health conditio...

"The afternoon of September first, dishwater-gray and rainy, a man named Dale Figgo picked up a hitchhiker on Gus Grissom Boulevard in Tangelo Shores, Florida. The hitchhiker, who reminded Figgo of Danny DeVito, asked for a lift to the interstate. Figgo said he'd take him there after finishing an errand." Thus begins  Fever Beach ,  with an errand that leads--in pure Hiaasen-style--into the depths...

In 1868, celebrated Civil War photographer Alexander Gardner traveled to Fort Laramie to document the federal government's treaty negotiations with the Lakota and other tribes of the northern plains. Gardner, known for his iconic portrait of Abraham Lincoln and his visceral pictures of the Confederate dead at Antietam, posed six federal peace commissioners with a young Native girl wrapped in a...

How does the son of a Presbyterian minister wind up winning a Pulitzer Prize for writing a wildly inaccurate newspaper column read by millions of people? In  Class Clown , Dave Barry takes us on a hilarious ride, starting with a childhood largely spent throwing rocks for entertainment--there was no internet--and preparing for nuclear war by hiding under a classroom desk. After literally getting el...