Politics and Prose Presents

Paul Simon told Joe Boyd that when he first heard the accordion flourish that would open his multi-platinum album  Graceland , it seemed to proclaim, "You haven't heard  this  before!" Yet the 1980s "world music" boom that Simon's album helped usher in had roots that extended back through the decades and across continents: tango on the eve of World War I, Latin dance ac...

The Louvre is the most famous museum in the world, attracting millions of visitors every year with its masterpieces. In  Adventures in the Louvre , Elaine Sciolino immerses herself in this magical space and helps us fall in love with what was once a forbidding fortress. Exploring galleries, basements, rooftops, and gardens, Sciolino demystifies the Louvre, introducing us to her favorite artworks,...

Shining a white-hot spotlight on America's famous, from Hollywood legends to Broadway stars to media moguls,  Notorious   is a captivating assortment of Maureen Dowd's most compelling style features and profiles. Using her signature wit and incisive commentary as a scalpel, Dowd dissects influential cultural elites, including: Leading Hollywood women from Uma Thurman to Jane Fonda to Greta...

How close can a person come to home when their family has deserted it? Guided by this question, the poems in Nida Sophasarun's  Novice  traverse natural, animal, and dream worlds, seeking intimacy in a snake coming in from the rain, a mother's body imagined as a house, and the moon serving as both the missing piece and the linchpin in a night sky. Organized by tropical seasons and unfolding in Asi...

Houston, Texas, in the early 1970s was an exciting place--the home of NASA, the city of the future. But a string of missing teenage boys, many from the same neighborhood, hinted at a dark undercurrent that would go ignored for too long. While their siblings and friends wondered where they'd gone, the Houston Police Department dismissed them as thrill-seeking runaways, fleeing the Vietnam draft...

In  Bad Law , the  New York Times  bestselling author of  Allow Me To Retort: A Black Guy's Guide to the Constitution  brings his trademark legal acumen and passionate snark to a brilliant takedown of ten of what he considers the most egregiously awful laws on the books today. These are pieces of legislation that are making life worse rather than better for Americans, and that, he argues with tren...

At twenty-five years old, Michael Stewart was a young Black aspiring artist, deejay, and model, looking to make a name for himself in the vibrant downtown art scene of the early 1980's New York City. On September 15, 1983, he was brutally beaten by New York City Transit Authority police for allegedly tagging a 14th Street subway station wall. Witnesses reported officers beating him with billy...

This event is in partnership with  New Endeavors by Women . The working homeless.  In a country where hard work and determination are supposed to lead to success, there is something scandalous about this phrase. But skyrocketing rents, low wages, and a lack of tenant rights have produced a startling phenomenon: People with full-time jobs cannot keep a roof over their head, especially in America&#3...

This event is in partnership with  Byrdland Records .  Peter Wolf grew up in the Bronx, a child of "fellow travelers" whose artistic inclinations influenced both his love of music and his initial desire to become a painter. Stories of his loving and sometimes eccentric parents complement scenes depicting a very young Bob Dylan as he arrived on the Greenwich Village folk scene. Reflection...

Wife to a well-known actor, the mother of two, a sister, daughter, and general meddler, Tess Sanchez's life was like a #1-rated sitcom. But the loss of her career as a highly successful casting executive equaled series cancellation. Now, with humor and insight, Sanchez examines the aftermath of a major shift that forever changed the course of her life, and the resilience that came from reframi...

The film  Oppenheimer  has awakened interest in this vital period of American history. Now, for the first time in a generation,  Red Scare  presents a narrative history of the anti-Communist witch hunt that gripped America in the decade following World War II. The cultural phenomenon, most often referred to as McCarthyism, was an outgrowth of the conflict between social conservatives and New Deal...

Naema, an elderly princess dedicated to her pet causes, is in a bind: struck by a malady that maroons her in Montreux, she's unable to host an exclusive gala dinner in Berlin to honor the author Masud al-Huzeil for his lifetime achievement in Arabic literature. Not only is she unable to attend, RSVPs have been slow to materialize, and she's reduced to begging the ancient award winner to fi...

The American government was faced with an unprecedented challenge: where to house the nearly 400,000 German prisoners of war plucked from the battlefield and shipped across the Atlantic. On orders from President Franklin D. Roosevelt, the Department of War hastily built hundreds of POW camps in the United States. Today, traces of those camps--which once dotted the landscape from Maine to Californi...

During the Cold War, the Smolensk Archive held the only collection of Communist Party documents available to Western scholars, becoming the foundation for generations of scholarship on Soviet history.  Crucibles of Power   returns to the Smolensk Region with fresh eyes and fresh sources. Prizewinning historian Michael David-Fox traces the experiences of Smolensk residents between the interwar year...

Prophecies that the dollar will lose its status as the world's dominant currency have echoed for decades--and are increasing in volume. Cryptocurrency enthusiasts claim that Bitcoin or other blockchain-based monetary units will replace the dollar. Foreign policy hawks warn that China's renminbi poses a lethal threat to the greenback. And sound money zealots predict that mounting US debt an...

The Martin Luther King Jr. of popular memory vanquished Jim Crow in the South. But in this myth-shattering book, award-winning and New York Times bestselling historian Jeanne Theoharis argues that King's time in Boston, New York, Los Angeles, and Chicago--outside Dixie--was at the heart of his campaign for racial justice.  King of the North  follows King as he crisscrosses the country from the...

The rise of China and its great power competition with the U.S. will be one of the defining issues of our generation. But to understand modern China, one has to understand the people who live there - and the way the Chinese state is trying to control them along lines of identity and free expression. In vivid, cinematic detail,  Let Only Red Flowers Bloom  tells the stories of nearly two dozen peop...

In the Nation's Capital, music and sports have played a central role in the lives of African Americans, often serving as a barometer of social conflict and social progress--for sports clubs and ball games, jam sessions and concerts, offered entertainment, enlightenment, and encouragement. At times, they have also offered a means of escape from the harsh realities of everyday life. Rhythms of R...

A slender novel of epic power and the winner of the Booker Prize 2024,   Orbital   deftly snapshots one day in the lives of six women and men traveling through space. Selected for one of the last space station missions of its kind before the program is dismantled, these astronauts and cosmonauts--from America, Russia, Italy, Britain, and Japan--have left their lives behind to travel at a speed of...

In a nation whose Constitution purports to speak for “We the People,” too many of the stories that powerful Americans tell about law and society include only "We the Men". A long line of judges, politicians, and other influential scene setters have ignored women's struggles for equality or distorted them beyond recognition by wildly exaggerating American progress. Even as sexism cont...

From the moment Paul Lisicky heard Joni Mitchell while growing up in New Jersey, he recognized she was that rarity among musicians--a talent whose combination of introspection, liberation, and deep musicality set her apart from any other artist of the time. As a young man, Paul was a budding songwriter who took his cues from Mitchell's mysteries and idiosyncrasies. But as he matured, he set hi...

It's been ten years. In case you're out there somewhere. In case you're listening, I'm here. And I have so much to tell you. It's been nearly ten years since Gabe's been gone when Lucy finds a tiny piece of paper in a box of his old photos. An address in Rome. Why did Gabe keep it, and what was he doing in Italy? Lucy buys a last-minute plane ticket. Impulsive, but Gabe alw...

As snappy as a dinner jacket's red silk lining, as appealing as a piano interlude in jazz, Brad Leithauser's robust felicity is a balm in grim times. It's also the perfect vehicle for nostalgia, regret, and surprise, forces that animate his first collection in more than a decade. By turns laugh-out-loud funny and deeply thoughtful, this collection balances wisdom and practicality, as w...

It was one of history's great vanishing acts. Around 3,400 BCE--as humans were gathering in complex urban settlements--a scribe in the mud-walled city-state of Uruk picked up a reed stylus to press tiny symbols into clay. For three millennia, wedge shape cuneiform script would record the military conquests, scientific discoveries, and epic literature of the great Mesopotamian kingdoms of Sumer...

Faruq Zaidi, a young journalist processing the recent death of his father, a devout Muslim, takes the opportunity to embed himself in a cult called "the nameless." Based in the California redwoods and shepherded by an enigmatic Vietnam War veteran named Odo, the nameless adhere to the 18 Utterances, including teachings such as "all suffering is distortion" and "see only be...