Live At Politics And Prose

An American by choice, Vargas came to the U.S. from the Philippines when he was twelve. He’s lived here for twenty-five years, but his status as undocumented has meant that he’s spent those years feeling unmoored and anxious. He knows no other home but this one, yet can’t feel fully at home in a place where he has to lie to get by. In this eloquent and passionate memoir, Vargas speaks out about the reality of living as an “illegal” immigrant in the U.S. today. A Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist, filmmaker, and founder and CEO of the nonprofit media advocacy organization Define American, Vargas makes the incontrovertible case that people should not be defined by their legal status, but by who they are. Vargas is in conversation with fellow Pulitzer recipient Jonathan Capehart, member of The Washington Post’s editorial board, host of the“Cape Up” podcast, and MSNBC contributor.https://www.politics-prose.com/book/9780062851352Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

As the national debate over slavery grew more impassioned in the 1840s and 1850s, local brush-fires throughout the nation anticipated the Civil War to come. The halls of Congress, too, saw their share of physical violence, and Freeman, a Yale history professor and cohost of the podcast BackStory, draws on a wide range of sources to document scores of incidents ranging from shouting to shoving matches, fistfights, drawn knives, and even death threats among elected representatives. Her revelatory book tracks a seldom-acknowledged history of incivility in American politics, revises views of familiar figures such as John Quincy Adams and Henry Clay, and shows how the era’s reporting of these sensational events led to a new, splashier journalism.https://www.politics-prose.com/book/9780374154776Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

The finale to Feiffer’s inimitable noir trilogy is grand indeed. Told with Feiffer’s subtly-toned yet irrepressible graphics, this homage to noir that began with Kill My Mother and continued with Cousin Joseph unfolds against a Hollywood backdrop rich with politics, back-stabbers, femme fatales, and more. As this final volume opens, it’s 1953. Tinseltown is haunted by spooks of all sorts, both supernatural and political. The witch hunts are in high gear and Archie Goldman, of Goldman and Mother, Confidential Investigators, is searching for a screenplay that reveals a real-world conspiracy behind the Hollywood blacklist. But is the film itself truth or a fake? And in a town where almost everyone has something to hide, is there reason for the paranoia or is it all another con?https://www.politics-prose.com/book/9781631493133Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Four days after Hurricane Maria hit Puerto Rico, José Andrés arrived on the island and started to cook. Andrés, whose 29 restaurants have earned him Michelin Stars and two James Beard “Outstanding Chef” awards, dropped everything to feed the people of Puerto Rico as they scrambled to rebuild their infrastructure and economy. Andrés cooked paella in parking lots and served sancocho at a friend’s destroyed restaurant, ultimately feeding hundreds of thousands of people. At the same time, he confronted the broken, wasteful crisis-management systems that made his cooking so necessary. We Fed an Island movingly describes his experiences in Puerto Rico, and introduces readers to the networks of community activists feeding the island to this day. A portion of the proceeds from the book will be donated to the Chef Relief Network of World Central Kitchen for efforts in Puerto Rico and beyond. Andrés is in conversation with Tim Carman, food reporter at The Washington Post.https://www.politics-prose.com/book/978006286448

John Kerry has devoted his life to public service. Since he testified in front of Congress as a decorated young Vietnam veteran disillusioned with the war, he’s placed himself at the heart of American political life, serving as a five-term Senator and as Barack Obama’s second Secretary of State. Every Day Is Extra is a moving, candid account of his time in politics, and a forceful testimony about the importance of diplomacy, leadership, and collaboration in the face of the myriad challenges the United States faces today.Kerry is in conversation with David Ignatius, associate editor and columnist for The Washington Post.https://www.politics-prose.com/book/9781501178955Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Ryan has been a White House correspondent for the American Urban Radio Networks since the Clinton administration, but with Trump’s arrival she has become part of the story she’s covering. Her new book is both a reporter’s inside view of the unconventional protocol in the Trump White House, with all the Tweets, policy reversals, and sudden personnel changes, and an intimate look at what it’s like to be targeted by Trump, who has repeatedly responded to Ryan’s serious questions about urgent issues with shaming and insults. Ryan is also the author of The Presidency in Black and White and At Mama’s Knee, and in 2017 she was named the National Association of Black Journalists Journalist of the Year.https://www.politics-prose.com/book/9781538113363Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

A longtime foreign correspondent, Hedges has reported from more than fifty countries. His latest book is a profound exploration of one of the most troubled: today’s United States. Hedges, author of American Fascists and War Is a Force That Gives Us Meaning, cites the opioid crisis, the increases in gambling and magical thinking, and the explosion of xenophobia as symptoms of a society that has lost hope. He traces this disillusionment to the twin ills of a de facto corporate coup d’état and a failed democracy. The anger and frustration these have spawned helped bring Trump to power and Hedges issues a passionate call to action to reverse them.https://www.politics-prose.com/book/9781501152672Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Pyenson is a paleontologist and “reading whale bones is what I do,” he says. These bones have told some amazing stories: whales outweigh dinosaurs and are the largest creatures ever to have lived on Earth, and their songs can travel some 900 miles underwater. But while we know whales descended from four-legged land-dwelling animals the size of a dog, we don’t know when and how they developed their tremendous sizes, what’s to stop them from getting still larger, or if they can adapt to climate change. The curator of fossil marine mammals at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of Natural History, Pyenson takes us through the collection—the largest in the world—with attendant lessons on whale anatomy, feeding habits, and migratory range, as well as on field trips to Panama, Alaska, and the Hvalfjörður whaling station west of Iceland.https://www.politics-prose.com/book/9780735224568Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

P&P’s series of teach-ins addressing the most urgent political problems of our day returns with a discussion of gun control in the United States. What are the best ways to prevent further deaths by gun violence in this country? What are the most rapidly attainable ways? What actions are available for private citizens to take, and how can we keep ourselves and our communities safe? Participants will include Avery Gardiner, co-president of the Brady Campaign; Zion Kelly, gun control activist and March For Our Lives speaker; and Craig Whitney, journalist and author of Living with Guns: A Liberal’s Case for the Second Amendment.Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

From being the only African-American Muslim wearing a hijab in her hometown of Maplewood, New Jersey, to being the first veiled American woman to compete for the U.S. in the Olympics, Muhammad has always stood out, as much for her prodigious talent as for her courage and faith. Though she started fencing at the late age of thirteen, she quickly pushed beyond state and collegiate championships to become a five-time Senior World medalist and Olympic bronze medalist. But her athletic triumphs are only one part of Muhammad’s prodigious achievements. Her memoir is an unflinching account of how she turned around the bias and opposition she faced from the beginning, earning a spot on TIME magazine's 100 Most Influential People In the World, serving as a sports ambassador for the U.S. State Department, and inspiring the first hijabi Barbie.Muhammad is in conversation with Brittany Packnett, Vice President of National Community Alliances for Teach for America, co-founder of the policy platform to end police violence C

The unnamed narrator of Moshfegh’s compelling and unsettling novel is a woman who has everything: looks, a brand-new degree from Columbia, a job at an art gallery, an Upper East Side apartment, and a substantial inheritance. But her fairy-tale existence feels cursed. In 2000, she decides to escape her life by taking enough drugs to sleep through it all for a year. Aside from the psychiatrist who writes the prescriptions, she sees only a college friend and a boyfriend. Her plan works for a while, then a new drug, Infermiterol, causes strange and frightening blackouts and the narrator must face what it is she really needs. As she did in Eileen, winner of the PEN/Hemingway Award for debut fiction, Moshfegh writes with both humor and an unflinching attention to parts of life we’d rather not see, but can’t look away from.https://www.politics-prose.com/book/9780525522119Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Written during the first two hundred days of the Trump presidency, these charged sonnets mark “the umpteenth slump / In our humming democracy, a bumble bureaucracy.” Angry, sarcastic, and playful, Hayes explores, reinterprets, and riffs on the meanings of “American,” “assassin,” and “future.” Notable Americans he turns to include James Baldwin, Amiri Baraka, and Toni Morrison, but he also has to reckon with “James Earl Ray Dylann Roof... /…George Zimmerman John Wilkes Booth.”  The author of acclaimed books including Hip Logic, How to Be Drawn, and the National Book Award-winning Lighthead, Hayes has consistently been one of the most innovative and technically accomplished poets, and here he brilliantly reinvents the Renaissance sonnet as a specifically “American sonnet that is part prison,/part panic closet …/that is part music box, part meat/grinder,” because, as he says, “when the wound/ is deep, the healing is heroic.”https://www.politics-prose.com/book/9780143133186Learn more about your ad choices. Visit

A self-described political outsider, Dorey-Stein came to the Obama White House via Wesleyan, teaching high school English in Hightstown, New Jersey, and Craigslist. She worked as a White House stenographer from 2012 to 2017, and her memoir engagingly captures her many trips with the presidential entourage, recorder mics in hand. Dorey-Stein also introduces her colleagues, among them the dedicated political insider she fell in love with. Conversational and witty, this compulsively readable memoir evokes the glamour, intrigue, and drama of a Washington gone all too soon.Dorey-Stein is in conversation with Julie Pace, Washington Bureau Chief of the Associated Press.https://www.politics-prose.com/book/9780525509127Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

The Clash was a paradox of revolutionary conviction, musical ambition, and commercial drive. We Are The Clash is a gripping tale of the band's struggle to reinvent itself as George Orwell's 1984 loomed. This bold campaign crashed headlong into a wall of internal contradictions, and rising right-wing power.While the world teetered on the edge of the nuclear abyss, British miners waged a life-or-death strike, and tens of thousands died from US guns in Central America, Clash cofounders Joe Strummer, Paul Simonon, and Bernard Rhodes waged a desperate last stand after ejecting guitarist Mick Jones and drummer Topper Headon. The band shattered just as its controversial final album, Cut the Crap, was emerging.Andersen and Heibutzki weave together extensive archival research and in-depth original interviews with virtually all of the key players involved to tell a moving story of idealism undone by human frailty amid a climatic turning point for our world.https://www.politics-prose.com/book/9781617752933Learn more abo

No two immigration experiences are the same, and Iftin’s amazing story of chance, courage, and resilience began years before he came to the U.S. Growing up in Mogadishu, he was five in 1991 when Somalia plunged into civil war. He escaped the hunger and militia attacks temporarily by watching American movies and listening to American pop music. But as he learned English, reinvented himself as "Abdi American,” and reported for NPR, he drew the enmity of the radical Islamist group al-Shabaab and was forced to take refuge in Kenya. Then, after a harrowing sequence of events that nearly stranded him in Nairobi, Iftin was granted a visa to enter this country. He now lives in Maine and works as an interpreter for newly-arrived Somalis.https://www.politics-prose.com/book/9781524732196This event is supported by the Young African Professionals (YAP) Network. YAP is a network of more than 10,000 young African professionals in the D.C. Metro area, which provides a forum for professionals interested in Africa to engage wi

Theranos, founded in 2003 by nineteen-year-old wunderkind Elizabeth Holmes, promised to revolutionize blood testing by developing technologies to miniaturize samples and so make testing fast, easy, and inexpensive. It seemed too good to be true—and was, as Carreyrou, a two-time Pulitzer Prize-winning Wall Street Journal reporter, revealed in a series of detailed articles. Undaunted by pressure from the company’s CEO and lawyers, Carreyrou raised enough doubts about Theranos policies, procedures, and promises that by 2015 Holmes and her corporation were being investigated by a host of medical authorities, investors, state attorneys general, the Securities and Exchange Commission, and others. Here Carreyrou recounts his riveting story of the biggest corporate fraud since Enron.https://www.politics-prose.com/book/9781524731656Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In her second book, Daley-Ward combines the haunting lyricism of Bone with passionate, unsparing prose to tell the story of her life. Born to a Jamaican mother and a Nigerian father, Daley-Ward was raised by her devout Seventh Day Adventist grandparents in Chorley, a small town in the North of England. Along with family tensions—a father she was often afraid of, a mother she saw worn down, and a brother she was estranged from—Daley-Ward confronts abuse, depression, racism, and the tremendous power of sexuality. Fearless in confronting and chronicling her own pain, Daley-Ward is also attuned to joy, and her writing, like that of Rupi Kaur, sings as artfully as it rages and laments.https://www.politics-prose.com/book/9780143132622Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Groff has been one of our most exciting contemporary fiction writers since her phenomenal 2008 debut, The Monsters of Templeton. Her most recent novel, Fates and Furies, was a National Book Award finalist, Barack Obama’s favorite book of 2015, and one of the most talked-about novels in years. Now, Groff returns with a collection of eleven shimmering stories. The book opens with an unnamed woman escaping her family for a walk. She sets out after dark, interested in the moment when “a second neighborhood unrolls atop the daytime one.” In the narratives that follow, Groff maps this overlooked terrain. Conveying a landscape of sinkholes and storms that’s as much emotional as it is natural, she delves into the lives of people looking for options, from a homeless woman to a woman so conflicted about her husband and children that she’s lost track of what “home” means.https://www.politics-prose.com/book/9781594634512Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Kuttner’s astute analysis of the post-war “golden age” starts with measures including the New Deal and the Bretton Woods Agreement, showing how they allowed democracy and capitalism to be mutually supportive and thrive. The balance began to slip in the 1970s; as financial regulations were rolled back and taxes cut, inequality worsened, and frustrated voters turned away from progressive agendas, a right-wing turn that has led us to Trump, Brexit, the precarious state of the European Union, and the rise of nationalisms. Both democracy and capitalism are now foundering and Kuttner, cofounder and co-editor of The American Prospect, asks whether this dissolution was inevitable or if we can use the lessons of the past to re-establish the former harmony.https://www.politics-prose.com/book/9780393609936Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In his eye-opening memoir, Adults in the Room, Varoufakis, Greece’s former Finance Minister, recounts his frustrating struggle to resolve Greece’s debt crisis without resorting to austerity measures. His book give us a valuable inside look at discussions with officials of the European Union and International Monetary Fund as well as with policy makers in Washington and other capitals. Founder of the Democracy in Europe Movement 2025, an international grassroots organization dedicated to restoring democracy to Europe, Varoufakis as a father is all too aware of the legacy today’s fraught economic policies will leave to the next generation. Couched as a series of fatherly letters, Talking to My Daughter about the Economy is an accessible primer on the history, elements, ideals, and problems of economics, including issues of inequality, climate change, and the chronic risk of global instability.https://www.politics-prose.com/book/9780374538057https://www.politics-prose.com/book/9780374272364Learn more about your