Awarded the J. Anthony Lukas Work-in-Progress Award, Leonard’s monumental work of investigative reporting charts the five-decade rise of Koch Industries. One of the largest privately held multinationals in the country, and one of the most secretive, Koch owns companies in businesses ranging from energy to chemicals to banking; its CEO, Charles Koch, and his brother, David, are together wealthier than Bill Gates. As Leonard shows, the brothers have consolidated power by practicing a single-minded attention to the bottom line—which has also meant quashing unions, widening income inequality, thwarting action on climate change, and making capitalism a deeply alienating force for many Americans.
https://www.politics-prose.com/book/9781476775388
Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Christopher Leonard: Live at Politics and Prose

Readings and discussions featuring today’s best authors, recorded live at Washington DC’s famous Politics and Prose bookstore.

Arts

Literature

Performing Arts

Design

Food

Fashion & Beauty

Visual Arts

Books

Taking her title from Google’s early mantra, Foroohar, the award-winning CNN global economic analyst and Financial Times columnist and associate editor, chronicles how far Big Tech has fallen from its original vision of free information and digital democracy. Drawing on nearly thirty years of experience reporting on the technology sector, Faroohar traces the evolution of companies such as Google, Facebook, Apple, and Amazon into behemoths that monetize people’s data, spread misinformation and hate speech, and threaten citizens’ privacy. She also shows how we can fight back by creating a framework that both fosters innovation and protects us from the threats posed by digital technology. 

﻿https://www.politics-prose.com/book/9781984823984
Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Rana Foroohar: Live at Politics and Prose

Choi’s first novel, The Foreign Student, won the Asian-American Literary Award for fiction; her second, American Woman, was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize, and after that she was awarded the PEN/W.G. Sebald Award for A Person of Interest. Praised for narrative style, inventiveness, and keen insight, Choi in her latest work of fiction takes the novel to new places. At first a seemingly straightforward story of first love, the book follows two students at a performing arts high school who live, study, and fall in love in a competitive and rarefied world that has at its center a charismatic acting teacher. Then the off-stage dramas go too far, and the second half of the narrative puts into question all that preceded it. Choi is in conversation with Nicole Chung, author of All You Can Ever Know.

https://www.politics-prose.com/book/9781250309884
Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Susan Choi: Live at Politics and Prose

Machado’s electrifying Her Body and Other Parties—a finalist for the National Book Award—expanded our sense of what a short story could be and do. Her powerful new book draws on a similarly wide range of tones, cultural references, and formal innovations to redefine the memoir. Organizing each chapter around different themes—a haunted house, erotica, the bildungsroman—Machado explores an abusive lesbian relationship from multiple angles. As she chronicles her attraction to a charismatic and volatile woman, Machado looks back at the role of religion in her adolescence, interrogates the assumption that lesbian relationships are safe, and explores the history and reality of abuse within the queer community. Machado is in conversation with Jeannie Vanasco, author of Things We Didn’t Talk about When I Was a Girl. 

https://www.politics-prose.com/book/9781644450031
Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Carmen Maria Machado: Live at Politics and Prose

Lindy West, New York Times columnist and bestselling author of Shrill, provides a brilliant and incisive look at how patriarchy, intolerance, and misogyny have conquered not just politics, but American culture itself in The Witches Are Coming. With her signature wit and in her uniquely incendiary voice, The Witches Are Coming lays out a grand theory of America that explains why Trump's election was, in many ways, a foregone conclusion. Whether it be the notion overheard since the earliest moments of the #MeToo movement that feminism has gone too far or the insistence that holding someone accountable for his actions amounts to a "witch hunt," this book exposes the lies that many have chosen to believe and the often unexpected figures who have furthered them. Along the way, it unravels the tightening link between culture and politics, identifying in the memes, music, and movies we've loved the seeds of a reactionary movement now surging through the nation

﻿https://www.politics-prose.com/book/9780316449885
Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Lindy West: Live at Politics and Prose

In this engaging political history, Brown, senior U.S. senator from Ohio, tells the story of twentieth-century progressive politics through the profiles of eight of the senators who occupied his chair—desk 88—before him. In a series of insightful essays, Brown traces the achievements of Hugo Black, Robert F. Kennedy, Al Gore Sr., George McGovern, Herbert Lehman, Glen Taylor, Theodore Francis Green, and William Proxmire, extolling the men’s hard work and dedication, assessing and celebrating their communal legacy, and, drawing on his own experience, showing that progressive ideals are still vital to the life of our democracy. 

﻿https://www.politics-prose.com/book/9780374138219
Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Christopher Leonard: Live at Politics and Prose

Download our free app to listen on your phone