Live at Politics and Prose

Live at Politics and Prose episodes:

• 12.21.2018

  Congo Stories: Live at Politics and Prose

  In Congo Stories, John Prendergast and Fidel Bafilemba reveal how the people of Congo are fighting back against a tidal wave of international exploitation and governmental oppression to make things better for their nation, their communities, and their families. The...

  
• 12.14.2018

  Kristen R. Ghodsee: Live at Politics and Prose

  Expanding on her August 12, 2017 New York Times op-ed, Ghodsee looks at all facets of American women’s lives—relationships, parenting, work, politics—showing how each is harmed by unregulated capitalism and how a socialist model could improve the situation. A skilled...

  
• 12.07.2018

  Elaine Pagels: Live at Politics and Prose

  When Pagels, author of groundbreaking studies of the Gnostic Gospels, was asked, “Why religion?" she found that her own life illuminates both why she’s made a career of studying religious texts as well as why religion itself still exists in...

  
• 11.30.2018

  Bernie Sanders: Live at Politics and Prose

  Senator Bernie Sanders' presidential campaign was a beginning, not an ending. In Where We Go From Here: Two Years in the Resistance, New York Times bestselling author Bernie Sanders chronicles the day-by-day struggles that he and his progressive colleagues have...

  
• 11.23.2018

  Chris Gethard: Live at Politics and Prose

  The key to success, Gethard says, is failure. He knows this from experience. While he’s now the host of his own truTV talk show and the weekly podcast Beautiful Stories from Anonymous People, he also suffered the humiliation of having...

  
• 11.16.2018

  Lisa Halliday: Live at Politics and Prose

  Halliday’s debut novel was one of the literary events of the year, earning uniformly rave reviews and a place on innumerable bestseller lists. Now available in paperback, the narrative ingeniously combines two starkly different narratives to give us a startling...

  
• 11.09.2018

  Kiese Laymon: Live at Politics and Prose

  Laymon’s novel, Long Division, was named to several Best Of lists in 2013 and his collection of autobiographical essays, How to Slowly Kill Yourself and Others in America, showed him as a powerful social and cultural commentator. In his new...

  
• 11.02.2018

  David W. Blight: Live at Politics

  Blight, the award-winning author of histories including American Oracle and Race and Reunion, is perhaps the foremost Frederick Douglass scholar at work today. He’s edited the annotated editions of Douglass’s first two autobiographies, and he draws on this close work...

  
• 10.26.2018

  Rebecca Traister: Live at Politics and Prose

  Rebecca Traister is one of today’s most powerful feminist voices. She’s written about women in politics, media, popular culture, and at home, exploring the rise of single women in her bestselling All the Single Ladies and the 2008 Democratic primary...

  
• 10.19.2018

  Casey Gerald: Live at Politics and Prose

  Gerald’s extraordinary memoir cuts a swath through a dizzying number of socio-cultural sectors, enacting an American dream that questions the very assumptions behind it. Growing up in Dallas, Gerald was immersed in his grandfather’s evangelical church, a source of stability...

  
• 10.12.2018

  Jose Antonio Vargas: 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...

  
• 10.05.2018

  Joanne B. Freeman: Live at Politics and Prose

  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...

  
• 09.28.2018

  Jules Feiffer: Live at Politics and Prose

  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,...

  
• 09.21.2018

  José Andrés: Live at Politics and Prose

  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...

  
• 09.14.2018

  John Kerry: Live at Politics and Prose

  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...

  
• 09.07.2018

  April Ryan: Live at Politics and Prose

  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...

  
• 08.31.2018

  Chris Hedges: Live at Politics and Prose

  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...

  
• 08.24.2018

  Nick Pyenson: Live at Politics and Prose

  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...

  
• 08.17.2018

  Teach-In on Gun Control

  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...

  
• 08.10.2018

  Ibtihaj Muhammad: Live at Politics and Prose

  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...

  
• 08.03.2018

  Ottessa Moshfegh: Live at Politics and Prose

  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...

  
• 07.27.2018

  Terrance Hayes: Live at Politics and Prose

  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,”...

  
• 07.20.2018

  Beck Dorey-Stein: Live at Politics and Prose

  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...

  
• 07.13.2018

  Mark Andersen and Ralph Heibutzki: Live at Politics and Prose

  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...

  
• 07.06.2018

  Abdi Nor Iftin: Live at Politics and Prose

  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...

  
• 06.29.2018

  John Carreyrou: Live at Politics and Prose

  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...

  
• 06.22.2018

  Yrsa Daley-Ward: Live at Politics and Prose

  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...

  
• 06.15.2018

  Lauren Groff: Live at Politics and Prose

  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...

  
• 06.08.2018

  Robert Kuttner: Live at Politics and Prose

  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...

  
• 06.01.2018

  Yanis Varoufakis: Live at Politics and Prose

  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...

  
• 05.25.2018

  Sarah Kendzior: Live at Politics and Prose

  A scholar and journalist based in St. Louis, Kendzior was alert to the struggles of America’s disaffected heartland well before the 2016 election. Writing on income disparity, labor exploitation, racism, xenophobia, and other conditions of the post-employment economy, Kendzior so...

  
• 05.18.2018

  Jesmyn Ward: Live at Politics and Prose

  In 2011, Jesmyn Ward won the National Book Award for Salvage the Bones, and last year, she became the first woman to ever win twice. This time it was for Sing, Unburied, Sing, an American epic that earned her comparisons...

  
• 05.11.2018

  John Scalzi: Live at Politics and Prose

  Scalzi’s Lock In introduced the brutal, riveting game of Hilketa, in which players wield swords and hammers to try to decapitate each other. The violence is real, but the players are “threeps,” robot-like bodies controlled by people immobilized with Haden’s...

  
• 05.04.2018

  Alan Stern and David Grinspoon: Live at Politics and Prose

  NASA launched the New Horizons craft on January 19, 2006. By July 24, 2015 it had covered 4.67 billion miles and transmitted a stream of amazing photos as it flew by Pluto at 32,000 miles per hour. The images made...

  
• 04.27.2018

  Samantha Irby: Live at Politics and Prose

  Irby’s sharp and earthy debut collection of essays, now reissued, marked the arrival of a seriously talented and transgressive feminist humorist, one who’s risen into the stratosphere in the wake of last year’s We Are Never Meeting in Real Life....

  
• 04.20.2018

  Anthony Ray Hinton: Live at Politics and Prose

  Hinton was twenty-nine when he was arrested on two counts of capital murder in Alabama in 1985. He was innocent, but he was also poor and black with an incompetent defense attorney. Hinton was convicted, sentenced to death by electrocution,...

  
• 04.13.2018

  Cecile Richards: Live at Politics and Prose

  For the first time, Cecile Richards—president of the Planned Parenthood Federation of America for more than a decade, daughter of the late Governor Ann Richards, and heroine of the resistance—tells the story of her lifetime fighting for women's rights and...

  
• 04.06.2018

  Nell Scovell: Live at Politics and Prose

  With more than thirty years of experience as a writer, producer, and director, Scovell knows how the entertainment industry works.  She came to Hollywood as a bookish New Englander and worked her way up from a low-level writer for Newhart...

  
• 03.30.2018

  Sarah McBride: Live at Politics and Prose

  As McBride recounts in this stirring memoir, she identified as female from the start, but came out as a transgender woman only at the end of her term as American University’s student body president in 2011. When the news went...

  
• 03.23.2018

  Mary Frances Berry : Live at Politics and Prose

  Berry’s bracing call-to-action combines progressive idealism with the pragmatism of a seasoned activist to argue that resistance effects important changes in all political climates. Berry, Geraldine R. Segal Professor of American Social Thought and professor of history at the University...

  
• 03.16.2018

  Dhonielle Clayton: Live at Politics and Prose

  In Orléans, people are born gray-skinned and ugly. Sixteen-year-old Camellia and her sisters are tasked with using magic to make them beautiful but for a price. However, as Camellia’s talents draw her closer to people with political power, she learns...

  
• 03.09.2018

  Robert Reich: Live at Politics and Prose

  Robert B. Reich has been one of America's leading political thinkers since he served as Bill Clinton's Secretary of Labor, for which Time Magazine named him one of the ten most effective cabinet secretaries of the twentieth century. A constant...

  
• 03.02.2018

  Brittney Cooper: Live at Politics and Prose

  When mainstream culture stereotypes the anger of Black women as ugly or destructive, or when it dismisses “sassy” Black women by laughing them off, it does so because it knows this Black female rage is powerful. In this passionate manifesto,...

  
• 02.23.2018

  Isaac Butler & Dan Kois: Live at Politics and Prose

  Twenty-five years ago, Angels in America made its Broadway premier. It won the Pulitzer Prize for drama and the Tony Award for best play, but Tony Kushner’s landmark work was always more than just a theater piece. It changed the...

  
• 02.16.2018

  David Frum: Live at Politics and Prose

  Frum’s ninth book expands on his eye-opening March 2017 Atlantic column, “How to Build an Autocracy,” which argued that Trump is leading the nation into authoritarianism. An experienced Washington insider and one of the country’s leading conservative commentators, Frum examines...

  
• 02.09.2018

  Johann Hari: Live at Politics and Prose

  Hari, author of Chasing the Scream, changed the terms of the debate about addiction with his influential TED talk, “Everything You Think You Know About Addiction Is Wrong.” In his second book he uses his own experience with depression and...

  
• 02.02.2018

  Leni Zumas: Live at Politics and Prose

  In the all-too-plausible future of Zumas’s second novel, the Personhood Amendment has outlawed abortion, a “pink wall” has gone up between the U.S. and Canada to prevent pregnant Americans from accessing Canadian clinics, and the “Every Child Needs Two” act...

  
• 01.26.2018

  Race in America 2018: Live at Politics and Prose

  Join April Ryan for the fifth in an ongoing series of discussions focusing on race in America.  As in previous presentations, Ryan will moderate a panel of leading writers and commentators to examine recent and longstanding issues. Speakers include: Mary...

  
• 01.12.2018

  Linda Gordon: Live at Politics and Prose

  The KKK was founded in 1865 by Confederate veterans. After a few turbulent years and federal efforts to outlaw it, it faded with Reconstruction. Then it rose again in the 1920s. This second incarnation flourished largely in the north, grounded...

  
• 01.05.2018

  Bruce Bartlett: Live at Politics and Prose

  Bartlett’s handbook for telling real facts from alternative versions is a practical tool for citizens concerned about the quality of the news they consume. Bartlett, who served in both the Reagan and George H. W. Bush administrations and more recently...