Politics and Prose Presents

New York Times journalist Jesse Wegman tells the story of James Wilson, a Founding Father whose bold vision shaped American democracy but whose legacy was lost to scandal.
As a young lawyer, James Wilson made a celebrated case for American independence in an essay that inspired the famous words “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal.” He wrote the first draft of the Constitution and, along with the more famous James Madison, played perhaps the essential role in its ultimate creation.
Wilson believed that the people are the ultimate source of all power. He argued successfully for a strong central government and a powerful presidency, and fought unsuccessfully for a direct vote for the president and the Senate. Appointed as a justice to the first Supreme Court, he was later brought down by reckless land speculation and died of malaria in the back room of a North Carolina tavern while hiding from his creditors.
Instead of being remembered as one of the nation’s great political thinkers, Wilson was virtually written out of history. But in The Lost Founder, Wegman brings to life the most prescient of the earliest patriots and makes a convincing argument that scandal should not diminish the life and impact of a brilliant, complicated man whose vision for his country could not be more relevant today.

Jesse Wegman is a Senior Fellow at the Brennan Center for Justice, where he writes about Supreme Court reform and constitutional amendments. From 2013 to 2025, he was a member of the New York Times editorial board, covering law and politics, the Supreme Court, democracy, and electoral reforms. His first book, Let the People Pick the President: The Case for Abolishing the Electoral College, was published in 2020.

Wegman is joined in conversation with John Mikhail, the Carroll Professor of Jurisprudence at Georgetown University Law Center, where he has taught since 2004.  He teaches and writes on a variety of topics, including constitutional law, moral psychology, moral and legal theory, and legal history, and human rights. Professor Mikhail is the author of Elements of Moral Cognition (CUP, 2011) and over fifty articles and essays, including several on James Wilson.

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Just in time for the 2026 World Cup in North America—a new edition of the bestselling sports classic, featuring a new preface from the author.

With the 2026 World Cup in all three nations of North America, the power and scope of soccer has truly become global. In this remarkably insightful, wide-ranging work, Franklin Foer argues that soccer is much more than a game, or even a way of life. It is a unique window into the crosscurrents of modern globalization, with all of its benefits and pitfalls. Soccer clubs don’t represent geographic areas; they stand for social classes and political ideologies. Unlike baseball or tennis, soccer is freighted with ancient hatreds and history. It’s a sport with real stakes—a catalyst capable of ruining regimes and launching liberation movements.

Foer takes us on a surprising tour through the world of soccer, shattering myths and dire predictions. Instead of destroying local cultures, as the left warned, globalization has revived tribalism. Far from the triumph of capitalism that the right anticipated, it has entrenched corruption. From Brazil to Bosnia, Italy to Iraq, How Soccer Explains the World is an eye-opening chronicle of how a beautiful sport and its fanatical followers can illuminate the fault lines of a society, whether it’s terrorism, poverty, anti-Semitism, authoritarianism, or radical Islam—issues that continue to affect all of us. At a time when globalization is under attack and many Americans yearn for retrenchment and retreat from the world, this remarkable book—filled with blazing intelligence, colorful characters, wry humor, and an equal passion for soccer and humanity—continues to make sense of our troubled times.

“Step aside Tom Friedman, Sam Huntington, and Amy Chua. Franklin Foer’s dark and witty tale of the soccer world reveals the meaning of globalization in all its joys and horrors.”—Robert Kagan

Franklin Foer is a staff writer at The Atlantic and former editor of The New Republic. He is the author of several books, including most recently The Last Politician: Inside Joe Biden’s White House and the Struggle for America’s Future. He lives in Washington, DC, with his family.

Foer is in conversation with Ishaan Tharoor, a staff writer at The New Yorker. In 2021, he won the Arthur Ross Media Award in Commentary, a prize administered by the American Academy of Diplomacy. In 2024, he won the Ted Sorensen award, an honor bestowed by Network 20/20, a New York-based group that seeks to bridge the gap between the private sector and foreign policy worlds. He previously was a senior editor and correspondent at Time magazine, based first in Hong Kong and later in New York.

Foer will also be in conversation with Adam Harris, podcast host at The Atlantic. He is the author of The State Must Provide: Why America's Colleges Have Always Been Unequal—and How to Set Them Right. Before joining The Atlantic in 2018, Adam was a reporter for The Chronicle of Higher Education covering federal higher-education policy and HBCUs. At The Atlantic, he writes about politics and education.

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In a groundbreaking global exploration of the ideas that drove the American Revolution, a prize-winning historian shines a light on the defiance of marginalized peoples all over the world.
In her powerful new history of the American Revolution, Sarah M. S. Pearsall argues that the American Founding Fathers did not have a unique claim on the revolutionary spirit. The thirteen colonies that became the United States, she reminds us, were not even half of the British colonies that existed in the eighteenth century. In her sparkling and original Freedom Round the Globe, Pearsall uncovers the insurgents, freedom lovers, and dreamers in India, West Africa, North America, Europe, China, and West Indian islands who shaped the nature of American rebellion and nationhood. 
In each fresh and compelling chapter of Freedom Round the Globe, Pearsall plucks a keyword from the Declaration of Independence—security, happiness, respect-- finding its spark in a far-flung place. In an Edinburgh club where women were first invited into philosophical conversations, she explores what the pursuit of happiness meant to women and men of all sorts. She traces how novel forms of slavery provoked a new use of the word liberty in Connecticut petitions as well as in cries of “liberty or death.” On a Kolkata street where Indians protested relentless taxes, Pearsall finds a critique of oppressive imperial government that galvanized Americans in their protests and parties against the tea of the English East India Company. In rural Germany, boy soldiers sent abroad to die for Britain complicate who can lay claim to being civilized in a brutal war.
In telling the extraordinary tales of Friends of Liberty protesting tyranny around the world, Pearsall restores these individuals and movements to their rightful place in the vital story of the American Revolution and the nation it created. The result is a stirring and surprising revisioning of our history.

Sarah M. S. Pearsall is an award-winning historian with degrees from Yale, Harvard, and Cambridge, where she taught for nearly a decade. She is a professor in, and soon to be Chair of, the Department of History at Johns Hopkins. She wrote this book as both a National Endowment for the Humanities Public Scholar and Distinguished Fellow in the American Revolution at the British Library.

Pearsall is in conversation with François Furstenberg, was born in Washington, D.C., and grew up in Boston, Massachusetts, and Washington. After graduating with a BA from Columbia University, he worked for several years in Paris before pursuing his graduate studies in history at The Johns Hopkins University, where he is currently a professor. He is the author of In the Name of the Father and When the United States Spoke French. 

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Democratic Drain links two of the most compelling topics of our time: immigration and democracy. With a blend of in-depth interviews and data analysis across 149 countries, Justin Gest explores how global migration filters people with liberal democratic values out of authoritarian spaces, enabling democratic backsliding around the world. At a global scale, the correlation between migratory choices and political values introduces a new reason why authoritarian countries may have struggled to democratize in the decades since the end of the Cold War - a period when flows of international migrants have grown so significantly, populism has spread, and authoritarians' resolve has steadily hardened. At a time when the world is increasingly sorting into democratic and undemocratic spaces, Gest's timely and innovative analysis raises important political and policy questions about how democracies might compensate for the inadvertent effects of global human mobility.

Justin Gest is a Professor and the Director of the Public Policy Program at George Mason University’s Schar School of Policy and Government. He is the award-winning author of seven books on immigration, democracy, and demographic change, including Democratic Drain: Global Migration and the Struggle for Democracy (Cambridge University Press, 2026). He has published a wide variety of peer-reviewed articles on immigration and the politics of demographic change, and is a founding editor of the Oxford University Press book series, “Oxford Studies in Migration and Citizenship.” Over the last two decades, he has published his reporting or commentary with news publications including The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, The Washington Post, The Atlantic, and served as a columnist for CNN Opinion and Newsweek. From 2010 to 2014, Professor Gest was a postdoctoral fellow and lecturer in Harvard University’s Departments of Government and Sociology. In 2014 and 2020, Professor Gest received Harvard University’s Joseph R. Levenson Memorial Teaching Prize and George Mason University’s Teaching Excellence Award, respectively each university’s highest award for faculty teaching. In 2013, he received the Star Family Prize for Student Advising, Harvard’s highest award for student advising. From 2007 to 2010, he co-founded and served as the co-director of the Migration Studies Unit at the London School of Economics and Political Science (LSE). He is a product of Los Angeles Unified School District’s University High School in Los Angeles, where he grew up. He later earned his bachelor’s degree in Government at Harvard University and his PhD in Government from the LSE.

Gest is in conversation with Margaret Talev, director of Syracuse University’s DC-based Institute for Democracy, Journalism & Citizenship and senior contributor at Axios, where she leads polling partnerships. She is a professor of practice at the Newhouse School of Public Communications. Talev appears regularly on CNN, Sirius XM, NPR and other outlets.

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From the Killing Fields of Cambodia to the gilded halls of New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art, a tale of stolen treasures and the battle to reclaim a nation’s soul.
Amidst the chaos of Cambodia's brutal genocide, a new crime wave emerged—one that would sweep across borders and entangle the world's most prestigious art institutions. Priceless treasures of the ancient Khmer Empire, the civilization that produced Angkor Wat, vanished from sacred temples, looted by smugglers and trafficked into the hands of elite collectors. At the center of it all was a man named Douglas Latchford.
Known later as "Dynamite Doug" for the ruthless methods used to extract statues from temple ruins, Latchford orchestrated one of history's most audacious cultural heists. From dusty Cambodian villages to the glittering auction houses of London and New York and institutions like the Met, he played a double game—presenting himself as an expert on Khmer art while secretly flooding the market with stolen antiquities.
In The Man Who Stole the Gods, award-winning journalist Matthew Campbell unravels the gripping story of Latchford's criminal enterprise, and a global conspiracy of greed and collusion—one that involves some of the world's most powerful museums and collectors.
A masterful blend of true crime, history, and investigative journalism, The Man Who Stole the Gods is the definitive account of one man's greed, an industry's complicity, and the fight to expose the truth and restore stolen treasures to their rightful home.

Matthew Campbell is an award-winning reporter for Bloomberg Businessweek and the author of The Man Who Stole the Gods: A True Story of War, Obsession, and a Global Art Conspiracy. His previous book, Dead in the Water—co-authored with Kit Chellel—was selected as a Book of the Year by The Economist, the Financial Times, and The Times. 
Matt has reported from more than twenty-five countries on crime, corruption, terrorism, economics, and the environment. His work has earned some of journalism’s highest honors, including awards from the Gerald Loeb Foundation, the Overseas Press Club, the National Press Club, SOPA, and SABEW for both feature and investigative reporting. A 2025 Jonathan Logan Family Foundation Fellow at New America, Matt lives in Singapore with his family.

Campbell is in conversation with Carl Hoffman, the author of five books. Savage Harvest was a New York Times Editors’ Choice, a New York Times bestseller, a Washington Post notable book of the year, and has been translated into ten languages.  The Last Wild Men of Borneo was a finalist for the Edgar Awards and the Banff Mountain Adventure Book Awards.  The Lunatic Express was named one of the ten best books of the year by The Wall Street Journal.  He has reported from some 80 countries, covering stories about technology, exploration and indigenous culture.  He is a former contributing editor at Wired and National Geographic Traveler magazines.  Upon Great Waters, his sixth book, will be published by HarperCollins/Mariner in 2027. 

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In the next installment of the Bruno, Chief of Police series, a newcomer to St. Denis is found dead at the home of one of Bruno’s best friends—and for once, Bruno feels as though he is too close to the case to investigate, until it becomes clear that he’s the only person who can solve the crime.
After Bruno sees he’s missed several phone calls from his longtime neighbor Pamela, he has no idea what to expect. He’s shocked to hear that she’s found her new lodger on her back patio, brutally murdered. Bruno knows that Pamela isn’t capable of killing anyone, but then who’s the culprit? And what’s the motive? The victim had only just moved to town to take a job at the local nursing home. She had no enemies in the village—but no friends, either.
Bruno decides that he can’t be impartial where Pamela is involved, so the force assigns the case instead to their rising star rookie, Fabien. Bruno is happy for Fabien to take the lead. Lately, Bruno’s been distracted: by his faltering relationship, by a meddlesome film crew that’s descended on the Dordogne, by a group of opinionated small business owners Bruno wants to help to organize a logistically complicated night market. He can’t seem to catch a break.
But when Fabien realizes that the victim is connected to his own past, Bruno steps back in to help. The village has never felt more crowded, and the clock is ticking: Will Bruno and Fabien be able to catch a killer?

After a long career working in international journalism and for think tanks, Martin Walker now gardens, cooks, explores vineyards, writes, travels, and has never been busier. He divides his time between Washington D.C. and the Dordogne. now gardens, cooks, explores vineyards, writes, travels, and has never been busier. He divides his time between Washington D.C. and the Dordogne.

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In this raw and lyrical memoir as rich and insightful as How to Say Babylon and as vulnerable and provocative as Heavy, an Emmy Award-winning director chronicles his struggle to break free from—and live outside of—the prescribed paradigms of Blackness and masculinity that shaped him.

Long before every moment of our lives was tracked by technology, Phill Branch was under surveillance. His father was a football-playing, weed-smoking, Army vet—the guy men wanted to be around, and women loved. Phill was different. His father treated him as if he were defective and continually searched for proof to support this belief. Phill paid greatly for his failures at boyhood, especially when he was caught playing jump rope with girls. This taught him there were standards to be met, codes that were not to be violated, and strict punishment for any deviation from a Black man’s assigned position in the world.

In this poignant, illuminating personal narrative, Branch reckons with the patriarchy and tradition of these social structures in Black America, their legacy, and how they molded and silenced him. Taking us from Newark, New Jersey, to Los Angeles, California, Branch writes unflinchingly about growing up as the queer black son of a complicated and often absent father with rigid ideas of masculinity. From early inappropriate relationships with men twice his age, to his successful rebranding at Hampton University, to the dichotomy of Hollywood—living in a world of wealthy celebrities while struggling to survive as a writer—Branch navigates his complex emotions surrounding success, perceptions of manhood, and ultimately his father.

The Double Dutch Fuss recounts growing up under the heavy burden of expectation—to be a boy, to be Black, and to be queer in ways that conform to rigid, often unforgiving norms. It is about the knotted path of becoming, while navigating the always-present fear of emotional and physical violence, and the threat of isolation for simply being who you are. Branch explores the cosmic pull between fathers and sons, and how healing wounds can open a pathway toward freedom and wholeness. His is an insightful and surprisingly humorous reflection on identity, masculinity, and the quiet, radical act of choosing to exist on your own terms.

Phill Branch is a writer, live performance storyteller, and regional Emmy Award-winning filmmaker. He is a 2025 recipient of the Maryland State Arts Council’s Creativity Grant and received the Council's highest honor, the Individual Artist Award, for Theater (Solo Performance) in 2019. He was the GrandSLAM Champion of The Moth in D.C. in 2018 and has since traveled all over the country and overseas to tell stories with the organization. Branch was a 2014 Lambda Literary Nonfiction Emerging Voices Fellow and is the founder and Creative Director of Baltimore Story Fest, a showcase for live, personal storytelling. An alumnus of the American Film Institute, Branch has an MFA in Screenwriting. He earned his BA in Mass Media Arts at Hampton University and later returned as a professor in the English department to teach writing and develop the Film Studies program. Currently, Branch is a Resident Artist at the Howard County Center for the Arts in Maryland.

Branch will be in conversation with Shaniqua McClendon, the Vice President of Politics for Crooked Media (home to the popular podcast, Pod Save America), a political strategist and sought-after speaker and commentator on media, politics, voting, and race. At Crooked Media, she leads their political strategy and civic engagement program (Vote Save America), and also created their successful 2020 volunteer engagement and fundraising program (Adopt a State).

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What happens when intelligent machines aren’t just in our pockets but are also driving our cars, making our decisions, folding our laundry, and educating our kids?

You’ve heard the hype: AI will make us healthier, give every child a personalized tutor, run our businesses more efficiently, return hours of free time to our overworked brains, and make discoveries previously unimagined by humankind. The AI future is going to be unlike any other technological revolu­tion. But what does that really mean? And will AI truly make life better?

To find out, award-winning journalist Joanna Stern surrendered her life to artificial intelligence for one year. The results are both hilarious and unsettling.

I Am Not a Robot is like a time machine trip to the very near future, where AI promises to be your doctor, chauffeur, teacher, masseuse, coworker, thera­pist, financial planner, chef, housekeeper, and even . . . romantic partner. Your colleague might be using ChatGPT to write emails at work, but Joanna used AI tools and robots to do household chores, to manage her health, and to transport her family on vacation. If there was a decision to make or a task to do, she let AI go first. Along the way, she conducted exclusive interviews with the tech leaders building this future, then reported back from the front lines as your funny, no-nonsense tour guide.

Of course, tech’s sunny promises never tell the whole story, and that’s what Joanna is here to share. Filled with illustrations and photographs, this book offers less hype, more clarity, and as little jargon as humanly (or robotically) possible. It’s an AI guide for ordinary people—not the tech bros who tried to sell you a cruise to the metaverse or an NFT of a cartoon monkey.

This book is not the definitive story, because we’re only a few years into the AI revolution. But after a year of living as a human lab rat, Joanna deliv­ers one of the clearest—and funniest—pictures yet of what’s really happening and what it means for you.

Joanna Stern is an Emmy-winning tech journalist and author of I AM NOT A ROBOT: My Year Using AI to Do (Almost) Everything, about her year letting AI take over her life. She is the founder of New Things, where she publishes newsletters, videos and more about consumer technology. She’s also NBC News’ chief tech analyst, regularly appearing on TODAY, NBC Nightly News and beyond. Stern spent 12 years at The Wall Street Journal, where her personal tech columns and videos made her one of the most-watched voices in consumer technology. Her 2021 documentary E-Ternal won an Emmy for Outstanding Science, Technology or Environmental Coverage. She is also a two-time Gerald Loeb Award winner and a Pulitzer Prize finalist. She frequently appears on radio and podcasts, including The Vergecast. Previously, she was a technology editor at ABC News and The Verge. She lives in New Jersey with her wife, their two sons, a dog and more gadgets than a Best Buy.

Stern will be in conversation with Matt Murray, executive editor of The Washington Post. During his first two years, the newsroom won three Pulitzer Prizes, including the 2026 awards for public service, for coverage of the Trump administration’s efforts to overhaul the federal government, and for feature photography, as well as the 2025 prize for breaking news coverage of the attempted assassination of Donald Trump in Butler. Murray served as editor in chief of The Wall Street Journal and Dow Jones Newswires from June 2018 to February 2023, during which The Journal doubled digital subscriptions, grew its social media presence and video and audio businesses, and won two Pulitzer Prizes and its first Emmy.

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The New York Times bestselling author of Begin Again confronts America’s unfinished story in this blistering reassessment of race, freedom, and the myths that bind us.
Celebrated public intellectual Eddie S. Glaude, Jr. presents a groundbreaking analysis of the vicious cycles of American history and the country’s enduring refusal to face its true nature—especially at the moments when national anniversaries steer us back toward the mythology meant to disguise the truth.
America, U.S.A., deliberately formulated and beautifully written, details a heart-wrenching exploration of America’s legacy. It is a magnificently complex combination of lessons and voices—from W.E.B. DuBois and John Dos Passos to Herman Melville and Martin Luther King, Jr.—that, together, paint a sprawling and honest tableau of the United States, its complicated past, and ever more tenuous future. Glaude’s is a powerful voice of conscience in our tumultuous world. He pulls no punches, calling on us to interrogate our conceptions of innocence and freedom and the stories we tell ourselves about our past and present.
Centered around the major celebrations of America’s milestone birthdays across 250 years of history, the book offers a riveting look at the battles over who has a stake in writing the American story. Devastatingly candid, profoundly moving, and deeply reflective, America, U.S.A. is a shining meditation on how we must reckon with a grim past in order to strive for the better angels of our future.

Eddie S. Glaude, Jr. is the James S. McDonnell Distinguished University Professor at Princeton University and author of New York Times bestselling Begin Again and Democracy in Black.

Glaude is in conversation with Jonathan Capehart, a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist who is co-host of the morning edition of “The Weekend” on MS NOW (7am - 10am) and the New York Times bestselling author of “Yet Here I Am: Lessons from A Black Man’s Search for Home.” At PBS, Capehart serves as a political analyst on “PBS News Hour” and is featured on the popular Friday segment “Brooks and Capehart.” Capehart is a former Associate Editor at The Washington Post, where he was an opinion writer for 18 years. Capehart was deputy editorial page editor of the New York Daily News (2002-2004) and served on its editorial board (1993-2000). They won the 1999 Pulitzer for Editorial Writing for their campaign to save the Apollo Theater. 

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A revealing investigation into how industrial farming poses a growing threat to America's bees

Each February, a vast yet largely invisible migration takes place across the United States. Semi-trucks stacked high with honey bee colonies head to California's Central Valley, carrying nearly 99 percent of the nation's domesticated bees. There, the bees pollinate millions of acres of blooming almond orchards before fanning out across the country for apples, berries, and other crops. This massive undertaking sustains both beekeepers and farmers--but it comes at a heavy price.

In Bitter Honey, Jennie Durant takes readers behind the scenes to reveal the human and ecological cost of industrial farming for bees, beekeepers, and all of us who depend on them. Bees today face a gauntlet of threats: parasites and disease, pesticide exposure, and climate extremes--all magnified by Big Ag. Beekeepers, meanwhile, endure grueling practices just to survive, often losing half their hives each year.

But this isn't a story of defeat. Durant introduces us to the beekeepers, farmers, and activists pioneering new ways to support both wild and managed bees. The stakes are high: nearly three-quarters of our major food crops depend on bees and other pollinators. Bitter Honey exposes the crisis threatening the nation's bees and spotlights the advocates working to protect them for generations to come.

Jennie Durant is a writer and researcher focused on bees, agriculture, and the environment. She has spent more than a decade working with beekeepers, scientists, and policymakers, including time at the US Department of Agriculture and University of California, at both Davis and Berkeley. Her writing has appeared in Grist, Glamour, HuffPo, and the San Francisco Chronicle. She lives in the San Francisco Bay Area with her family.

Durant is in conversation with Nancy Lawson, the author of The Humane Gardener: Nurturing a Backyard Habitat for Wildlife and Wildscape: Trilling Chipmunks, Beckoning Blooms, Salty Butterflies, and other Sensory Wonders of Nature. A nature writer, habitat consultant, and founder of The Humane Gardener, she pioneers creative wildlife-friendly landscaping methods. Nancy co-chairs Howard County Bee City in Maryland and co-launched a community science project, Monarch Rx, after observing a little-known butterfly behavior in her own garden. Her habitat, books, and scientific endeavors have been featured in Science Magazine, The New York Times, The Washington Post, Oprah magazine, Entomology Today, and Ecological Entomology. Nancy is a columnist for American Gardener and an honorary director for Wild Ones. Her most recent book, Wildscape, received an honorable mention from the American Horticultural Society and was a 2024 finalist for an American Association for the Advancement of Science writing award.

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