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This event is co-sponsored by OneAID.
“A gripping page-turner that doubles as both a warning and an inspiration.” —Samantha Power, winner of the Pulitzer Prize
A Civil Servant Discovers His Breaking Point when the Trump Administration’s Cruelty and Indifference Threaten to Violate the Oath He Swore to Uphold
Nicholas Enrich had finally achieved his lifelong dream: becoming USAID’s lead official for global health. But that dream turned out to be a nightmare in the tumultuous time after President Trump’s second inauguration.
In the months that followed, USAID became the first target of Elon Musk’s newly created Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE). The mission to which Enrich had dedicated his career was being dismantled before his eyes—even the name of the agency was removed from the building’s facade. Enrich witnessed firsthand the Trump administration’s lies, how it systematically prevented USAID from providing lifesaving foreign aid, and the death and suffering around the world that resulted from careless decisions. Finally determining he could no longer keep quiet, and risking the career that he loved deeply, Enrich released a set of whistleblowing memos exposing the administration’s illegal and destructive actions.
Enrich was put on administrative leave, yet his memos went viral and had a sustained impact. In the days following their release, hundreds of canceled aid projects were revived, and the documents were cited in a Supreme Court case on the legality of USAID’s dissolution. While his memos were too late to save USAID, Enrich was one of the first government officials to publicly blow the whistle on DOGE’s reckless destruction, sounding an early alarm bell for other federal agencies that would soon find themselves in the crosshairs.
Urgent and profoundly human, Enrich’s story offers an astonishing behind-the-scenes look at a federal agency under siege, from the early days when Enrich and his team were unaware of what was to come to the shockingly ignorant, callous, and bigoted conversations they witnessed. Enrich reveals in this detailed, no-holds-barred account what was truly at stake when DOGE set out to dismantle one of America’s most effective humanitarian institutions, and how millions of lives hung in the balance.
Nicholas Enrich is a former civil servant who worked at USAID under four administrations. He served as the Bureau of Global Health’s director of policy, programs, and planning until January 2025, when he was designated as USAID’s acting assistant administrator for global health. On March 2, 2025, he was placed on administrative leave for exposing the Trump administration’s illegitimate and dangerous dismantling of USAID.
Enrich is in conversation with Atul Gawande, author of several bestselling books: Complications, a finalist for the National Book Award; Better; The Checklist Manifesto, and Being Mortal. He is also a surgeon at Brigham and Women's Hospital in Boston, a staff writer for The New Yorker, and a professor at Harvard Medical School and the Harvard School of Public Health. He has won the Lewis Thomas Prize for Writing about Science, a MacArthur Fellowship, and two National Magazine Awards.
OneAID is a grassroots organization whose mission is to sustain and empower the U.S. foreign assistance community. They serve as a connector and information hub to carry forward the knowledge, expertise, and dedication of a community that transcends borders and advances global peace and prosperity.
PURCHASE:
https://politics-prose.com/book/9781668226957?ic_referral=SEcgACC8EGWjaLVjJLH9ZTHIeIEAcufIXeud6yaWpS0wMxXIvQQvOYdQrb7XtTI_4eM-8Bx4S9xLxLJbatl6kq6tjQugUu5YfL03l4EhCR9yIgv_nHub6D5lY2f36Deq5Tiudl0
Wild meets The Wife Between Us in this page-turning thriller, set in Maine's Hundred Mile Wilderness—the treacherous final stretch of the storied Appalachian Trail—an addictive tale of passion, betrayal, control, and what it means to survive.
Raised by a doomsday prepper and hardened by the startup world, Emma Sharp has learned how to endure—especially in her marriage to Logan Grant, a charismatic tyrant who keeps her under tight control. To Emma, her marriage is a cage: it keeps you in, but it also keeps you safe. Until it doesn't.
When Emma forms an unexpected bond with Logan’s former girlfriend, the two women form a plan to help Emma take her life back. Destination: the punishing final stretch of the Appalachian Trail known as the Hundred Mile Wilderness.
After all, bad things happen in the woods all the time.
As the three venture deeper into Maine’s backcountry, desire and dread curdle into something unpredictable, dark, and deadly. Someone is lying. Someone is watching. And in the remote heart of the forest, someone is about to be lost . . . or found.
How to Survive in the Woods is a heart-stopping knockout of a novel, by turns smart, psychologically rich, and deliciously dark. In her masterful hands, Kat Rosenfield asks us to consider what it means to be a survivor—and what, or who, you would sacrifice to stay alive.
Kat Rosenfield is the author of six books, including No One Will Miss Her (Edgar Award nominee for Best Novel), and the New York Times-bestselling A Trick of Light, co-authored with the late, great Stan Lee. A former reporter for MTV News and current columnist for The Free Press, her essays and cultural criticism have appeared in The Boston Globe, Vulture, Wired, AirMail, and The New York Times. She lives in Connecticut.
Rosenfield will be in conversation with Ben Dreyfuss.
PURCHASE:
https://politics-prose.com/book/9780063467484?ic_referral=fR1VBXKGzjmT4pZfUWEqNujcEbEIQ_0Byv4K6nJtZCgwMxbVbVAhcdN8J2FIJ3J_tLKzbQDW9bbTr1G6kLj2Tir33tHll1z0iRgbuDI-tc5gsHh96202foPhcfImFpOrTI3y-1g
The story of a disillusioned generation that set out to reclaim its dignity and take on corporate America.
In recent years, young college grads have faced an alarming reality: crushing debt, unemployment, and jobs below their qualifications. They are frustrated that the time and money they invested in a degree have failed to bring about the opportunities they were promised.
The anger of this college-educated working class began to boil over during the Covid pandemic, when workers at companies like Apple and Starbucks shocked corporate America by voting to unionize. Not long after, the veteran New York Times reporter Noam Scheiber met Chaya Barrett, an astute college grad and eight-year Apple employee who had helped organize her coworkers at an Apple store near Baltimore.
While following Barrett and her cohort as their seemingly spontaneous rebellions spread far and wide—from college-educated workers at Apple stores and Starbucks cafés, through video-game studios, and even to Hollywood writers’ rooms—Scheiber realized he was witnessing something deep and lasting. Mutiny is the revelatory account of a generation made confident by their historic educational achievements, only to become disillusioned when their degrees yielded far less than they were taught to expect.
With striking empathy, Scheiber paints a vivid portrait of this new working class while telling the dramatic story of its revolt against the status quo. He describes how recent developments like the proliferation of artificial intelligence and the war in Gaza have further fueled its discontent, and he explains why the college-educated working class will continue to demand change in the workplace, in cities like New York, and in national politics for years to come.
Noam Scheiber covers workers for The New York Times. Before that, he covered economic policy and three presidential campaigns for The New Republic. His first book was The Escape Artists. He holds a master’s degree in economics from the University of Oxford.
Scheiber is in conversation with Franklin Foer, a staff writer at the Atlantic. For seven years, he was the editor of the New Republic. He is the author of the New York Times bestseller, The Last Politician: Inside Joe Biden's White House and the Struggle For America's Future. Sports Illustrated named his book How Soccer Explains the World one of the "most influential books of the decade;" it has been translated into 29 languages. He is a native of Washington, D.C.
PURCHASE:
https://politics-prose.com/book/9780374610814?ic_referral=31QNyJViaEUIOMhKNbPoeD0-c2ORP_m2UbrsW0C_vrAwM3KkbfJi1inqOn14GxG06ZTI1EoSeZvnBk3-SSD6KBQoslIdjCFx6cNZQSkHYeiYELIlXwts_wPckyYU-cEhAevMeFo
Interrogates how digital self-surveillance can be turned against us by police, prosecutors, and political whims
For consumers living in a digitally-connected world, smart technologies have built an inescapable trap of digital self-surveillance. Smart cars, smart homes, smart watches, and smart medical devices track our most private activities and intimate patterns. While these devices allow users to receive personal insights by monitoring their every move, that data can be accessed by police and prosecutors looking to find incriminating clues. Digital technology exposes everyone, everywhere, all at once and we have few laws to regulate it.
In Your Data Will Be Used Against You, Andrew Guthrie Ferguson warns us of how the rise of sensor-driven technology, social media monitoring, and artificial intelligence can be weaponized against democratic values and personal freedoms. At the same time, that data will solve crimes, radically transforming how criminal cases are prosecuted. Ferguson explores how this proliferation of private data in combination with public surveillance networks promises new ways to solve previously unsolvable crimes but also leaves us vulnerable to governmental overreach and abuse. He argues for legal interventions that address the threat of digital self-surveillance and provides concrete suggestions about how legislators, judges, and communities should respond.
As consumers, citizens, and potential subjects of surveillance, the questions in this book must be confronted now, before the trap of surveillance captures us completely. Providing a stark warning of the dangers of digital self-surveillance, Your Data Will be Used Against You is a defense of civil liberties against the growing threat of data-driven policing.
Andrew Guthrie Ferguson is Professor of Law at George Washington University Law School. He is a national expert on new surveillance technologies, policing, and criminal justice. He is the author of the 2018 PROSE Award winning book, The Rise of Big Data Policing. He is an elected member of the American Law Institute.
Ferguson is in conversation with Rachel Levinson-Waldman, director of the Liberty and National Security Program at the Brennan Center for Justice, where she works to shed light on the government’s use of surveillance technologies and authorities and its collection and use of data for law enforcement and homeland security purposes. Rachel has authored articles and reports on topics including DHS's counterterrorism efforts 20 years after 9/11; the government’s use of social media; and the constitutional implications of law enforcement surveillance in public. She has written and provided expert input for publications including the Guardian, Washington Post, Wired, Atlantic, and the New Republic. From February to June 2024, she served as an Ian Axford Fellow in Public Policy for the New Zealand Office of the Privacy Commissioner in Wellington, New Zealand. She previously served as senior counsel to the American Association of University Professors and trial counsel in the Housing and Civil Enforcement Section of the Civil Rights Division of the U.S. Department of Justice, and was a law clerk to the Honorable Margaret M. McKeown of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit. She is a graduate of Williams College and the University of Chicago Law School.
PURCHASE:
https://politics-prose.com/book/9781479838288?ic_referral=3rZX02MEW8cLPLnminHYruqdvDuOzSQ_MSnX6Wi_hw0wM9oFHSL5tFTX90ejjFPugVq47zv8lnIYRG4NH2PHZnQW3l2ZTGKYKgPp8L9J0oIR4uAgJ_tvj_Ryx84qGoJW9SYeq8k
The first-ever biography of the most pivotal Justice on the Supreme Court whose decisions, like the overturning of Roe, will drive the reshaping of America, by prize-winning journalist Peter Canellos.
When the Supreme Court handed down its decision in Dobbs v. Jackson, the landmark case overturning Roe v. Wade, it marked a turning point in the lives of millions of Americans. It was also the culmination of a decades-long movement whose grievances were embodied by the man who wrote the court’s opinion: Samuel Anthony Alito Jr.
Steely in his demeanor, with an impassive appearance that defies changing fashions, Alito could be the family lawyer in a 1960s television drama. But when he talks there is an emotional undercurrent, a fast-flowing stream beneath a placid surface. This is a man driven to push boundaries and mold ideas. His aim is to right the wrongs of the past six decades, as he saw them. He was the prized son of an Italian-born father and a mother whose parents emigrated from Italy shortly before her birth, worked their way into the middle class despite anti-Catholic prejudice and humiliating setbacks like evictions, and exacting big achievement demands of their children. But his family’s values came under attack during the sixties and later when Alito was at Princeton as the Vietnam war raged, women demanded equality, and their brand of patriotism was devalued.
The Federalist Society provided a safe space for Alito and those like him, and he moved fast up the judicial ladder to eventually land on the Supreme Court. There he has been aggressive in pushing the law in new, conservative directions—from pushing for expanding rights for the religious conservatives, overturning affirmative action, extending the right to bear arms to thwart gun controls, and reducing the power of the Environmental Protection Agency. And finally—most crucial to his legacy—he was the author of Dobbs v. Jackson, bringing the conservative legal movement full circle in overruling Roe v. Wade. His ethnic and religious background, his intellectual confidence, and his unyielding determination are all illustrative of a group of men and women who, beset by grievance, embarked on a decades-long mission to change the rules that govern society.
Peter S. Canellos is the author of The Great Dissenter: The Story of John Marshall Harlan, America’s Judicial Hero, and the editor of the bestselling Last Lion: The Fall and Rise of Ted Kennedy. He is currently managing editor for enterprise at POLITICO, and also has been POLITICO’s executive editor, leading the newsroom during the 2016 presidential coverage; and the editorial page editor of The Boston Globe. He has also been a Pulitzer Prize finalist, a recipient of the American Society of Newspaper Editors award in 2011 for excellence in editorial writing along with the 2022 George Polk Award, Robin Toner Award, and News Leaders Association Batten Medal for his writing about the Supreme Court.
Canellos is in conversation with Kimberly Wehle, a Professor of Constitutional Law at the University of Baltimore School of Law who speaks and writes on democracy, the rule of law, the Supreme Court and the separation of powers. A former Assistant U.S. Attorney and Associate Independent Counsel in the Whitewater Investigation, she has authored four books, including How to Read The Constitution—and Why, What You Need to Know About Voting—and Why, and How to Think Like a Lawyer—and Why and Pardon Power: How the Pardon System Works—and Why. She is also a legal contributor for ABC News, has a monthly column with Zeteo called Constitution in Crisis, and writes semi-monthly for The Hill. Her Substack, The Little Law School with Kim Wehle, breaks down complex legal issues for general audiences.
PURCHASE:
https://politics-prose.com/book/9781668200025?ic_referral=hT3PVozCmDrX6Z41gLO4lJNrHmXr1CrHwU9oHemSZo4wM2AYkG5HyeYsiVPLbHVfuq2B2lITOuDL0Wt0jbgRaUJgAT2oEaDpoa91stt5fWqhznRi2tNPtEQi5rUjZX5gc2PyHBM
The 30th Anniversary Edition of this classic memoir includes a new introduction by the author.
A heartbreaking and hilarious memoir by the longtime All Things Considered commentator charts the trajectory of a marriage so impossible that it became inevitable.
"Gritty, funny, moving, horrific, outrageous—and, above all, fearlessly honest.... ultimately a joyous story." —Newsday
When Marion Winik fell in love with Tony Heubach during a wild Mardi Gras in New Orleans, her friends shook their heads. For starters, she was straight and he was gay. But Marion and Tony's impossible love turned out to be true enough to produce a marriage and two beautiful sons, true enough to weather drug addiction, sexual betrayal, and the AIDS that would kill Tony at the age of thirty-seven, twelve years after they met.
Marion Winik is heard regularly on National Public Radio's "All Things Considered." She was the recipient of a 1993 National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship in Creative Nonfiction and has been voted Favorite Local Writer by the readers of the Austin Chronicle for four consecutive years. First Comes Love won the Violet Crown Award for Best Book by an Austen Writer, 1996, from the Austen Writer's League. The author of Telling, she lives in Austin, Texas, with her two sons.
Winik is in conversation with Susan Coll, the best-selling author of eight novels, including The Literati, Real Life and Other Fictions, Bookish People, and The Stager, a New York Times and Chicago Tribune Editor’s Choice. Her novel Acceptance was made into a television movie starring Joan Cusack. Her work has appeared in publications including the New York Times Book Review, the Washington Post, Washingtonian Magazine, Moment Magazine, NPR.org, and Atlantic.com. She is the events advisor at Politics and Prose Bookstore.
PURCHASE:
https://politics-prose.com/book/9780679765554?ic_referral=_MOCg5WVTDMmfRWbuNGJgre-GEy7jUr-DJLX1PG-6qQwM8IJdPJNNe_IkKS6VCImyl0uEoU_neWNviBuKNMIb1grpHIdtFKEzWR0gPxkYTCZ99wO8GdfDGQtfzWI_zi90Y7ubYo
From award-winning author Nora Lange comes a ransacking of the house of motherhood and matrimony.
Nora Lange’s debut novel, Us Fools, was praised as the “Great American Novel” by Molly Young in The New York Times, and “a razor-sharp critique of American capitalism” by Michael Schaub at NPR. Now, she turns her eye toward the daily exercise of getting by.
In “Heart Beats,” Carol and David arrive late to a Boston dinner party for a night of “messy socializing” with other couples, including a former cult-leader turned financial-advisor and a woman who learned of a “kinky sort of game” while riding public transit, details that she will reveal after the peach crumble. In “Island of Phaetons,” an expatriate living in Istanbul is called away from her daily life with “the husband” and “the friend who wanted more than friendship” to visit her mother, who notoriously makes bad decisions, and who has just arrived in Greece “with news” for her daughter, a tantalizing invitation that has her daughter immediately on a plane. In “Dog Star,” two figurines live out their dreams before succumbing to the truth that they have been assembled inside of a snow globe and will never go anywhere. In the title story, a new mother in Los Angeles navigates a job, a long-distance relationship with her husband, and her visiting mother, while hoping to find relief in daytime app sex.
These stories of lust, estrangement, and self-preservation are at once hilarious and savage. Day Care is a biting reflection on economic precarity, love, and peeing your pants.
Nora Lange’s debut novel Us Fools was awarded the The Sue Kaufman Prize for First Fiction, was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award in Fiction, named a best book of 2024 by The Boston Globe and NPR, a Los Angeles Times bestseller, and a New York Times Editors’ Choice pick. Her writing has appeared in The Believer, BOMB, Hazlitt, and elsewhere. Her project “Dailyness” was longlisted for the 2014 Leslie Scalapino Award for Innovative Women Performance Writers. She has received fellowships from Brown University and is a fellow at USC’s Los Angeles Institute of the Humanities. She recently moved to Salt Lake City with her family.
Lange is in conversation with Tope Folarin, a Nigerian-American writer based in Washington, DC. He won the Caine Prize for African Writing in 2013 and was shortlisted once again in 2016. He was also recently named to the Africa39 list of the most promising African writers under 40. He was educated at Morehouse College and the University of Oxford, where he earned two Masters degrees as a Rhodes Scholar. He is the author of A Particular Kind of Black Man.
PURCHASE:
https://politics-prose.com/book/9781953387578?ic_referral=Au7ChQ1cBhMKWuq2u7RHQLmciq8fjB4MhF8kAJ7GRw8wM4Vr_G-8xEqfL4yu63-S_AhrBN96zwEzixGg5iiLP-rUnaixM6eAivLJSN7rQbTLyiAhHIi-uY0oN5lo3nLV41VeHZ4
A gripping story that reveals what happened to a small American town when an influential white nationalist group relocated its headquarters there, illustrating how radical changes in American politics impact our psyches and divide our communities
When the white nationalist group VDARE used dark money to purchase a historic castle overlooking Berkeley Springs in West Virginia, America’s “cold civil war” spilled into this scenic tourist town.
From behind the imposing stone walls of their castle, VDARE’s Peter and Lydia Brimelow spread propaganda focused on the “great replacement” conspiracy theory, sowing discord in the once-peaceful town below. In an attempt to restore civility, a group of neighbors banded together to oppose VDARE’s presence in Berkeley Springs.
Strange People on the Hill urgently demonstrates how extreme reactionary ideology and the national politics that embody it disrupt the lives of everyday Americans while highlighting the intimate relationship between violent, racist radicalism and what now passes for mainstream conservatism.
Through extensive on-the-ground reporting, renowned researcher and investigative reporter Michael Edison Hayden shows how the politicized culture wars manifest in deeply personal dramas and conflicts in a moving narrative about how the people of Berkeley Springs are bravely standing up against hate and division and forging a community built on inclusivity, respect, and neighborliness.
Michael Edison Hayden is an investigative reporter and a leading expert on far-right extremism. As a reporter, he broke some of the biggest stories on the radical right over the last decade, and his analyses—featured in outlets like NPR, MSNBC, and CNN—helped shape perspectives on the authoritarian, anti-democracy movement that took over the Republican Party. He is the co-host of the podcast Posting Through It and he resides in New York.
Hayden is in conversation with Jared Holt, an acclaimed investigative researcher and reporter known for his coverage of right-wing political movements in the United States. He currently works as a senior researcher at Open Measures, an open-source social intelligence platform. His reporting and analysis has appeared in major national outlets including The Washington Post, MSNow, The Daily Beast, Columbia Journalism Review, and HuffPost, among others. He has also worked with leading research organizations such as Institute for Strategic Dialogue, The Atlantic Council's Digital Forensic Research Lab, Right Wing Watch, and Media Matters. He is based in Chicago
PURCHASE:
https://politics-prose.com/book/9781645030607?ic_referral=V3JYFF9e14hKFk6u6ImBBzOTElZsvuAEBOcVMQGNI68wMwLAk9zsxM5UbNQMFOakLvg5UqEYKydQ_63oaj7WpLKLETAVNZDu1ish__V0gze9DkFFYsgrh1utQDd9VXee0J1kzc8
An assembly of refusals portraying the radical power of "no" by the renowned scholar and author of The Feminist Killjoy Handbook, Sara Ahmed.
To be heard as complaining is not to be heard, writes Sara Ahmed. In her sweeping exploration of complaint as a means of resistance, Ahmed attunes her "feminist ear" to those who seek to challenge powerful institutions. She shows how complaints can unbury past complaints, getting them out of filing cabinets or from behind closed doors, allowing us to see institutions more clearly--how they work, and for whom they work.
Where complaints live, how complaints are made, who receives them, who buries them and where--Ahmed's accessible, attentive writing brings to life the lessons learned from people knocking at closed doors, teaching us how to collectively resist the glacial weight of institutional power. This book inspires all of us to persist, to say "No " and to build new collectivities that break down brick walls together.
Sara Ahmed is an independent feminist scholar who works at the intersection of feminist, queer, and race studies. Her research is concerned with how bodies and worlds take shape and how power is secured and challenged in everyday life as well as institutional cultures. She has published eleven books, including The Feminist Killjoy Handbook. She lives in Cambridgeshire, England.
Ahmed is in conversation with Soraya Chemaly, an award-winning writer and activist whose work focuses on the role of gender in culture, politics, religion, and media. She is the director of the Women's Media Center Speech Project and an advocate for women's freedom of expression and expanded civic and political engagement. A prolific writer and speaker, her articles appear in Time, The Verge, The Guardian, The Nation, HuffPost, and The Atlantic. Follow her on X at @SChemaly and learn more at SorayaChemaly.com.
PURCHASE:
https://politics-prose.com/book/9781558613683?ic_referral=O-VYY_qK6xdHs6y47VMA3SXxwjSaCPA6NxTWEnMEzQAwM9ftbIv_CRmI_UV3vQd3dP7Zsf3v_B_D-megeypHdm4MEge9mdqPVKva0enBieo044Wi0QuVUs05pJfPaJI8hXS2J-A
A GI’s guide to the brain-gut-microbiome connection, including research on why people develop IBS and how anyone can achieve poophoria
Welcome to the easy-to-digest user’s manual for your body’s unsung hero: the gut. Leading Harvard gastroenterologist, Dr. Trisha Pasricha takes us on a riotous deep dive into our own bowels with new insight from neuroscience, enteric biology, and physiology for an actionable framework to make pooping a breeze.
No one would expect you to have stunning teeth if you were never shown a toothbrush. You would struggle to fall asleep if you never knew how to turn off the bedroom lights. But no one talks about the fundamentals of pooping, and so many—even the highest of achievers—spiral into a quagmire of poor habits and toilet-anxiety.
You’ve Been Pooping All Wrong will teach you:
Trisha Pasricha, MD, MPH is an assistant professor of medicine at Harvard Medical School and the “Ask A Doctor” columnist for The Washington Post where she translates complex medical topics into must-read insights—with a touch of humor—for millions each week. A graduate of Harvard College, Dr. Pasricha earned her medical degree from Vanderbilt University School of Medicine and a Master of Public Health from the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health. Her training includes an internal medicine residency at The Johns Hopkins Hospital and gastroenterology and motility fellowships at Massachusetts General Hospital. Currently, Dr. Pasricha serves as director of the Institute for Gut-Brain Research at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center, leading an NIH-funded research laboratory at the forefront of gut-brain science. Her work has been published in The New England Journal of Medicine, JAMA Network Open, and Nature Reviews.
Dr. Pasricha will be in conversation with Ann Compton.
PURCHASE:
https://politics-prose.com/book/9780593855133?ic_referral=6W0CM3KGuadQlptRSjTLTJZkPgaLYuSZiK24UWy6ABQwMwu94QvMk88nY0si0k3qVl7K4aykyqODUYED1FmYI-YpWESnHMGrlOC6IbPeXa4NsNES_9hzTguxXi4OmDTCix6IKdA
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