Politics and Prose Presents

To truly grasp the roots of America's political polarization, economic inequality, public health crises, and democratic collapse, we must examine the country's longstanding regional divides. In Nations Apart, Colin Woodard--an expert on North American regionalism and European ethnonationalism --delves into how centuries-old settlement patterns and the cultural geography they created have shaped today's most contentious policy debates and brought American democracy to the brink. Drawing on original, quantitative research conducted through Woodard's university-based think tank project, Nations Apart offers a fresh perspective on the issues most threatening our national cohesion, including:

• Guns
• Health
• Immigration
• the History Wars
• Abortion
• Climate Change
• Democracy
• Authoritarianism

Blending groundbreaking original findings from commissioned polls and surveys with new cultural insights into our current reality, Nations Apart offers actionable strategies to bridge the rifts that divide us and points the way toward a more united nation.

Colin Woodard, a New York Times bestselling author, historian and award-winning journalist, is director of Nationhood Lab Salve Regina University's Pell Center for International Relations and Public Policy. He is the author of six books that have been translated into a dozen foreign languages and inspired an NBC television drama. A longtime foreign correspondent, he reported from more than 50 countries on seven continents and, as an investigative reporter at Maine's Portland Press Herald, won a 2012 George Polk Award and was a finalist for a 2016 Pulitzer Prize. His work has appeared in The New York Times, Politico, The Washington Post, The Economist, Smithsonian, and dozens of other major publications. A graduate of Tufts University and the University of Chicago and a Fellow of the Royal Geographical Society, he lives in Maine.

https://politics-prose.com/book/9780593833407?ic_referral=YJgMqFRK1U5DFBrbFh4UMBHpwW_fi5Y6XswH8RCJfWowM6z_GfEh405i_LRFNo6c8h3JJk0raRg-CJNnHs2HFCTmnMnKNuEy_Dm1XgBanlt9BNXF94ENfpTNszwNB_DkYpqGlcI

George Packer’s gripping fable of imperial collapse illuminates the crises of our times.
George Packer’s bestselling nonfiction work exploring American life has won many prizes, including the National Book Award. With The Emergency, he turns to fiction, bringing us a visionary novel that goes to the nerve center of what it means to live in a time of fracture and upheaval.
An empire has collapsed from boredom and loss of faith in itself. In the Emergency that follows, youth rebellions of urban Burghers and rural Yeomen embrace radical new ideas of humanity. Doctor Hugo Rustin, chief surgeon at the Imperial College Hospital, is increasingly estranged from his city and his family—from his wife, Annabelle, who finds fulfillment in their changed community; and especially from his teenage daughter, Selva, who has turned against her father’s values. When an incident at the hospital leads to Rustin’s disgrace, he seeks redemption in a quixotic and dangerous journey into the countryside, with Selva as his companion, just as the conflict between Burghers and Yeomen is reaching a crisis.
The Emergency is a novel of ideas and a taut page-turner. It asks what we owe each other across divided generations and classes—what common human bonds remain when a society falls apart. In creating a vividly imagined world, Packer takes us deep into the heart of our troubled moment.

George Packer is an award-winning author and staff writer at The Atlantic. His books include The Unwinding: An Inner History of the New America (winner of the National Book Award), The Assassins’ Gate: America in Iraq, and Our Man: Richard Holbrooke and the End of the American Century (winner of the Hitchens Prize and the Los Angeles Times Book Prize for biography). He is also the author of two novels and a play, and the editor of a two-volume edition of the essays of George Orwell.

Packer is in conversation with Jeffrey Goldberg, the editor in chief of The Atlantic, and the moderator of Washington Week With The Atlantic on PBS. Goldberg is the 15th person to serve as editor in chief in The Atlantic's 168-year history. Under Goldberg’s leadership, The Atlantic has won the first three Pulitzer Prizes in its history, and set new records for subscriptions. The Atlantic has also won the National Magazine Award for General Excellence, the highest honor bestowed by the magazine industry, for the past three years in a row. Goldberg's most recent book, On Heroism, is an expansion of his explosive reporting about former President Donald Trump’s contempt for and repeated disparagement of military service members—a story he broke four years ago.  

https://politics-prose.com/book/9780374614720?ic_referral=zpl7cVnwRcHiqPcWmIp_xSLZPwSUN5eDHaJxrS7wmlcwM2qDDhFKCcfUnoVz7D71uiwMhmcYOrQd3uMjQN_vUjuVfhxTit8z5zZSbj3k2JvIGE3pj7yyVzuQIXJUf-D0jzCEt1Q

"Well, most people want to come to a national park and leave with that warm, fuzzy feeling with an ice cream cone. Rushmore can't do that if you do it the right way. If you do it the right way people are going to be leaving pissed."

Gerard Baker, the first Native American superintendent of Mt. Rushmore, shared those words with author Matthew Davis. From the tragic history of Wounded Knee and the horrors of Indian Boarding Schools, to the Land Back movement of today, Davis traces the Native American story of Mt. Rushmore alongside the narrative of the growing territory and state of South Dakota, and the economic and political forces that shaped the reasons for the Memorial's creation.

A Biography of A Mountain combines history with reportage, bringing the complicated and nuanced story of Mt. Rushmore to life, from the land's origins as sacred tribal ground; to the expansion of the American West; to the larger-than-life personality of Gutzon Borglum, the artist who carved the presidential faces into the mountain; and up to the politicized present-day conflict over the site and its future. Exploring issues related to how we memorialize American history, Davis tells an imperative story for our time.

Matthew Davis is the author of When Things Get Dark: A Mongolian Winter's Tale. His work has appeared in the New Yorker, The Atlantic, The Los Angeles Review of Books and Guernica, among other places. He has been an Eric and Wendy Schmidt Fellow at New America, a Fellow at the Black Mountain Institute at UNLV, and a Fulbright Fellow to Syria and Jordan. He holds an MFA in nonfiction writing from the University of Iowa and an MA in International Relations from the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies. Davis lives in Washington, D.C. with his wife, a diplomat, and their two young kids.

Davis is in conversation with Vann R. Newkirk II, a senior editor at the Atlantic, and the host and co-creator of the Peabody-award-winning podcast Floodlines. Newkirk was a 2022 Andrew Carnegie fellow, and was a 2020 James Beard Award Finalist, a 2020 11th Hour Fellow at New America, and a 2018 recipient of the American Society of Magazine Editors's ASME Next Award. In 2024, Newkirk was named Journalist of the Year by the Washington Association of Black Journalists.

https://politics-prose.com/book/9781250285102?ic_referral=VGsZLKk6vu74_kT0yNzk2bO0_OLI26RNAHY8WLmWq_EwM_TqqUHNuKGT2IXncaYcSR0ZiNY2KiDUMYW2aSLaWJyoFd_zk-a2UjNu01UQUt9SHtfDFWaMgk9uo6I5vjw7XaIOWNw

Join April Ryan for another installment in an ongoing series of discussions focusing on the panelists' most recent books and current events. Ryan will examine recent and longstanding issues with the following panelists: 

White House Correspondent April Ryan has a unique vantage point as the only Black female reporter covering urban issues from the White House - a position she has held for over 28 years, since the Clinton era.  She is now the longest-serving Black member of the press corps.  Her position as a White House Correspondent has afforded her unusual insight into the racial sensitivities, issues, and attendant political struggles of our nation's past presidents. April is the Washington D.C. Bureau Chief for Black Press USA and the host of The Tea with April Ryan on Substack. She has been featured in Essence, Vogue, Cosmopolitan, and Elle Magazines to name a few.  April Ryan has served on the board of the prestigious White House Correspondents Association. She is also an esteemed member of the National Press Club and the Gridiron Club. In 2015, Ms. Ryan was nominated for an NAACP Image Award (Outstanding Literary Work-Debut Author) for her first book. In 2017 April was the Journalist of the Year for the National Association of Black Journalists. April Ryan is the author of the award-winning book, The Presidency in Black and White, and At Mama's Knee, where she looks at race relations through the lessons and wisdom that mothers have given their children. April is also the author of Under Fire: Reporting from the Front Lines of the Trump White House. Her latest book, Black Women Will Save the World, celebrates Black women's resilience and unheralded strength, reflects on "The Year That Changed Everything" — 2020 — and discusses African-American women's unprecedented role in upholding democracy.

Nikole Hannah-Jones is the Pulitzer Prize-winning creator of the 1619 Project and a staff writer at The New York Times Magazine investigating racial inequality and injustice – earning a MacArthur Fellowship, a Peabody Award, George Polk Awards and National Magazine Awards. Hannah-Jones is the Knight Chair in Race and Journalism at Howard University and founder of the Center for Journalism & Democracy, the Ida B. Wells Society for Investigative Reporting and the 1619 Freedom School. She holds a Master of Arts in Mass Communication from UNC at Chapel Hill and a Bachelor of Arts in History and African-American studies from the University of Notre Dame.

Don Lemon spent three decades on local and national TV, a trusted voice after the Sandy Hook massacre, in war-torn Eastern Europe, and during the riots of 2020. Anchoring Don Lemon Tonight on CNN, he was known for hard-hitting interviews with public officials and compassionate dialogue with everyday people. The Don Lemon Show is now streaming on all platforms. His book on race, This is the Fire, was a #1 New York Times bestseller. His most recent book is, I Once Was Lost: My Search for God in America.

https://politics-prose.com/race-in-america-2025

Every story exists within a world, either existing, created, or adapted. What preconceived notions or associations does the reader bring to those worlds, and how does the writer navigate them? What are the constraints of working with an existing place or time, and how do its traditions, mythology, or folklore affect the stories we choose to tell? Memoirist Kyoko Mori speaks with local writers Michele Evans, Tamar Shapiro, and Charlotte Taylor Fryar about crafting writing in tandem--and also distinct--from the lore that exists around their subjects.

Michele Evans, a fifth-generation Washingtonian (D.C.), is a writer, teacher, and adviser for Unbound, an award-winning Northern Virginia high school literary magazine. This Pushcart Prize and Best of the Net nominee studied at Smith College, King's College London, and the Graduate School at the University of Maryland. Her poems have appeared in Artemis Journal, The ASP Bulletin, Maryland Literary Review, Mid-Atlantic Review, Spoken Black Girl Magazine, Yellow Arrow Journal, Zora's Den, and elsewhere. This Watering Hole fellow and Teacher Consultant for the Northern Virginia Writing Project lives online at www.awordsmithie.com. purl is her first poetry collection.

Tamar Shapiro was raised in both the U.S. and Germany and now lives in Washington, DC with her husband, two children, and the world's best dog. While writing Restitution, Shapiro attended the Iowa Writers' Workshop Summer Program and the Bread Loaf Writers' Conference in Vermont. A former real estate attorney and non-profit leader, she is a 2026 MFA candidate at Randolph College in Virginia. This is her first novel.

Charlotte Taylor Fryar is a writer, historian, educator, and herbalist. She holds a PhD in American Studies from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and lives in Glen Echo, Maryland, less than seven hundred feet from the banks of the Potomac River. Potomac Fever: Reflections on the Nation's River is her first book.

Kyoko Mori’s new nonfiction book, CAT & BIRD, was published in March 2024 by Belt Publishing. She is the author of 3 other nonfiction books (The Dream of Water; Polite Lies; Yarn) and 4 novels (Shizuko’s Daughter; One Bird; Stone Field, True Arrow; Barn Cat). Her essays and stories have appeared in The Best American Essays, Harvard Review, The American Scholar, Colorado Review, Conjunctions, and others. She teaches in the MFA Program in Creative Writing at George Mason University and the Low-Residency MFA Program at Lesley University.

Potomac Fever, Restitution, and purl are The Inner Loop's Author's Corner fall spotlights. The Inner Loop (https://theinnerlooplit.org/) cultivates and promotes the distinctive literary culture of Washington, DC. Author's Corner supports local authors' independently published books by spotlighting them in community programming and collaborations.

PURCHASE BOOKS: https://politics-prose.com/inner-loop-panel

An original transatlantic history of the invention of the corrections profession and of ensuing debates about punishment’s purposes and prisoners’ rights.

Impermissible Punishments explores the history of punishment inside prisons and how governments grappled with obligations to justify the punishments they impose. Legal scholar Judith Resnik charts the creation of the corrections profession and weaves together the stories of people who made rules for prisons and the stories of those living under the resulting regimes.

Resnik maps three centuries of shifting ideas, norms, and legal standards aiming to draw lines between permissible and impermissible punishments. Her account documents the impact of World War II, the United Nations, the US Civil Rights movement, and the pioneering prisoners who insisted that law should protect their individual dignity. Taking us to the present, Resnik analyzes the expansion of imprisonment, the inability of public and private prisons to provide safe housing, and the impact of abolition politics.

Exploring the interdependency of people in and out of prisons, Impermissible Punishments examines what governments committed to equality owe to the people they detain and argues that many contemporary forms of punishment need to end.

Judith Resnik is the Arthur Liman Professor of Law at Yale Law School. She has authored many works, including Representing Justice: Invention, Controversy and Rights in City-States and Democratic Courtrooms.

Resnik is in conversation with Kristin Henning. Henning is a nationally recognized advocate, author, trainer, and consultant on the intersection of race, adolescence, and policing in communities of color. She is the Blume Professor of Law and Director of the Juvenile Justice Clinic and Initiative at Georgetown Law, where she and her law students have been representing youth accused of crime in Washington, DC for more than 26 years. Kris was previously the Lead Attorney for the Juvenile Unit of the D.C. Public Defender Service and is currently the Director of the Mid-Atlantic Region of the Gault Center.

Kris writes extensively about race and adolescence in the courts, including in her book, The Rage of Innocence: How America Criminalizes Black Youth, which was featured on the front page of the New York Times Book Review, and articles such as The Reasonable Black Child: Race, Adolescence, and the Fourth Amendment. She is the co-founder of a number of initiatives to combat racial inequities in the juvenile and criminal legal systems, including the Ambassadors for Racial Justice program and a Racial Justice Toolkit for defenders. She also trains state actors across the country on the impact of racial bias in the courts and the traumatic effects of police contact and surveillance.

Kris serves on the Board of Directors for the Public Welfare Foundation and has received many awards including the Juvenile Leadership Prize from the Juvenile Law Center, a Women of Distinction Award from the American Association of University Women, and the Embracing the Legacy Award from the RFK Community Alliance.

https://politics-prose.com/book/9780226754741?ic_referral=R3sfwGl4YRjik2rOB-7cOPgVN45wZAiAGKUeRm-HppEwM-dNsl3pESOikh_o0-qLP_pHW3IS_FppEDj1rX1dsRTzmqMQiZ5O0PBurPIQ7vv1aF6dQX5c54gBycmF0qFe9WnATNA

Our solar system is a dynamic place where asteroids careen off course and solar winds hurl charged particles across billions of miles of space. Yet we seldom consider how these events, so immense in scale, influence our comparatively minuscule corner of the cosmos: planet Earth.

In Ripples on the Cosmic Ocean, Dagomar Degroot traces the surprising threads linking human endeavor to the rest of the solar system. He shows how variability in planetary environments shaped geopolitics, spurred scientific and cultural innovation, and encouraged new ideas about the emergence and ultimate fate of life. Martian dust storms altered the trajectory of the Cold War and inspired fantastical stories about alien civilizations. Comet impacts on Jupiter led to the first planetary defense strategy. And volcanic eruptions spewed sulfuric acid into Venus's atmosphere, exposing the existential risks of climate change at home.

In the dawning era of space settlement, cosmic environments are becoming increasingly vulnerable to human activity. They may also hold the key to slowing the destruction of environments on Earth. Ripples on the Cosmic Ocean asks what it will take to develop an interplanetary environmentalism across a vast mosaic of entangled worlds.

Dagomar Degroot is Associate Professor of Environmental History at Georgetown University. A contributor to the Washington Post, Nature, and Aeon, he is the author of The Frigid Golden Age: Climate Change, the Little Ice Age, and the Dutch Republic, 1560-1720, named one of the ten best history books of 2018 by the Financial Times.

Degroot is in conversation with Rebecca Helm, a marine biologist studying life in the open ocean and at the ocean’s surface. Helm grew up in Arizona and completed her undergraduate degree in Marine Science at Eckerd College before conducting research on jellyfish life cycles as a Fullbright Fellow in South Africa. Helm received a Ph.D. in Ecology and Evolutionary Biology from Brown University, where she was an NSF Graduate Student Research Fellow and an NSF EPSCoR fellow. Her Ph.D. work focused on the evolution of open-ocean and coastal jellyfish species. Helm then conducted research on circadian rhythms as a postdoc at Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution, and later at the Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History as an NSF Postdoctoral Fellow, where she continued her research on coastal and open-ocean jellies. For the last four years, Helm has been an Assistant Professor at the University of North Carolina Asheville, where she has led multiple interdisciplinary projects on the biology of life on the high seas.

https://politics-prose.com/book/9780674986503?ic_referral=Wedhh-wV9o635khXKeHqy6Ph4Nxs94lEz6_WdiI4u5gwM2wKxU3P0ClA2TYZVodLdGZWuGoG1tkbhPLQE9sZrAaBkUxtTs1hGvz6GMVogrg_o3ovxSbbOIcvZRc6ea1c5jrJiEo

When six-year-old Laurel Taylor vanishes without a trace, her family is left shattered, struggling to navigate the darkness of grief and unanswered questions. As their search turns to despair, Laurel's older sister, Nadine, begins experiencing nightmares that blur the line between dream and reality, and she becomes convinced that Laurel's disappearance could be connected to other family tragedies. Guided by her elders, Nadine sets out to uncover whether laying the ghosts to rest is the key to finding her sister and healing her fractured family.

Carson Faust captivates in this chilling literary debut that confronts the specter of colonization and the generational scars it leaves on Native American families. Steeped in Indigenous folklore and drawing from the author's own family history, If the Dead Belong Here examines what it means to be haunted--both by the supernatural and by terrors of our own making. Faust crafts a powerful, kaleidoscopic tale about the complicated legacies of violence that shape our present, the importance of honoring our past, and the resilience of a family--and a people--determined to heal from old wounds.

Carson Faust is two-spirit and an enrolled member of the Edisto Natchez-Kusso Tribe of South Carolina. He is the recipient of artist fellowships from the McKnight Foundation and the Jerome Foundation. His fiction has appeared in TriQuarterly, ANMLY, and Waxwing, among other journals, and has been anthologized in Never Whistle at Night: An Indigenous Dark Fiction Anthology. He lives in Minnesota, where he works in philanthropy.

Faust is in conversation with Morowa Yejidé, a native of Washington, DC, is the author of the critically acclaimed novel Time of the Locust, which was a 2012 finalist for the PEN/Bellwether Prize, long listed for the 2015 PEN/Bingham Prize, and a 2015 NAACP Image Award nominee. Her most recent novel, Creatures of Passage, was shortlisted for the Ernest J. Gaines Award for Literary Excellence and a 2021 Notable Book selection by NPR and the Washington Post. She lives in the DC area with her husband and three sons.

https://politics-prose.com/book/9780593830895?ic_referral=RB24UXgkTzlRa56St-rzHQZ3nC0VyiSgHiiFxIfv3aAwMzE2-qm4r9V9tUk5XcczFLiU6kX5hRPW0ARAXzouq1LtAvNVFXXfQmxKB60Y8acdpnctZRR9koInT1-npdVfl2QkGNY

Hard to figure how so much awful horror could've started out with just them two horses and not a one yet named...
From the bestselling author of House of Leaves comes a magisterial novel about two friends determined to rescue a pair of horses set for slaughter.
While folks still like to focus on the crimes that shocked the small city of Orvop, Utah, back in the fall of 1982, not to mention the trials that followed, far more remember the adventure that took place beyond municipal lines.
For sure no one expected the dead to rise, but they did. No one expected the mountain to fall either, but it did. No one expected an act of courage so great, and likewise so appalling, that it still staggers the heart and mind of anyone who knows anything about the Katanogos massif, to say nothing of Pillars Meadow.
As one Orvop high school teacher described that extraordinary feat just days before she died, Fer sure no one expected Kalin March to look Old Porch in the eye and tell him: You get what you deserve when you ride with cowards.
Mark Z. Danielewski was born in New York City, raised in Utah, and now lives in Los Angeles.https://politics-prose.com/book/9781524747718?ic_referral=5EiNJJhdtZQotGSIahHI2aEHk7GxSvQM6Lztg2Am_0gwMyaKnBDDRmXj7HH4766yRmdo98y_fhXZq8cI99WliQ0dj7PzSGO-97ry11iZNSaxtFF7Ji6vTmeSQ_fPgY7XvzQPGCs

What just happened?

From the moment Trayvon Martin's senseless murder initiated the Black Lives Matter movement in 2014, America has been convulsed by the new social movements--around guns, gender violence, sexual harrassment, race, policing, and on and on--and an equally powerful backlash that abetted the rise of the MAGA movement. In this punchy, powerful collection of dispatches, mostly published in The New Yorker, Jelani Cobb tries to pull the signal from the noise of chaotic era. Cobb's work as a reporter takes readers to the frontlines of sometimes violent conflict and he uses his gifts as a critic and historian to crack open the meaning of it all. Through a stunning melange of narrative journalism, criticism, and penetrating profiles, Cobb captures the crises, characters, movements, and art of an era--and helps readers understand what might be coming next.

Cobb has added new material to this collection--retrospective pieces that bring these stories up to date and tie them together, shaping these powerful short dispatches into a cohesive, epic narrative of one of the most consequential periods in recent American history.

Jelani Cobb is the current Dean of Columbia's Graduate School of Journalism. He is a staff writer at The New Yorker, author of several books including The Substance of Hope: Barack Obama and the Paradox of Progress and To the Break of Dawn: A Freestyle on the Hip Hop Aesthetic. He is the editor/co-editor on multiple volumes including The Matter of Black Lives and The Essential Kerner Commission Report. Dr. Cobb is the producer/co-producer on documentaries including THE RIOT REPORT. He received the Peabody Award in 2020 and was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in Commentary. Dr. Cobb currently serves on the Board of Directors of the American Journalism Project and the Board of Trustees of the New York Public Library.

Cobb is in conversation with Jake Tapper, who has written two New York Times bestselling novels, The Hellfire Club and The Devil May Dance, as well as the bestselling nonfiction books The Outpost: An Untold Story of American Valor and The Terrorist Detectives. He is the lead Washington, DC, anchor and chief correspondent for CNN. A Dartmouth graduate and Philadelphia native, he lives in Washington, DC, with his wife, daughter, and son.

https://politics-prose.com/book/9780593978207?ic_referral=7hJk4Jo6n9dC_Sd30diQbCpOKWpofFvjsYiYWzcid-YwM2CqfStVpOO0Q82k1w3x9jjFLJfuqTpfCyNhJPDdUhkpgtbjPs_2GpKEgW4HCaV3AUMallhlJomasVcLfJr1MgcnNls