Politics and Prose Presents

Every major modern art museum in the world has Chaim Soutine in its collection. Yet, a full biographical study of the artist and his work does not exist. His paintings, which are shocking, grotesque, difficult, touching, and brilliant, were revered but misunderstood by his contemporaries who mistook him for an expressionist.

In Chaim Soutine, Celeste Marcus offers a compelling history of the artist, taking us from his early days in eastern Europe to his life in Paris among other artists such as Chagall and Modigliani, to his death in France during the German invasion. Marcus highlights how his Jewish identity dictated his dark fate even while he personally abandoned his heritage, and she reveals the conditions in which he created his most intriguing paintings. What emerges is a thorough examination of an artist who defied the conventional standards of beauty in the 1920s and 1930s and an immersive look into the expressionist movement that flourished during the interwar period and influenced the most popular artists of today.

Celeste Marcus is the managing editor of Liberties: A Journal of Culture and Politics, which she helped to found. She lives in Washington, DC.

Marcus is in conversation with Leon Wieseltier, the editor of Liberties. The former literary editor of The New Republic, Wieseltier’s essays on culture, religion, and history have been published in many international journals and magazines. In addition, his books include Kaddish and Against Identity, and he has published many translations of Hebrew poetry into English. In 2013 he won the prestigious Dan David Prize for outstanding achievement in the humanities.

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For Nicholas Thompson, running has always been about something more than putting one foot in front of another. He ran his first mile at age five, using it as a way to connect with his father as his family fell apart. As a young man, it was a sport that transformed, and then shook, his sense of self-worth. In his 30s, it was a way of coping with a profound medical scare.

By his early 40s, Thompson had many accomplishments. He was the Editor in Chief of a major magazine; a devoted husband and father; and a passionate runner. But he was haunted by the recent death of his brilliant, complicated father and the crack-up that derailed his father's life. Had the intensity and ambition he'd inherited made a personal crisis inevitable for him as well?

Then a chance offer gave him the opportunity to train for the Chicago Marathon with elite coaches. Giving himself over to the sport more fully than ever before, he discovered that aging didn't necessarily put you on an unbroken trajectory of decline. For seven years after his father died, Thompson transforms his body to perform at its highest capacity, and the profound discipline and awareness he builds along the way changes every aspect of his life. Throughout the narrative, he weaves in stories of remarkable men and women who have used the sport to transcend some of the hardest moments in life.

The Running Ground is a story about fathers, sons, and the most basic and most beautiful of sports.

Nicholas Thompson is the CEO of The Atlantic, an American magazine founded in 1857, which earned the top honor for magazines, General Excellence, at the National Magazine Awards in 2022, 2023, and 2024. Before joining The Atlantic, he was the editor in chief of Wired and an editor at The New Yorker. He has long been a competitive runner; in 2021, he set the American record for men 45+ in the 50K race. In 2025, he became the top-ranked runner in the world in his age group for the 50-mile run. He lives in Brooklyn, New York, with his wife and three sons.

Thompson is in conversation with James Fallows, a contributing writer at The Atlantic and author of the newsletter Breaking the News. He began writing for the magazine in the mid-1970s, and has written hundreds of articles for the publication since then. He is the author of 12 books. The first, National Defense, won the American Book Award in 1982 and was excerpted in The Atlantic. The most recent, Our Towns, co-written with his wife, Deborah Fallows, was based on their reporting series for The Atlantic and formed the basis of a 2021 HBO documentary. He has been a finalist for the National Magazine Award five times and was the winner in 2003, for his Atlantic reporting on the Iraq War. Before joining The Atlantic, he was the chief White House speechwriter for President Jimmy Carter. 

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In The Pursuit of Liberty, bestselling author and president of the National Constitution Center Jeffrey Rosen explores the clashing visions of Hamilton and Jefferson about how to balance liberty and power in a debate that continues to define--and divide--our country: Jefferson championed states' rights and individual liberties, while Hamilton pushed for a strong Federal government and a powerful executive. This ongoing tug-of-war has shaped all the pivotal moments in American history, including Abraham Lincoln's fight against slavery and southern secession, the expansion of federal power under Franklin Roosevelt's New Deal, and Ronald Reagan's and Donald Trump's conservative push to shrink the size of the federal government.

Rosen also shows how Hamilton and Jefferson's disagreement over how to read the Constitution has shaped landmark debates in Congress and the Supreme Court about executive power, from John Marshall's early battles with Andrew Jackson to the current divisions among the justices on issues from presidential immunity to control over the administrative state.

More than ever, the clash between Hamiltonian and Jeffersonian ideals resonates today in our most urgent national debates over the question of whether modern presidents are consolidating power and subverting the Constitution--the very threat to American democracy that both Hamilton and Jefferson were determined to avoid. The Pursuit of Liberty is a compelling history of the opposing forces that have shaped our country since its founding, and the ongoing struggle to define the balance between liberty and power.

Jeffrey Rosen is President and CEO of the National Constitution Center, where he hosts We the People, a weekly podcast of constitutional debate. He is also a professor of law at the George Washington University Law School and a contributing editor at The Atlantic. Rosen is a graduate of Harvard College, Oxford University, and Yale Law School. He is the author of nine books, including the New York Times bestsellers The Pursuit of Happiness and Conversations with RBG. His essays and commentaries have appeared in The New York Times Magazine; on NPR; in The New Republic, where he was the legal affairs editor; and in The New Yorker, where he has been a staff writer.

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From the New York Times bestselling author of The Escape Artist, an extraordinary true story of resistance, heroism and betrayal.

When the whole world is lying, someone must tell the truth.

Berlin, 1943: A group of high society anti-Nazi dissenters meet for a tea party one late summer’s afternoon. They do not know that, sitting around the table, is someone poised to betray them all to the Gestapo.

They form a circle of unlikely rebels, drawn from the German elite: two countesses, a diplomat, an intelligence officer, an ambassador’s widow and a pioneering head mistress. What unites every one of them is a shared loathing of the Nazis, a refusal to bow to Hitler and the courage to perform perilous acts of resistance: meeting in the shadows, rescuing Jews or plotting for a future Germany freed from the Führer's rule. Or so they believe.

How did a group of brave, principled rebels, who had successfully defied Adolf Hitler for more than a decade, come to fall into such a lethal trap?

Undone from within and pursued to near-destruction by one of the Reich’s cruelest men, they showed a heroism in the face of the most vengeful regime in history that raises the question: what kind of person does it take to risk everything and stand up to tyranny?

Jonathan Freedland is the author of the New York Times bestseller The Escape Artist: The Man Who Broke Out of Auschwitz to Save the World (National Jewish Book Award winner in both the Biography and Holocaust categories), a weekly columnist for the Guardian and previously the Guardian’s Washington correspondent. Freedland is the host of  the Guardian's Politics Weekly America podcast; he presents BBC Radio 4's The Long View and is co-host of the Unholy podcast, alongside the journalist Yonit Levi. He is also the author of several thrillers under the pseudonym Sam Bourne and is a past winner of the George Orwell Prize for Journalism.

Freedland 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.

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History Matters brings together selected essays by beloved historian David McCullough, some published here for the first time, written at different points over the course of his long career but all focused on the subject of his lifelong passion: the importance of history in understanding our present and future. Edited by McCullough's daughter, Dorie McCullough Lawson, and his longtime researcher, Michael Hill, History Matters is a tribute to a master historian and offers fresh insights into McCullough's enduring interests and writing life. The book also features a foreword by Jon Meacham.

McCullough highlights the importance of character in political leaders, with Harry Truman and George Washington serving as exemplars of American values like optimism and determination. He shares his early influences, from the books he cherished in his youth to the people who mentored him. He also pays homage to those who inspired him, such as writer Paul Horgan and painter Thomas Eakins, illustrating the diverse influences on his writing as well as the influence of art.

Rich with McCullough's signature grace, curiosity, and narrative gifts, these essays offer vital lessons in viewing history through the eyes of its participants, a perspective that McCullough believed was crucial to understanding the present as well as the past. History Matters is testament to McCullough's legacy as one of the great storytellers of this nation's history and of the lasting promise of American ideals.

Dorie McCullough Lawson is David McCullough's daughter and worked with him for nearly three decades. She is the author of three previous books, including Posterity: Letters of Great Americans to Their Children.

Michael Hill is an independent historical researcher who worked with David McCullough for over thirty years. He is also the author of three previous books, including a biography of Elihu Washburne. He served as a historical consultant for the HBO production of David McCullough's John Adams.

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In the last twenty years the US Supreme Court has radically curtailed voting rights, undermined anti-corruption measures, encouraged extreme political gerrymandering, restricted the regulation of guns, and obliterated the constitutional right to control one's reproductive choices. This transformation was orchestrated by a billionaire-backed reactionary political movement, whose interests Chief Justice John Roberts has been all too willing to serve.

Without Precedent explodes the falsehood that Roberts is a fair-minded institutionalist who works to blunt the worst impulses of other Republican appointees to the court when, in fact, he has led the rightward transformation of the court's jurisprudence while presiding over the most corrupt and corrupted Supreme Court in American history.

Informed by Lisa Graves's experience working on judicial issues for all three branches of the federal government, and based on years of intensive research, Without Precedent not only exposes Roberts as the reactionary politician in robes he has always been but delivers a vigorous plan of judicial reform designed to overcome the divisive, discriminatory, destructive, and anti-democratic machinations of the Roberts court. 

Lisa Graves is one of the nation's foremost experts on right-wing influence on the federal courts. She helps lead Court Accountability and True North Research. She has served as a senior adviser in all three branches of the federal government, including as the chief counsel for nominations for the US Senate Judiciary Committee for Senator Patrick Leahy. She resides in Superior, Wisconsin.

Graves is in conversation with Senator Sheldon Whitehouse. Whitehouse has earned a reputation in the Senate as a fierce advocate for progressive values and a thoughtful legislator capable of reaching across the aisle to achieve bipartisan solutions. He has been at the center of bipartisan efforts to pass laws overhauling federal education policy, rebuilding our nation’s infrastructure, reforming the criminal and juvenile justice systems, protecting Americans from toxic chemicals in everyday products, and addressing ocean plastic waste. Recognizing the devastating toll of addiction in Rhode Island and across the nation, Whitehouse authored the first significant bipartisan law to address the opioid crisis, the Comprehensive Addiction and Recovery Act. Representing the Ocean State, he plays a key role in crafting policies addressing climate change, environmental protection, and a price on carbon. He passed into law a dedicated fund to support ocean and coastal research and restoration and bipartisan legislation to confront the crisis of marine plastic and other waste polluting our oceans. He has worked to enact bipartisan measures to reduce carbon pollution and boost America’s clean energy economy. Whitehouse has stood as a staunch defender of Social Security and Medicare, and has made improving care and reducing costs in our health care system a hallmark of his career. 
A graduate of Yale University and the University of Virginia School of Law, Sheldon served as
Rhode Island’s U.S. Attorney and state attorney general before being elected to the Senate,
where he serves on the Finance Committee, the Judiciary Committee, the Environment and
Public Works Committee, and the Budget Committee.

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Joe McGinniss was a paradox: a brilliant writer whose dazzling achievements were overshadowed by personal demons. At age twenty-six, he became the youngest living person to top the New York Times bestseller list, for his book The Selling of the President about Richard Nixon's 1968 campaign. Shortly after, he walked out on his wife and their three young children.

His oldest son, Joe McGinniss Jr., went on to become a writer himself, known for his critically acclaimed novels The Delivery Man and Carousel Court. In the memoir Damaged People, McGinniss Jr. vividly recounts his affectionate yet stormy relationship with his famous father, capturing moments of tenderness and humor amid the chaos and tension.

The prosaic commitments of full-time fatherhood held little appeal for Joe McGinniss, a superstar author who proudly relished the freedom to chase stories anywhere his curiosity led. He rose to prominence with a trilogy of true crime blockbusters in the 1980s and early '90s, Fatal Vision, Blind Faith, and Cruel Doubt. Notoriously, he found himself the subject of Janet Malcom's The Journalist and the Murderer, a book accusing him of manipulating one of his subjects. Controversy would dog the rest of his journalistic career, as he was accused of falsifying details in his 1993 biography of Ted Kennedy and his 2011 biography of Sarah Palin. His life was a turbulent mix of success and scandal, marked by alcoholism, depression, and an obsessive dedication to his craft that often left his family struggling to stay afloat.

Now a father raising a son of his own, McGinniss Jr. wrestles with the legacy of his upbringing and his father's self-destruction, striving to create a stable and nurturing environment for his child. The pressures of modern parenting--ranging from competitive school admissions to the mental health challenges that today's youth face--force him to confront long-buried demons of ambition and obsession. Damaged People dives deep into the heartbreak of unfulfilled expectations and the beauty of second chances, offering an unflinching look at what it means to grow into a more compassionate and present parent.

Bringing a novelist's storytelling skills to this deeply personal story, McGinniss Jr. delivers a poignant tale of grace, resilience, and growth, showing us that even in the face of fractured relationships, there's hope for healing and a brighter future.

Joe McGinniss Jr. is the author of Carousel Court and The Delivery Man. He lives in Washington, DC, with his family.

McGinniss Jr. is in conversation with Molly McCloskey, the author of five books of fiction and nonfiction. She lived abroad for 25 years in Ireland, Kenya, and Kosovo, and now resides in D.C. Her work has been published in the U.K. by Penguin and in the U.S. by Scribner and Overlook Press. Her essays and short stories have appeared in The New Yorker, McSweeney’s, Los Angeles Review of Books, the Guardian, the Irish Times, and various anthologies. She has taught writing at Boston University, George Washington, and Trinity College Dublin. She is currently working on a memoir about her father and NBA basketball.

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On February 11, 2024, NFL Commissioner, Roger Goodell, & the league’s two most powerful owners, Jerry Jones & Robert Kraft, looked down at the spectacle before them. What they saw was the sport’s championship game, the Super Bowl—now a de facto national holiday—being played in a shiny new $2B stadium, home to the first franchise based in Las Vegas, after the league’s embrace of nationwide gambling. The moment was over 30 years in the making. As one of Goodell’s colleagues said: “Roger doesn’t view the other leagues as competition. He wants to be mentioned with Disney and the Vatican, these massive institutions.” 

In Every Day is Sunday, Ken Belson traces the evolution of the league from “one of the four US professional sports,” to the superpower it is today. Belson illustrates how the league’s rise coincided with the arrival of Jones & Kraft in the early 90’s. He provides an inside look on how these two men reshaped the league, taking readers into the secretive owner’s meeting, how they decided Goodell was the right man to place as Commissioner, and how the three built, wielded, and held on to their collective power. 

Perfect for fans of The Dynasty and Big Game, Belson provides a unique peek behind the curtain of how America’s favorite sport achieved its status—and how these three men let nothing stand in their way.

Ken Belson rejoined The New York Times's Business section in 2023 to write about the business of sports after spending 14 years in the Sports department, primarily covering the N.F.L. Belson reports on the teams and personalities of the N.F.L., including finances, stadiums, medical issues, lawsuits and more. He lives in New York with his wife. You can follow him @el_belson on X.

Belson is in conversation with Josh Levin, a writer based in Washington, D.C. He is the author of The Queen: The Forgotten Life Behind an American Myth, the host of two seasons of the podcast “Slow Burn,” on David Duke and the rise of Fox News, and a former cohost (with Stefan Fatsis) of the sports podcast “Hang Up and List".

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In this darkly funny gothic tale, a reclusive mother and her saturnine daughter move into a haunted building brimming with eccentrics—and secrets.

Just past the edge of summer, Alice and her daughter, Fern, arrive at the Pine Lake Apartments—a former sanatorium occupied by an ensemble of peculiar neighbors and a smattering of ghosts. Among the living: the Mermaid Lady, who performs in a nightclub fish tank; the building’s handyperson, moonlighting as a medium; and an awkwardly charming professor of medieval studies. Fern alone is acquainted with the undead, who pass like troubled clouds through the apartments, humanity mostly lost ages ago. For the determinedly private Alice, Pine Lake seems the perfect place at the edge of the world to hide herself and her daughter—until the day Fern finds a dead body in the dumpster.

Intent on solving the mystery of this discarded corpse, Fern eagerly puts her encyclopedic knowledge of detective novels to good use while dodging warnings from her increasingly paranoid mother. She soon comes to realize that within the strange tapestry of Pine Lake residents, nothing is ever quite as it seems. Her investigation digs up long-buried secrets, including her mother’s, that implicate each of her neighbors . . . and conjures a new one from beyond the grave.
The hotly anticipated debut novel from “master of the fantastic” (Roxane Gay) Amber Sparks, Happy People Don’t Live Here is an unforgettable portrait of family—whether by birth or by chance or by choice—and the sometimes dangerous myths we make to keep ours together.
 

Amber Sparks is the author of the short story collections And I Do Not Forgive You and The Unfinished World. Her writing has appeared in The Paris Review, Granta, Slate, and elsewhere. She lives in Washington, D.C., with her husband, daughter, and cats.

Sparks is in conversation with Shannon Sanders, the author of the linked short story collection Company, which won the 2024 Los Angeles Times Book Prize's Art Seidenbaum Award for First Fiction. Her short fiction has appeared in One Story, Sewanee Review, Virginia Quarterly Review, Electric Literature, and elsewhere. She lives in Silver Spring with her husband and three sons.

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Myriam Gurba has lived in California her entire life, with its plants and soils, forests and ecology, immersing herself in the language of the landscape as refracted through the languages and memories of her ancestors. In Poppy State, California plants serve as structural anchors in a wildly inventive work of narrative nonfiction that is part botanical criticism, part personal storytelling, part study of place. Gurba traverses themes of language, power, ancestry, and California's ecology, in masterfully constructed sentences that seem to defy gravity, in the structure of a labyrinthine secret garden. The reader is invited to commune with California with Gurba as their guide, and is ushered through a compendium of anecdotes, reminiscences, utterances, lists, incantations, newspaper articles, and other ephemera.

As a child, Gurba helped her father plant a garden at their "house on the hill" overlooking the strawberry fields where he spends his days as an educator for the children of migrant workers. Through the stories of these plants she comes to a new understanding of what occurs in the cultivation of a soul. Gurba learns if she can care for her body as she does her plants, her soul can thrive--like the California poppy on her kitchen windowsill, emerging from a dented can of El Pato brand enchilada sauce filled with courtyard dirt. And through walks in the Angeles National Forest, she visits oaks, crows, elderberries, and sycamores, foraging for acorns, flowers, and berries to place on her altar at home, inviting the plants to write with her. Poppy State is a riveting tour de force that asks you to read it once and immediately read it again.

Myriam Gurba is the author of four books, including Dahlia Season (2007) which won the Edmund White Award for Debut Fiction, Painting their Portraits in Winter (2015; Mean (2017), a true crime memoir that was a finalist for the Lambda Literary Award in LGBTQ Nonfiction, the Publishing Triangle's Judy Grahn Award for Lesbian Nonfiction, and the PEN America Award for Creative Nonfiction; and Creep: Accusations and Confessions, her first essay collection, which includes her viral essay, "Pendeja, You Ain't Steinbeck: My Bronca with Fake Ass Social Justice Literature," and was a finalist for a National Book Critics Circle Award in criticism. Gurba's writing been widely anthologized and has also appeared in publications such as the New York Times, Los Angeles Times, Harper's Bazaar, Believer, Paris Review, and TIME. She is also a teacher, editor, anti-rape activist, public speaker, practitioner of plant-based magic, and a co-founder of Dignidad Literaria, a grassroots organization that combats white supremacy in the publishing industry.

Gurba is in conversation with Lupita Aquino. Aquino, better known as @Lupita.Reads on Instagram and TikTok, passionately spreads her love for books online. She has moderated numerous book events and founded La Comunidad Reads, an author-inclusive book club in partnership with the DC Public Library. Alongside her vibrant online presence, she has contributed insightful book coverage to outlets such as TODAY.com, Aster(ix) Literary Journal, She Reads, The Washington Independent Review of Books, and many more. Notably, Lupita has served as a judge for the 2024 PEN/Jean Stein Book Award, the 2023 Louise Meriwether First Prize for the Feminist Press, and was on the Selection Committee for the Aspen Words Literary Prize in 2021. She enjoys exploring local bookstores and libraries with her wife and son when not immersed in books.

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