Politics and Prose Presents

In 1940, with the Nazis sweeping through France, Henri Matisse found himself at a personal and artistic crossroads. His 42-year marriage had ended, he was gravely ill, and after decades at the forefront of modern art, he was beset by doubt. As scores of famous figures escaped the country, Matisse took refuge in Nice, with his companion, Lydia Delectorskaya. By defiantly remaining, Matisse was a source of inspiration for his nation.

While enemy agents and Resistance fighters played cat-and-mouse in the alleyways of Nice, Matisse's son, Jean, engaged in sabotage efforts with the Allies. In Paris, under the swastika, Matisse's estranged wife, Amélie, worked for the Communist underground. His beloved daughter, Marguerite, active in the French Resistance, was arrested and tortured by the Gestapo, sentenced to Ravensbruck concentration camp--and miraculously escaped when her train was halted by Allied bombs. His younger, son, Pierre helped Jewish artists escape to New York; even his teenaged grandson risked his life by defying the Germans and their Vichy collaborators.

Amidst this chaos, Matisse responded to the dark days of war by inventing a dazzling new paper technique that led to some of his most iconic pieces, including The Fall of Icarus, his profile of Charles De Gaulle, Monsieur Loyal, and his groundbreaking cut-out book, Jazz. His wartime works were acts of resistance, subtly patriotic and daringly new.

Drawing on intimate letters and a multitude of other sources, Christopher C. Gorham illuminates this momentous stage of Matisse's life as never before, revealing an artist on a journey of reinvention, wrenching meaning from the suffering of war, and holding up the light of human imagination against the torch of fascism to create some of the most exciting work of his career, of the 20th century, and in the history of art.

Christopher C. Gorham is a lawyer, educator, and acclaimed author whose books include Matisse at War and the Goodreads Choice Award finalist, The Confidante. With degrees in history from Tufts University and the University of Michigan, he served on the editorial staff of the Syracuse Law Review while earning his J.D. from Syracuse University College of Law. His writing has appeared in The Washington Post and in online journals. He lives with his wife in Watertown and Chatham, Massachusetts, and can be found online at ChristopherCGorham.com.

https://politics-prose.com/book/9780806544168?ic_referral=WwUAxh7cD-xZ53mIvdTKb-dHz7GXMcuuCBr8S7juEQgwM6GEL5lxp4asGVxD17kwt-mt7UC84rqf-D9pCybrZRWayNf5yqetF9oy8xA2fzgtpjYd8McK6sxy5t1qOYyYJxVdoj0

Politics and Prose is pleased to announce the fourth in a series of discussions meant to keep our community informed and engaged during this exceptional period in our nation’s political history. 

The Trump administration has wasted no time pushing an agenda that favors fossil fuel production over environmental regulation, and its actions threaten to quicken changes in our climate for the worse.  

Some of the major moves up to now have included: withdrawal (again) from the Paris agreement: a drill-baby-drill energy policy that calls for expanded fossil fuel extraction: a reduced emphasis on clean energy alternatives; the rollback of regulations on vehicle emissions, methane leaks, and other pollutants; the weakening of such agencies as FEMA and NOAA critical in dealing with the impacts of severe weather;  and the undermining of climate science. 

Our panel of experts will assess just how damaging to the climate these measures have been and how much faster the clock is ticking now toward further disaster. Also discussed will be actions that can be taken to push back through legal challenges, advocacy, state-level moves, and private sector efforts. 

Neela Banerjee is NPR's Chief Climate Editor. She manages NPR’s Climate Desk, which focuses on making complex science accessible to audiences, spotlighting barriers to addressing climate change, explaining climate solutions and revealing how climate change disproportionately affects marginalized people. The desk coordinates a nationwide collaborative of dozens of member stations aimed at strengthening local climate journalism.

Manish Bapna joined NRDC as president and chief executive officer in August 2021. With more than 700 attorneys, scientists, advocates and policy experts on staff, as well as three million supporting members, NRDC is confronting the interlocking climate, health, nature and inequity crises facing the world today. Prior to joining NRDC, Bapna’s leadership roles have focused on scaling solutions at the intersection of the environment and human development. He served as a senior economist at the World Bank for seven years, where he designed and implemented water, forestry and rural development projects in Asia and Latin America; then as executive director of the Bank Information Center (BIC), a nonprofit that works to protect the rights of local communities and the environment from the negative impacts of projects and policies financed by development banks; then as executive vice president and managing director of the World Resources Institute (WRI) for 14 years.

Monica Medina is an Arnhold Distinguished Fellow at Conservation International. She most recently served as the first woman President and CEO of the Wildlife Conservation Society. From 2021-2023, she was the Assistant Secretary of State for Oceans and International Environmental and Scientific Affairs and the first U.S. Special Envoy for Biodiversity and Water Resources at the U.S. State Department. She is a former small business owner having founded Our Daily Planet, an environmental e-mail newsletter. From 2015-2021, Medina was also an Adjunct Professor in the School of Foreign Service at Georgetown University. Medina has had a long career in environmental law, policy, philanthropy, media, and advocacy, including at the Walton Family Fou ndation and the National Geographic Society.

Ally Coll (who will moderate) is an Assistant Professor of Law at the City University of New York (CUNY), where she teaches courses about constitutional separation of powers, the modern administrative state, and the federal courts system. She was previously a litigator in private practice and spent time on Capitol Hill as an aide in both the U.S. House and Senate. Coll received her law degree from Harvard Law School and her B.A. in History and Political Science from Tulane University. 

Driven brings a seasoned perspective to today's conversations about government, media, and the future of truth in the form of a long-awaited autobiography by Tom Johnson, an award-winning journalist who helped shape the twenty-four-hour news media as we know it. Johnson's storied career in politics and journalism spans the Lyndon B. Johnson administration, where he was privy to painful negotiations on Vietnam and notified the president that Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. had been assassinated, through the executive leadership of the LA Times and, finally, Ted Turner's upstart CNN in Atlanta.

From his perspective "inside the room," Johnson provides eyewitness accounts of Lyndon B. Johnson's triumphs and disasters and his on-the-ground view of the magnificent achievements and significant shortfalls of late twentieth-century American journalism. Johnson is also candid about his lifelong struggle with depression and mental health and recovery advocacy. With more than eight decades behind him, Driven is not just Johnson's look at the past but a chance for his story to offer guidance about finding balance in an uncertain future.

Tom Johnson served as chief executive officer of two of America's most respected news organizations, the Los Angeles Times and CNN. Part of the first White House Fellows class, he eventually became assistant press secretary under Bill Moyers, then assistant to President Lyndon B. Johnson, following LBJ back to Texas after he left office. He is a recipient of several awards, including the Horatio Alger Award, Ten Outstanding Young Americans, the Walter Cronkite Award for Excellence in Journalism, the Paul White Award, to name a few. In 2006, he also received the John Gardner Legacy of Leadership Award by the White House Fellows for lifetime achievement in public service. A native of Macon, Georgia and graduate of the University of Georgia and Harvard Business School, Johnson lives in Atlanta.

Johnson is in conversation with Judy Woodruff. Woodruff is a senior correspondent and the former anchor and managing editor of the PBS News Hour. She has covered politics and other news for five decades at NBC, CNN and PBS.

https://politics-prose.com/book/9780820374536?ic_referral=o9WGjbklqNF3fGVZgXrzmlT3ITI6ENIintG7xB_TzucwM36CfPc6UuNbKxxSIfm3s12vK-A9resQzxE8-JjWGDoNtx-yz5XuufcjeZ0JoX4Q4KzbHVkRZMvL69IQo2pIXJ0tawc

From pandemics to the climate crisis, humanity faces tougher challenges than ever. Whether it's the health of our people or the health of our planet, we know we are on an unsustainable path. But our efforts to effectively tackle these existential crises are now hampered by a common threat: politically and ideologically motivated opposition to science.

Michael E. Mann and Peter J. Hotez are two of the most respected and well-known scientists in the world and have spent the last twenty years on the front lines of the battle to convey accurate, reliable, and trustworthy information about science in the face of determined and nihilistic opposition.

In this powerful manifesto, they reveal the five main forces threatening science: plutocrats, pros, petrostates, phonies, and the press. It is a call to arms and a road map for dismantling the forces of anti-science. Armed with the information in this book, we can be empowered to promote scientific truths, shine light on channels of dark money, dismantle the corporations poisoning the planet, and ultimately avert disaster. 

Michael E. Mann is presidential distinguished professor in the Department of Earth and Environmental Science at the University of Pennsylvania. He is director of the Penn Center for Science, Sustainability, and the Media. He contributed to the award of the 2007 Nobel Peace Prize and was elected to the US National Academy of Sciences in 2020. He lives in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.

Peter J. Hotez is dean of the National School of Tropical Medicine and professor of pediatrics and molecular virology and microbiology at Baylor College of Medicine, where he is also the codirector of the Texas Children's Center for Vaccine Development. He is an elected member of the US National Academy of Medicine and, in 2022, was nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize for his work on the COVID-19 vaccine. He lives in Houston, Texas.

https://politics-prose.com/book/9781541705494?ic_referral=iJvl6WkYI0Bjo6lQUIDW5PtZ1bR9MJinREjHteiEt1EwM6rtMWZWNGH3pUIJNgKj4SsvsOMBqyPjFQkqhDCMuu_Y0i3yHxmIOSd7fmXT9o_Oe0ZPJFBwEtCSgjHoOOBG_UpKtB0

On October 7, 2023, Hamas fighters killed more than eleven hundred Israelis and took more than two hundred hostages, prompting an Israeli response that has in turn taken tens of thousands of lives and devastated the Gaza Strip. Why did this happen, and can anything be done to grant peace and justice to Israelis and Palestinians alike?

In Tomorrow Is Yesterday, the analyst Hussein Agha and the diplomat Robert Malley offer a personal and bracing perspective on how the hopes of the Oslo Peace Process became the horrors of the present. Drawing on their experience advising the Palestinian leadership (Arafat and Abbas) and US presidents (Clinton, Obama, and Biden) and their participation in secret talks over decades, Agha and Malley offer candid portraits of leading figures and an interpretation of the conflict that exposes the delusions of all sides. They stress that the two-state solution became a global goal only when it was no longer viable; that U.S. officials preferred technical schemes to a frank reckoning with the past; that Hamas's onslaught and Israel's war of destruction were not historical exceptions but historical reenactments; and that the gaps separating Israelis and Palestinians have less to do with territorial allocation than with history and emotions.

Robert Malley has served at senior levels in several US administrations. Under President Obama, he served as Special Assistant to the President, Senior Advisor to the President for the counter-ISIL campaign, and White House Coordinator for the Middle East, North Africa, and the Gulf Region. He served as Special Assistant to the President for Arab-Israeli affairs under President Clinton. Most recently, he was Special Envoy for Iran in the Biden Administration. He was also president and CEO of the International Crisis Group and is the author of The Call from Algeria.

Malley is in conversation with Ishaan Tharoor, a global affairs columnist on the International desk of The Washington Post, where he authors the WorldView newsletter and column. 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.

https://politics-prose.com/book/9780374617127?ic_referral=ELvui3uPcW2A-ElJxCjeE8RuyRzu6ygWvDZV4219uK8wMwtt39-8JidYOeLahMXItsVeWWr6IpNK39HHJJ8EcZ02SyCrUBhaEXqZ-Ms343mhW5LEfT5vsc2ktNYUaX9K29bV-mY

Jane Leavy has always loved baseball. Her grandmother lived one long, loud foul ball away from Yankee Stadium--the same grandmother who took young Jane to Saks Fifth Avenue and bought her her first baseball glove. It's no coincidence that Leavy was covering the game she loved for the Washington Post by the late 1970s. As a pioneering female sportswriter, she eventually turned her talent to books, penning three of the all-time best baseball biographies about three of the all-time best players: Sandy Koufax, Mickey Mantle, and Babe Ruth. But when she went searching for a fourth biographical subject, she realized that baseball had faltered. The Moneyball era of the last two decades obsessed over data and slowed the game down to a crawl, often at the expense of thrills, skills, and surprise. Major League Baseball has begun to address issues too long ignored, yet the questions linger: how much have these efforts helped to improve the game and reassert its place in American culture?

Leavy takes a whirlwind tour of the country seeking answers to these questions, talking with luminaries like Joe Torre, Dave Roberts, Jim Palmer, Dusty Baker, and more. What Leavy uncovers is not only what's wrong with baseball--and how to fix it--but also what's right with baseball, and how it illuminates characters, tells stories, and fires up the imagination of those who love it and everyone who could discover it anew.

Jane Leavy is the author of the New York Times bestsellers The Big Fella: Babe Ruth and the World He Created, The Last Boy: Mickey Mantle and the End of America's Childhood, Sandy Koufax: A Lefty's Legacy, and the comic novel Squeeze Play, which Entertainment Weekly called "the best novel ever written about baseball." She was a staff writer at The Washington Post from 1979 to 1988, first in the Sports section, then writing for the Style section. She covered baseball, tennis, and the Olympics. She has written for many publications, including The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Sports Illustrated, and The Los Angeles Times, and was anthologized in The Great American Sports Page: A Century of Classic Columns.

Mike Rizzo, the former President of Baseball Operations and General Manager of the Washington Nationals, having the past 17years leading the team. In a city without professional baseball for 33 years, Rizzo was charged with transforming a bare bones organization ranked at the bottom of the standings. Throughout his career with the Nationals, he built teams which won four division titles and, in 2019, a World Series championship. In doing so, he became only the sixth active GM to reach 1000 wins all with the same team. Rizzo is widely recognized for his astute scouting, shrewd trades and draft pick as well as for revamping the Nationals player development system. In 2019, after 11 seasons at the helm of the Washington Nationals, the teams won the World Series, defeating the Houston Astros in seven games. The come from behind victory gave Washington, D.C. its first World Series championship since 1924.

Leavy and Rizzo are in conversation with Stefan Fatsis, the author of the New York Times bestseller Word Freak, about the world of competitive Scrabble; A Few Seconds of Panic, about life in the National Football League; and Wild and Outside, about minor league baseball. His latest book, Unabridged: The Thrill of (and Threat to) the Modern Dictionary will be published in October by Grove Atlantic. In four decades as a journalist, Fatsis has written and talked for Slate, The Wall Street Journal, NPR, The New York Times, Sports Illustrated, and many other outlets. He lives in Washington, D.C. 

https://politics-prose.com/book/9780306834660?ic_referral=jhq4o6id2kOOd4_69L5T27DcCcyn27fgIfgyQYNO-hYwM2rE0jBUDFF-jlLexrJ6D1cSNVxXuthmpKMjVxbowliOKYBmRlSUcQv3He7T8bs99FF_djeeuai16pwQal3htcIyOOI

Reality Winner was a twenty-five-year-old translator for the NSA when she saw a document that she assumed would make headlines: After public silence by the NSA and blatant lies by the Trump administration, the 2016 US election was far from secure. She impulsively printed the document--a breach of NSA protocol--stuffed it into her stockings, left the building, and mailed it to The Intercept, which promptly informed the NSA.

Now, for the first time--after two films and a Broadway play about her--Winner tells her own story: her unusual childhood, which led her to want to serve her country; her reasons for leaking the document; and her torturous years in prison, where she served the longest prison sentence ever for a government-affiliated employee convicted on a single count of leaking classified information to an American news outlet. This is a bold, brave book about the risk one woman took to protect her country and the price she paid for it.

A brilliant linguist, devout patriot, voracious reader, and fitness and yoga enthusiast, Reality Winner was a US Air Force veteran working at the NSA when she leaked a classified document containing revelations about the 2016 US presidential election. Today she is a CrossFit coach living in South Texas and studying to become a licensed veterinary technologist. 

Winner is in conversation with former NPR correspondent Dina Temple-Raston, the Host and Managing Editor of the Click Here podcast as well as a senior correspondent at Recorded Future News. She previously served on NPR’s Investigations team focusing on breaking news stories and national security, technology, and social justice and hosted and created the award-winning Audible Podcast “What Were You Thinking.” She is also the author of four works of non-fiction including A Death in Texas, about the James Byrd murder in Jasper, Texas and The Jihad Next Door, about six Yemeni-Americans and their brush with al-Qaeda. 

https://politics-prose.com/book/9781954118843?ic_referral=4ZA1Q0U0SFcDNKynJusAmJaQjaUgsndSEvEsdZSKOtAwM99HVPoe_yMiSZKmpbRoCt9kSnOJY8XZJ_rTaBqyTiaM7aEu8fXqUYsV30YkYJ80KRXeyJB-BPE2mZb-jXIlNdL72Mw

The Tragedy of True Crime is a first-person journalistic account of the lives of four men who have killed, written by a man who has killed. Lennon entered the New York prison system with a sentence of 28 years to life but after he stepped into a writing workshop at Attica Correctional Facility, his whole life changed. Reporting from the cell block and the prison yard, Lennon challenges our obsession with true crime by telling the full life stories of men now serving time for the lives they took.

These men have completely different backgrounds -- Robert Chambers, a preppy Manhattanite turned true crime celebrity; Milton E. Jones, a seventeen-year-old coaxed from burglary into something far darker; and Michael Shane Hale, a gay man caught in a crime of passion -- and all are searching to find meaning and redemption behind bars. Lennon's reporting is intertwined with his own story, from a young man seduced by the infamous gangster culture of New York City to a celebrated prison journalist. The same desire echoes throughout the lives of these four men: to become more than murderers.

A first-of-its-kind book of immersive prison journalism, The Tragedy of True Crime poses fundamental questions about the stories we tell and who gets to tell them. What essential truth do we lose when we don't consider all that comes before an act of unthinkable violence? And what happens to the convicted after the cell gate locks?

John J. Lennon is serving his twenty-fourth year behind bars, currently in Sing Sing Correctional Facility. His writing has appeared in the New York Review of Books, the New York Times Magazine, the New Yorker, the Atlantic, Esquire, and New York magazine. His work has been anthologized in the Best American Magazine Writing, and he's twice been a finalist for the National Magazine Award, in feature writing and reviews and criticism. His feature essay "The Apology Letter" was part of the Washington Post Magazine's special issue that won the National Magazine Award.

Lennon will be in conversation with Tom Jackman, a D.C. area native who worked for the Washington Post for 27 years, during which he launched the True Crime blog, and helped lead coverage of the D.C. sniper trials, the Virginia Tech shootings, and the Jan. 6 Capitol riot. Prior to that he covered courts and cops for the Kansas City Star for 14 years, during which he wrote the best-selling book Rites of Burial about a Kansas City serial killer.

https://politics-prose.com/book/9781250858245?ic_referral=DWn8yfiv850ZJdrKeo5KecLCct2EjXTaJg3KVvC-BNAwM34q5Ihl_YSx9C82-FNM3woa8r4FhUw-yroUVoVKcgviSf2-AoU5IxA8w-zLZboUvfBQ3cRYbEjbg4ULIkOSDfdla7E

In 2023, hundreds of AI luminaries signed an open letter warning that artificial intelligence poses a serious risk of human extinction. Since then, the AI race has only intensified. Companies and countries are rushing to build machines that will be smarter than any person. And the world is devastatingly unprepared for what would come next.

For decades, two signatories of that letter--Eliezer Yudkowsky and Nate Soares--have studied how smarter-than-human intelligences will think, behave, and pursue their objectives. Their research says that sufficiently smart AIs will develop goals of their own that put them in conflict with us--and that if it comes to conflict, an artificial superintelligence would crush us. The contest wouldn't even be close.

How could a machine superintelligence wipe out our entire species? Why would it want to? Would it want anything at all? In this urgent book, Yudkowsky and Soares walk through the theory and the evidence, present one possible extinction scenario, and explain what it would take for humanity to survive.

The world is racing to build something truly new under the sun. And if anyone builds it, everyone dies.

Nate Soares is the President of MIRI. He has been working in the field for over a decade, after previous experience at Microsoft and Google. Soares is the author of a large body of technical and semi-technical writing on AI alignment, has been interviewed in Vanity Fair and the Financial Times, and has spoken on conference panels alongside many of the AI field's leaders.

Soares is in conversation with Jon Wolfsthal, the Director of Global Risk at FAS. Jon B. Wolfsthal is also a senior adjunct fellow at the Center for a New American Security and member of the Science and Security Board of the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists. He was appointed to the US Department of State’s International Security Advisory Board in 2022. He served previously as senior advisor to Global Zero in Washington, DC. Before 2017, Mr. Wolfsthal served as Special Assistant to President of the United States Barack Obama for National Security Affairs and is a former senior director at the National Security Council for arms control and nonproliferation. He also served from 2009-2012 as Special Advisor to Vice President Joseph R. Biden for nuclear security and nonproliferation and as a director for nonproliferation on the National Security Council.

https://politics-prose.com/book/9780316595643?ic_referral=j16l5IPPCHC-rdT-DrLqrBP7EVpsbMLgZWV9kLMYJBIwM039knrOSPLQqIVe-u89dRgkSpcDODPK_1w8h93fDYdQ5Gjah8FxrEuGxAhV3TqBD6n6nQZURkmBqF4XzOs7t9PRa28

In brutally repressive sixteenth-century England, artists had been frightened into dull conventionality; foreigners were suspect; popular entertainment largely consisted of coarse spectacles, animal fights, and hangings. Into this crude world came an ambitious cobbler's son with an uncanny ear for Latin poetry--a torment for most schoolboys, yet for a few, a secret portal to beauty, visionary imagination, transgressive desire, and dangerous skepticism. What Christopher Marlowe found on the other side of that door, and what he did with it, brought about a spectacular explosion of English literature, language, and culture, enabling the success of his collaborator and rival, William Shakespeare.

With propulsive narrative flair and brilliant literary criticism, Stephen Greenblatt reconstructs the youthful involvement with the queen's spy service that shaped Marlowe's brief, troubling life and gave us his Tamburlaine and Faustus--dramatic masterpieces on power and its costs. And with detailed historical insight, Greenblatt explores how the people Marlowe knew, and the transformations they wrought, birthed the economic, scientific, and cultural power of the modern world--involving Faustian bargains with which we reckon still.

Stephen Greenblatt, PhD, is Cogan University Professor of the Humanities at Harvard University and general editor of The Norton Anthology of English Literature. He is author of the Pulitzer Prize- and National Book Award-winning The Swerve.

Dr. Farah Karim-Cooper is the eighth director of the Folger Shakespeare Library in Washington DC. Prior to joining the Folger, Dr. Karim-Cooper was Professor of Shakespeare Studies, King’s College London, and Director of Education (Higher Education & Research) at Shakespeare’s Globe, where she worked for 20 years. She has published over 40 chapters in books, reviews, and articles. Her next book, All the World’s Your Stage: Shakespeare for Today, is written specifically for children ages 9–12. It will be published in November 2025 by DK Publishers in the UK and Penguin Random House in the United States.

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