Politics and Prose Presents

Distracted by our own agenda, we so often hear without understanding, impatiently waiting for our turn to speak. In this exploration of transformational listening, Kasriel shows how shifting from surface-level exchanges to Deep Listening can enrich our relationships as friends, parents, and partners, enhance our effectiveness as leaders, and strengthen the fabric of our communities. At a time when divisions within communities, organizations, and families are often a source of profound pain, this book offers inspiration and practical guidance on how we can better listen to each other, even when we fiercely disagree.

Drawing on scientific studies, new research, and powerful stories from legendary listeners in politics, business, and the arts, Kasriel unveils her simple yet transformative eight-step approach. With Deep Listening as your guide, you'll learn to become a better family member, friend, co-worker and citizen.

At once a practical guide and a heartfelt manifesto, this groundbreaking book challenges us to rethink our approach to listening and in doing so, transform our lives from the inside out. Whether readers seek to strengthen their empathy, boost their performance at work, or foster genuine understanding across cultural, political, and generational divides, Deep Listening provides the tools and inspiration to unlock the power of lasting, meaningful connections.

PURCHASE BOOK HERE: https://politics-prose.com/book/9780063352988?ic_referral=rDHIgnADLGbjnobwdBrYQt1M-0gIZOSRXoyxihpOfyswM7g3ctnhUm2DCm2SRDfZR85OghEFiERe9yCt1t2FTRgchUhHrV7VnaCcYhAOPyy8bvJOwSxBlAVfiXGtrna0mGGon8k

Emily Kasriel's distinguished career at the BBC for over two decades included roles as an award-winning journalist, editor and media executive. She developed the Deep Listening approach as a Senior Visiting Research Fellow at King's College Policy Institute in London, drawing on her experience as an accredited executive coach and workplace mediator. Previously, she's been a Visiting Fellow at Said Business School at Oxford University, and a Senior Advisor to the Skoll Foundation. An MA graduate of the University of Oxford and Syracuse University's Maxwell School of International Relations (as a Rotary International Fellow), she lives in London.

Kasriel is in conversation with Christopher Turpin, an award winning former NPR journalist and media executive. Most recently, he was Chief of Staff to NPR’s President & CEO. He’s also twice served as Senior Vice President for News and Editorial Director at NPR, running one of the nation's preeminent newsrooms. And for over a decade Turpin led All Things Considered, NPR’s legendary afternoon news magazine program, shaping coverage of major events such as September 11th, the Iraq War, Hurricane Katrina and multiple Presidential elections. Turpin has won many of journalism's top honors, including multiple Alfred I. duPont and Peabody Awards. He lives on Capitol Hill with his wife and daughter.

*recorded 7/1/2025

In 1917, in Fatima, Portugal, three shepherd children claimed that the Virgin Mary appeared before them and spoke the words, "Do not be afraid."

Stephen Harrigan first heard the story of Our Lady of Fatima when he was a young boy attending a Catholic school in Texas in the 1950s, struggling to come to grips with a religion that simultaneously soothed and terrified him. The question of what actually happened in Fatima in the early part of the twentieth century, one of the most important, and most mysterious, events in the church's history, captured his young imagination and has stayed with him ever since.

Sorrowful Mysteries is a detailed and extraordinarily compassionate examination of the phenomenon of Our Lady of Fatima, an attempt to unravel and put into perspective the lives of the three children, how this life-altering event changed them and the world they knew, and how it intersected with so many of the signal moments of the twentieth century--pandemics, revolutions, world wars, assassinations, and even skyjackings. It is a sweeping story, but also at its heart a very personal one, about Harrigan's own relationship with Catholicism and his lifelong struggle to break free from a religion that in so many paradoxical ways shaped and defined him.

PURCHASE BOOK HERE: https://politics-prose.com/book/9780593534281?ic_referral=tsFafnML8MQFaewRGyBTO3Ah4BUCuVurlyorTi56C70wM2nt3JbwhlUjSxAkKasakhJYMvSUmZYisT_iSbJPb0Sfdi8Ip4Dov70Qgsef5AIqZ8I1dVyK_cVug0ChdmhtZwi2F2w

Stephen Harrigan is the author of the New York Times bestselling The Gates of the Alamo, Remember Ben Clayton (which, among other awards, won the James Fenimore Cooper Prize from the Society of American Historians for best historical novel), Challenger Park, A Friend of Mr. Lincoln, Big Wonderful Thing: A History of Texas, and The Leopard Is Loose. He is a writer at large for Texas Monthly, as well as a screenwriter who has written many movies for television. He lives in Austin, TX.

Harrigan is in conversation with Thomas Mallon. Mallon is the author of eleven novels, including Henry and Clara, Dewey Defeats Truman, Fellow Travelers, Watergate, Landfall, and Up With the Sun. He is a frequent contributor to The New Yorker, The New York Times Book Review, and other publications. In 2011 he received the American Academy of Arts and Letters' Harold D. Vursell Memorial Award for prose style. He has been the literary editor of GQ and the deputy chairman of the National Endowment for the Humanities. He lives in Washington, D.C.

*recorded 5/16/2025

Years after her successful and impactful career at the CIA, Christina Hillsberg became enthralled with the stories of the trailblazing women who forged new paths within the Agency long before she began her career there in the aughts. These were women who sacrificed their personal lives, risked their safety, defied expectations, and boldly navigated the male-dominated spy organization.

Through exclusive interviews with current and former female CIA officers, many of whom have never spoken publicly, Agents of Change tells an enthralling and, at times, disturbing story set against the backdrop of the evolving women's movement. It was the 1960s, a "secretarial" era, when women first gained a foothold and pushed against the one-dimensional, pop-culture trope of the sexy Cold War Bond Girl. Underestimated but undaunted, they fought their way, decade-by-decade, through adversity to the top of the spy game.

Seamlessly weaving together the individual stories of these exceptional women, Hillsberg deftly tackles not just the fight for gender equality at the CIA, but the current dilemma the Agency faces when dealing with the culmination of a decades-long culture of sexual harassment and assault.

Each chapter sheds a light on women's issues during that decade before bringing to life the stories of female CIA operations officers whose experiences were emblematic of that given era. In this fascinating and empowering chronicle, Hillsberg takes readers inside the Agency in a way that's never been done before, paying long overdue tribute to the survivors and thrivers, the indispensable groundbreakers, and defiant rabble-rousers who made the choice to change their lives and in turn, changed history.

PURCHASE BOOK HERE: https://politics-prose.com/book/9780806543499?ic_referral=x-nZ0nROL0ZiFQAFSS3HTxpEdQbYsqcQGsh7bfYJBzYwM3vyYR7_DNrH4Vrq-A8j135G6Ozx2KAIxDtIQEl_JBeHySKBlW8R1TOXvdDx-Q1IvLYjHBD8bcL5MCh9lyTZ1L8gyA

Christina Hillsberg is a former CIA intelligence officer, writer, and recognized expert on women in espionage and intelligence tradecraft. The recipient of multiple CIA Exceptional Performance Awards, her work at the CIA included specializing in African politics and leaders as one of the Intelligence Community's few Swahili and Zulu linguists, producing analytic assessments for senior-level policymakers including the President and his Cabinet, and serving in the CIA's Directorate of Operations, clandestinely collecting intelligence from the field. After leaving the CIA, Christina worked in Information Security at Amazon, where she stood up the company's first Insider Threat program, created a new global framework to analyze cyber risks, and established new processes to utilize intelligence tradecraft to analyze information security threats. She now writes full-time and is the author of License to Parent: How My Career as a Spy Helped Me Raise Resourceful, Self-Sufficient Kids as well as Agents of Change . Her writing has been featured in The Washington Post, The Seattle Times, Harvard Business Review, Parents Magazine, Thrive Global, Parade, and more. Visit her online at ChristinaHillsberg.com.

Hillsberg is in conversation with former career covert CIA operations officer Valerie Plame. During her career with the CIA, Valerie managed top-secret covert programs designed to keep terrorists and rogue nation states from acquiring nuclear weapons. Valerie has served on numerous nonprofit boards and has been a keynote speaker to national and international audiences on resilience, ethical leadership, and crisis management as well as on intelligence, national security, and the global nuclear threat. She is a member of the Council on Foreign Relations. Valerie is the author of the New York Times best-selling memoir Fair Game.

*recorded 6/25/2025

John McPhee has been a staff writer for The New Yorker since 1965 and has written more than thirty acclaimed books that began on the magazine's pages. But few readers know or fully appreciate the true breadth of his writing. Looking for a Story is a complete reader's guide to McPhee's vast published work, documenting much rarely seen or connected with McPhee, including remarkable early writing for Time magazine published without his name.

In chronicling McPhee's career where he broke ground applying devices long associated with fiction to the literature of fact, Noel Rubinton gives insights into McPhee's techniques, choice of subjects, and research methods, shedding light on how McPhee turns complicated subjects like geology into compelling stories. Beyond detailing more than seventy years of McPhee's writing, Rubinton recounts McPhee's half century as a Princeton University writing professor, a little known part of his legacy. McPhee inspired generations of students who wrote hundreds of books of their own, also catalogued here.

With an incisive foreword by New Yorker staff writer and former McPhee student Peter Hessler, Looking for a Story also includes extensive annotated listings of articles about McPhee, reviews of his books, and interviews, readings, and speeches. Whether you are already an admirer of McPhee or new to his writings, this book provides an invaluable road map to his rich body of work.

PURCHASE BOOK HERE: https://politics-prose.com/book/9780691244921?ic_referral=VWwiCeQBM0ovDdIIAUO0JjVyNPDxn1N039LFB1VfFCcwMwyUcOJypddyYRHTKDVlcH0QJ_jQF00LVpiWOvC1t2MMQnmFCr0cyzd0Lgfbp43icr6xuFsDX8ShIHipBjUDl-ksUTY

Noel Rubinton is a journalist and strategic communications consultant whose writing has appeared in leading publications such as the New York Times and the Washington Post. He was a reporter and editor for Newsday for many years. 

Rubinton is in conversation with Marc Fisher, an associate editor of The Washington Post who writes a column on Washington – the city, its suburbs, and the people and issues of big-city America. Fisher moved to Opinions in 2024 after 37 years as a reporter and editor across various news sections at The Post, most recently focusing on Donald Trump and major breaking-news events. He previously created and led the Metro staff's enterprise reporting group, spent a decade as local columnist and blogger, served as the paper's special reports editor, wrote about politics and culture for the Style section, worked as Central Europe bureau chief on The Post’s Foreign staff, and covered D.C. schools and D.C. politics for the Metro section, where he was also an assistant city editor. Fisher taught creative nonfiction writing as Ferris Professor of Journalism at Princeton University, and was a student in John McPhee’s storied writing seminar at Princeton in his undergraduate years. 

*recorded 6/18/2025

Lucille "Mama Ceal" Hatch Eldridge wrote to her grandson Walter Pryor weekly for nearly 30 years, from his boyhood until she died at 80. Most extraordinarily, Mama Ceal was not a well-educated person, having completed only the eighth grade. As a live-in maid, raising other people's children, she had little leisure time to write. Yet, her letters, sprinkled throughout This Leaves Me Okay (Heliotrope Books, May 2025), helped Pryor profoundly to feel he mattered. His reflective memoir shares a local's perspective of the lesser-known rural Arkansas Black experience through his grandmother's story and interweaves well-known civil rights struggles that Pryor and his family recall. A CAO and General Counsel now at a financial institution that supports underserved communities, Pryor shares the demoralization of knowing Mama Ceal's great-grandchildren must still grapple with too many race and equity challenges that she had to face. He asks, and the story answers: how did this woman, who was devalued in American society, figure out how to make her small world better and stay hopeful for her family's future?

PURCHASE BOOK HERE: https://politics-prose.com/book/9781956474671?ic_referral=1_cScIn3BuwWDL7XyZ3XuFwCu3O1AFZK8vfzKFg-vJUwM4hoKA4oTIKEOyp28b4oOib65jTH4ngpy_L8pfxKZIY6KuvEhnPcPTXYHlMeWR8nSsTVAffhDPU_Uv0SgeXRsvOP3kg

Walter Pryor is a son of the South, the Black Church, and a strong family unit of resilient, formidable women.  He is a cum laude graduate of Hendrix College, the only Black student in the college’s history to have been awarded the President's Medal, and a graduate of Georgetown University Law Center. His professional career has spanned a myriad of sectors in the legal arena, having worked in both large and small law firms, the U.S. Department of Justice, Capitol Hill, corporations, and higher education.  He is passionate about education and has devoted a significant amount of time to volunteer work in that space. Pryor currently serves on the Board of Trustees of Hendrix College as vice chair and the Board of Directors of the Washington Children's Foundation. 

He has also served as a member of the Board of Trustees of the Latin School of Chicago, the Board of Directors of Legal Prep Charter Academies in Chicago, and the Board of Trustees of National Collegiate Preparatory Public Charter High School in Washington, D.C. He and his wife Juliette have two adult children, Adjua and Wade Osei, and divide their time between Chicago, Charlotte, and Martha’s Vineyard. This Leaves Me Okay (Heliotrope Books, 2025) is his first book.

Pryor is in conversation with Dr. Julianne Malveaux. Malveaux is President Emerita of Bennett College for Women. She is an economist, author and commentator who’s popular writings have appeared in USA Today, Black Issues in Higher Education, Ms.Magazine, Essence Magazine, the Progressive and many more.

*recorded 6/19/2025

In the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, Central American and Mexican immigrants arrived in New Orleans to help clean up and rebuild. When federal relief services overlooked the needs of immigrant-led construction and cleanup crews as part of post-Katrina mass feeding strategies, street food stands and taco trucks stepped in to ensure food security for these workers. Many of these food vendors settled in the city over the next decade, opening restaurants and other businesses. Yet, in a city experiencing whitewashed redevelopment, new immigrants were frequently pitted against Black poor and working-class New Orleanians for access to housing and other resources. 
During Fouts's five years as a volunteer with the New Orleans Workers' Center for Racial Justice, she came to know and interview the day laborers, food workers, culture producers, and community organizers whose stories shape this book. Her work reveals how, after the storm, immigrant communities have culturally and politically reshaped New Orleans and its suburbs. Fouts also highlights how immigrants forged multiracial solidarities to foster inclusive change at the local level. By connecting migration, labor, and food, Rebuilding New Orleans centers human experiences to illustrate how immigrant and established communities of color resisted criminalization and racial capitalism to create a more just New Orleans.

PURCHASE BOOK HERE: https://politics-prose.com/book/9781469685021?ic_referral=jxgSwnYaHtDg__Rtkmv8URGlTJRdt-QjKcupsjDt9FowM4-vSqSncou6m9TQg8wNlFrYgIbQJo5PAuslTqr1mXdgUrXCi2kifSRJlS2hHJ7m7Wg6Vm6zGH-9eTilqJXmoE8qMpY

Sarah Fouts is assistant professor in the Department of American Studies and director of the Public Humanities minor program at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County.

Fouts is in conversation with Baynard Woods, writer and reporter. He is the author of Inheritance: An Autobiography of Whiteness and the co-author of I Got a Monster and the co-producer of the documentary of the same name. His journalism and essays have been published in a wide variety of publications.  He strikes through his name in acknowledgement of the crimes committed by his forebears in an attempt to bring the tools of French deconstruction to the goals of American Reconstruction. 

*recorded 6/30/2025

Adela Woods is sixteen years old and pregnant. Her parents banish her from her comfortable upbringing in Indiana to her grandmother's home in the small town of Padua Beach, Florida. When she arrives, Adela meets Emory, who brings her newborn to high school, determined to graduate despite the odds; Simone, mother of four-year-old twins, who weighs her options when she finds herself pregnant again; and the rest of the Girls, a group of outcast young moms who raise their growing brood in the back of Simone's red truck.

The town thinks the Girls have lost their way, but really they are finding it: looking for love, making and breaking friendships, and navigating the miracle of motherhood and the paradox of girlhood.

Full of heart and life and hope, set against the shifting sands of these friends' secrets and betrayals, The Girls Who Grew Big confirms Leila Mottley's promise and offers an explosive new perspective on what it means to be a young woman.

PURCHASE BOOK HERE: https://politics-prose.com/book/9780593801123?ic_referral=SsWODnelQ0cbtBELDTOIaVb-SLfXNHzA2EjVmVdnukgwM6TDJXIBgBIEjXx6KCM9kL0SU-A_m4a3axIBlEKmMDumOl2cCCflA_6i9reY6_l81p8xeISS2kcgzhmoMgFIFUeXBNg

Leila Mottley is the author of the novel Nightcrawling, an Oprah's Book Club pick and New York Times bestseller, and the poetry collection woke up no light. She is also the 2018 Oakland Youth Poet Laureate. She was born and raised in Oakland, where she continues to live.

Mottley is in conversation with Renee Bracey Sherman. Sherman is the co-author of LIBERATING ABORTION: Claiming Our History, Sharing Our Stories, and Building the Reproductive Future We Deserve, co-host of the podcast The A Files: A Secret History of Abortion, and the founder of We Testify, an organization dedicated to the leadership of people who have abortions. She has been hailed as the ‘Beyoncé of Abortion Storytelling.’ She’s a Chicago-born, midwest-raised activist, writer, and reproductive justice activist committed to the visibility and representation of people who have abortions in media and pop culture with a particular focus on the intersection of race, class, and gender identity. Her work is so influential that the right-wing website Twitchy recognizes her as “the queen of all abortions” and once wrote that Renee “never met an abortion she didn’t love.”

*recorded 6/29/2025

David Litt, the Yale-educated writer with a sensible fear of sharks, and Matt, the daredevil electrician with two motorcycles and a passion for death metal, had always coexisted from a comfortable distance as brothers-in-law. Yet in 2021, as David wallowed in existential dread while America's crises piled up, he couldn't help but notice that Matt was thriving. When he wasn't making money rewiring New Jersey beach homes, Matt was riding waves at his favorite spots in the state.

Quietly, David started taking surfing lessons. For a few months, he suffered through wipeouts on waves the height of daffodils. But to his surprise, he soon became obsessed. And once he got a sense of the ways that fully committing to surfing could change him both in the water and on land, he set his sights on an unlikely goal: riding a big wave at Hawaii's famously dangerous North Shore. To get there, he'd need Matt's help.

At a moment when the fault lines of class, education, and culture threaten to tear our country apart, It's Only Drowning is a blueprint for becoming braver at a time when it takes courage just to read the news, a love letter to surfing in the vein of William Finnegan's Barbarian Days, and a poignant buddy comedy in the tradition of Bill Bryson's A Walk in the Woods.

https://politics-prose.com/book/9781668035351?ic_referral=yb0U4vYZVU76s11VDk2NgxarlSrAVYViFq7_5SCB64wwM2AWup0XfYah8zRUzQvWt-z2veqpPovLHdGhrwzwvEzVkWiiCZ6MWIyH73Bqo3aNmWkpyTKu-hDPkWj-yqoUKaKvCxQ

David Litt is the New York Times bestselling author of Thanks, Obama; Democracy in One Book or Less; and It's Only Drowning. A former senior speechwriter for Barack Obama, described as "the comic muse for the president" for his work on the White House Correspondents' Dinner monologues, he has also written for The New York Times, The Atlantic, The Washington Post, Los Angeles Times, Cosmopolitan, and more. Along with writing speeches and jokes for political figures, athletes, Fortune 500 CEOs, and philanthropists, David was the head writer/producer at Funny Or Die, DC, and has written and sold comedy pilots for Comedy Central, ABC, and NBC. Raised in New York, he and his wife now split their time between Washington DC, and Asbury Park, New Jersey. Find out more at DavidLittBooks.com.

Litt is in conversation with Jennifer Rubin, the co-founder and Editor-in-Chief of The Contrarian, a pro-democracy platform that covers politics, policy, and culture. She created a stir when she resigned after 14 years as The Washington Post’s top opinion columnist, denouncing owner Jeff Bezos and other media titans for refusing to fulfill their journalistic responsibilties. In just a few months, she and co-founder Norm Eisen have built a platform with hundreds of thousands of subscribers and published written pieces and interviews with everyone from Paul Krugman to Sherrilyn Ifill to Larry Tribe to Olivia Julianna. Jennifer is also an MSNBC contributor, a frequent guest on syndicated and public radio programs, and a popular speaker on college campuses and other venues . She is author of the book, Resistance: How Women Saved Democracy from Donald Trump. Before her career in journalism Jennifer practiced labor law for two decades in Los Angeles. 

*Recorded 6/28/2024

This event is in partnership with the DC Abortion Fund.

In this definitive, eye-opening history, award-winning author Rebecca Grant charts the reproductive freedom movement from the days before Roe through the seismic impact of Dobbs. The stories in Access span four continents, tracing strategies across generations and borders. Grant centers those activists who have been engaged in direct action to help people get the abortions they need. Their efforts involve no small measure of daring-do, spy craft, sea adventures, close calls, undercover operations, smuggling, sequins, legal dramas, victories, defeats, and above all, a deeply held conviction that all the risks are worth it for the cause.

In Access, we meet a cast of brave, bold, and unforgettable women: the founders of the Jane Collective, a group of anonymous providers working clandestinely between Chicago apartments to perform abortions in the pre- Roe years ; the originators and leaders of the abortion fund movement; Verónica Cruz Sánchez, a Mexican activist who works to support self-managed abortion with pills and fights to free women targeted by the criminalization of abortion; and Rebecca Gomperts, a Dutch doctor who realizes that there is one place abortion bans cannot reach: international waters.

Post- Dobbs, activist groups have once again stepped up and put themselves on the line to resist. Building on the work of their feminist forebearers and international allies, they are charting new pathways for access in the face of unprecedented acts to subjugate and control half of America's population. Working above ground, underground, and in legal gray areas, they've helped people travel across state lines for care, established telehealth practices, and formed community networks to distribute pills for free to people who needed them.

Drawing on expert research and investigative reporting, told with deep compassion and humanity by a journalist who has spent her career on the frontlines of the fight, Access celebrates the bravery, ingenuity, and determination of women across decades who have fought for a fundamental human right--and serves as an inspiring rallying cry for the work that lies ahead.

PURCHASE BOOK HERE: https://politics-prose.com/book/9781668053249?ic_referral=cpJPUNyR_zl9-F2kGR1mfI8KPC_l-YvSvmBY9mD59ukwMzMEId5rFMh66pFOXheFHqqju08AkNp7mqF9VxkAjGQj7fF4D3FqATkMJwQ8XCAWW5mhvSaHbHhpgqtW_bP5aK3lvO0

Rebecca Grant is a freelance journalist based in Portland, Oregon, who covers reproductive rights, health, and justice. Her work has appeared in NPR, New York magazine, The Atlantic, VICE, The Nation, The Washington Post, Mother Jones, Marie Claire, Cosmopolitan, HuffPost, and The Guardian, among other publications. She has received grants and fellowships from the International Women's Media Foundation, the International Reporting Project, The Fund for Investigative Journalists, and Type Investigations, reporting stories around the US and the world. Rebecca studied English and art history at Cornell University and served in the Peace Corps in Thailand. Before full-time freelancing, she worked at Washingtonian Magazine and wrote about startups in San Francisco. She is the author of Birth and Access.

Grant is in conversation with Amanda Becker, a Washington correspondent for The 19th and a 2023 Nieman Fellow. She has covered the U.S. Congress, the White House, and elections for more than a decade. Her first book, You Must Stand Up: The Fight for Abortion Rights in Post-Dobbs America, was published by Bloomsbury in September 2024. Becker previously worked at Reuters and CQ Roll Call. Her byline has appeared in the New York Times, Washington Post, USA Today, and Glamour magazine. Her political coverage has also been broadcast on National Public Radio. She splits time between Washington, D.C., and Cincinnati, Ohio. 

*recorded 6/26/2025

With the help of a distinguished group of panelists, this event will examine recent attacks on the freedoms of universities, law firms, and media organizations by a Trump administration intent on imposing its will through executive orders, threats of legal action, and denial of government contracts and grants. All three of the panelists have been playing active roles in speaking out against recent administration initiatives.

Universities are being pressured to change hiring, admission, and other policies to suit White House desires. Law firms harboring attorneys who have challenged Trump are being targeted. And publicly-supported news organizations like NPR, PBS, and Voice of America, as well as independent media companies like the Associated Press, are being denied funding or access.

In addition to elaborating on these developments, panelists will discuss the importance of free expression as a pillar of American democracy and its protection under the First Amendment of the U.S. Constitution. They also will suggest ways people can act on their concerns, speak truth to power, and participate in efforts to push back against the administration’s moves.

Our panelists for this teach-in include:

Kara Swisher is the host of the podcast On with Kara Swisher and the cohost of the Pivot podcast with Scott Galloway, both distributed by New York magazine. She was also the cofounder and editor-at-large of Recode, host of the Recode Decode podcast, and co-executive producer of the Code conference. She was a former contributing opinion writer for The New York Times and host of its Sway podcast and has also worked for The Wall Street Journal and The Washington Post. Swisher is the author of three books including Burn Book: A Tech Love Story, published in 2024.

William M. Treanor is the Executive Vice President of Georgetown University, Dean of the Law Center, and Paul Regis Dean Leadership Chair. Since he took office in 2010, Treanor has helped transform Georgetown Law, expanding its faculty by 75 new tenure or tenure-track members; tripling the number of experiential offerings for students in clinical, externship, and practicum programs; more than doubling financial aid; and raising record sums for the Law Center, including a unprecedented $100 million for Tsai Hall, a new flagship building. Among his many honors, Treanor is a member of the American Academy of Arts & Sciences, and was most recently awarded a Medal of Honor for Academic Merit by the World Jurist Association.

Donald B. Verrilli, Jr. is a partner with Munger, Tolles & Olson, and the founder of its Washington, D.C., office. Mr. Verrilli is one of the nation’s premier Supreme Court and appellate advocates. He served as Solicitor General of the United States from June 2011 to June 2016. Since joining the firm after his government service, he has handled numerous significant cases in the United States Supreme Court, including his successful defense of the constitutionality of the federal law establishing the Financial Oversight and Management Board for Puerto Rico in Financial Oversight and Management Board v. Aurelius.

This event will be moderated by Ally Coll, 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.