Politics and Prose Presents

Politics and Prose has partnered with The Atlantic for an evening of discussion surrounding the magazine’s August issue. Atlantic staff writer Rose Horowitch will discuss her cover article, “The End of Reading Is Here.” She will discuss her approach to research and writing the article, as well as the implications behind the lower reading rates. Rose will be in conversation with Yoni Appelbaum. Appelbaum is a deputy executive editor of The Atlantic. Before joining The Atlantic, he was a lecturer on history and literature at Harvard University. He is the author of Stuck.

A marriage cracks apart as a near-future United States redraws its borders in this penetrating and moving novel from the New York Times bestselling author of Fantasyland.
Natalie and Asher’s marriage has long been marked by fault lines, quiet rifts in how they view their fellow Americans and navigate AI-suffused life in 2045. After twenty-three years together, and after surviving the two years of civil war in the 2030s, Natalie in rural Tennessee (part of the new Free American Republic) and Asher in San Francisco (in the now smaller United States). Natalie and Asher’s relationship mirrors America’s own unraveling—confused, messy, painful, ambivalent, and impossibly intimate.
When Natalie and Asher are brought back into proximity while touring far-flung colleges with their seventeen-year-old, they find themselves on a road trip through a strange, uncertain new American landscape, transformed by both the terrorist uprising and technology, all while dealing with the flux—and resilience—within their own family. They face the questions the nation has reckoned with for a generation: what differences are irreconcilable, and when is something broken worth saving?
Razor-sharp, ambitious, ranging from tragic to comic and brimming with imagination, The Breakup is a sweeping story where the personal and sociopolitical intersect in ways bracingly plausible, keenly insightful, and surprisingly hopeful.

Kurt Andersen is the author of the recent New York Times bestsellers Evil Geniuses and Fantasyland, as well as several bestselling novels, including You Can’t Spell America Without Me, Heyday, and Turn of the Century. With Steven Soderbergh he co-created the dystopian comedy series Command Z. He co-founded Spy magazine and hosted the Peabody Award–winning public radio show and podcast Studio 360. A commentator on MSNOW and regular contributor to The New York Times and The Atlantic, he was previously editor-in-chief of New York and a columnist for The New Yorker. He grew up in Nebraska, graduated from Harvard, and lives in New York City with his wife Anne Kreamer.

Andersen is in conversation with Sean Rameswaram, who hosts Vox’s daily news podcast, Today, Explained. Before joining Vox Media to launch the show, he was a correspondent for WNYC’s Radiolab series More Perfect, where he reported features on guns in America, gerrymandering, and other urgent constitutional questions. Earlier at WNYC, he was a producer for Studio 360 with Kurt Andrsen and hosted Studio 360’s Sideshow podcast. He also hosted and helped launch CBC’s Podcast Playlist.

PURCHASE:

https://politics-prose.com/book/9781984801371?ic_referral=pgJJYlQlnPj34Cx62FvK-3RgYA6NNTmk3lHBKqUX0n4wM5PzjO6UiLY2lw5oZz4Rck3m0fL_kB1-KDDbnBn0r3lSsHE1Hl6DMhY3Hk5PhuxlDKRs2VLtbHHQCAungsWfGSP0JR0

Gives voice to the Black women whose lives were devastated by the carceral system and sheds powerful light on its slavery-based roots to transform how we think about mass incarceration
Historian Talitha L. LeFlouria centers Black women at the core of a fresh argument: that the system of mass incarceration was established as protection for the institution of slavery and the profits of enslavers and that this legacy continues today.
For centuries, Black women in America have experienced extreme rates of arrest, conviction, and incarceration in the nation’s jails and prisons, yet their experiences have often been overlooked in favor of Black men’s.
Arguing that the merger between profit and punishment continues to keep Black people bound, LeFlouria traces the connection between enslavement and incarceration, revealing how they have always been intertwined—from the domestic slave trade of 1810-1865, when an estimated one million people were incarcerated in privately owned slave jails, to the post-Civil War era when Black people were enslaved through new systems of state-sponsored mass incarceration, and through to today.
Using archival sources and personal testimonies, LeFlouria tells a new origin story of mass incarceration with the stories of numerous Black women throughout history, including:
· Delia Garlic, who was incarcerated in a slave jail and later sold to a sheriff at the height of the domestic slave trade
· Eliza Purdy, who was jailed and sold to the highest bidder a year after the Civil War ended, and
· Susan Burton, who was commodified and trafficked through a 20th-century cell block, much like an enslaved person on the auction block 200 years prior.

Talitha L. LeFlouria is one of the nation’s leading authorities on the history of Black women, mass incarceration, and the legacies of American slavery. She is an associate professor of history, and the Mastin Gentry White Fellow in Southern History at The University of Texas at Austin. She is the author of the multi-award-winning book, Chained in Silence. Dr. LeFlouria has received numerous awards for her research, including an Andrew Carnegie Fellowship from the Carnegie Corporation of New York, and her work has been featured in The Atlantic, The Washington Post, Ms. Magazine, The Root, and Vox.

LeFlouria is in conversation with Marcus Board Jr., Ph.D., an Associate Professor of Political Science at Howard University in Washington D.C. and author of Invisible Weapons (Oxford 2022). His research engages social movements, radical Black feminist theories of power, and public opinion. Marcus' community work has grown over the past twenty years, building politically and personally connected communities while advocating for youth empowerment, abolition, and systemic accountability.

PURCHASE:

https://politics-prose.com/book/9780807003930?ic_referral=M3vA_vZc5JmgryFUepu1hEuDOI8uTJ9nhunGqCNGFL0wM-Df3dZ3x-NqLhhQIlzsJm1PsDDECS566TB1QDD_4QN_4nGvtbaHAyVKxHX2IQsPZuPw1XVh0KqjtUHIp3yhK0en2qw

An explosive inside account of how the Democratic establishment used every weapon in its arsenal to subvert the will of the people and stop Bernie Sanders’s presidential bid in 2016—told by his chief strategist who witnessed it all firsthand.
One question haunted the American left after the 2016 election: how could a grassroots movement that drew massive crowds and shattered fundraising records fail? The answer exposes fundamental flaws in American democracy itself.
In How the Democrats Screwed Bernie, Sanders’s chief strategist in the 2016 Democratic primary unravels how the “Clinton Machine”—a network of operatives, Super PACs, and media allies—in consort with the Democratic National Committee deployed dark money and dirty tricks to stop a wildly popular outsider candidate. A candidate who may well have been the peoples’ choice and defeated Donald Trump.
You’ll discover how deeply the entrenched Democratic establishment orchestrated opposition research campaigns, the true story behind the voter file crisis that nearly derailed the campaign, and why primary rules are deliberately structured to favor insiders over often more compelling outsiders.
This isn’t just another campaign memoir. Nor is it just a reflection on the doomed Sanders’s candidacy ten years hence. It is a cautionary tale about a crisis in American democracy that is becoming more urgent by the day. As voters grapple with growing distrust of political institutions, How the Democrats Screwed Bernie reveals how our democratic processes really work, how they can be manipulated by those with enough money to game the system, and how the people can make their voices heard again. 
This is the story the Democratic establishment doesn't want you to read.

Tad Devine is a Democratic political strategist with over thirty years of campaign experience. Prior to serving as chief strategist for Bernie Sanders’s 2016 presidential campaign, he was a senior adviser in Al Gore’s 2000 and John Kerry’s 2004 presidential campaigns. In addition to his political work and media consulting, he has held academic positions at Boston University, the Harvard Kennedy School, and George Washington University, among others.

Devine is in conversation with Chuck Todd. Todd is a renowned political analyst, Host of The Chuck ToddCast, a weekly podcast offering in-depth interviews with political figures and experts, and Head of Politics & Host of “Sunday Night with Chuck Todd" for the Noosphere App. A six-time Emmy® Award-winner, Todd was NBC News’s chief Political Analyst and moderator of Meet the Press from 2014 to 2023. He also hosted Meet the Press NOW, a daily show on NBC News NOW, bringing timely political analysis to a digital audience.

PURCHASE BOOK:

https://politics-prose.com/book/9781668232286?ic_referral=0tiuL3rFwlszvSJR0LIUZ1AB58YijWYIZlc7eAWq_rQwM6FywPnEY2W0nrHVEjDIU53-TqBxYdFuVhIrgEVeGw5_dcDA8dJuhgHZBxieKNsH5NLOCo6rGHpH5F09zKI4MnAG1d4

A staggering examination of how America's wealthiest infiltrated the government and allied with dictators, transforming the U.S. from democracy to oligarchy.
For years, a small group of billionaires has amassed increasing power, steering American politics for their own benefit. Many of these figures are familiar. There’s Elon Musk, who has used his wealth to help place Donald Trump back in the White House. There’s Mark Zuckerberg, who has used his resources to transform America into his own digital playground. There’s Jared Kushner, who has used family connections to gain more political power than he ever dreamed of.
There is only one word to describe such extreme levels of wealth, avarice, and political control: Oligarchy. But the oligarchs are not working alone. From China to Russia to Saudi Arabia and beyond, many of these men have cultivated alliances with America’s most notorious adversaries, opening the doors for autocrats around the world to sink their teeth into the U.S. Placing profit over patriotism, they have transformed into vectors of influence for some of the world’s most repulsive dictatorships, all of whom are trying to create a world dominated by imperialism and tyranny. Connecting everything from the devastation in Ukraine to destruction in Gaza to destabilization in Greenland, these oligarchs have transformed American policy and American politics into their own private fiefdoms, regardless of what Americans actually want. 
In United States of Oligarchy, Casey Michel illuminates a story decades in the making, from the earliest efforts to corral and combat American oligarchs, to the new crop of individuals monopolizing American democracy and making the world safe for dictatorship – all for their own benefit. 
The oligarchs have risen, and are attempting to reign. The only question remaining is whether or not it’s too late to stop them.

Casey Michel is an author, journalist, and director of the Combating Kleptocracy Program with the Human Rights Foundation. He is the author of American Kleptocracy, named by The Economist as one of the "best books to read to understand financial crime," and Foreign Agents, which received starred reviews from both Kirkus and Publishers Weekly and was described by Foreign Policy Magazine as one of the "biggest foreign-policy book releases of 2024." 
His writing on offshoring, foreign lobbying, authoritarianism, and illicit wealth has appeared in The New York Times, Financial Times, The Wall Street Journal, The Atlantic, Foreign Affairs, and The Washington Post, among other outlets, and he has appeared on NPR, BBC, CNN, and MSNBC, among other stations. He has also testified in front of the Senate Judiciary Committee on the links between illicit financial networks and national security. He received his Master’s degree in Russian, Eurasian, and East European Studies from Columbia University’s Harriman Institute, and he is currently sanctioned by the Russian regime for his work. United States of Oligarchy is his third book.

Michel is in conversation with Matt Duss, the Executive Vice-President at the Center for International Policy and former foreign policy advisor to Senator Bernie Sanders (I-Vt). 

PURCHASE:

https://politics-prose.com/book/9781250430113?ic_referral=bJ-Hh19xZeMN24stWWlXDbhwrHFxnsR5qqCECc23KEUwM9Aj_sA55zm2beaxERYaQmleB7GWAqetZ_s40-Rmq80EvCRtzkLJbHWzUFQeUziTrIMKmaNpU-1BKZYLqWHjjMmCr9s

This event will be in partnership with The Atlantic.

The untold story of the women who debunked the Warren Report—a riveting history of obsession, heartbreak, and the myth of the great American century
In the winter of 1967, the official account of the Kennedy assassination was beginning to unravel. A scattered group of Americans had pointed to major problems with the report prepared by President Johnson’s handpicked Warren Commission. Many of the most serious criticisms of the government’s work came from a source that surprised some: women who, within the community of critics, outnumbered the men two to one.
Politicians and reporters dismissed these women, referring to them as “scavengers” and suggesting they were eccentrics with murder-mystery fixations or crushes on the deceased President Kennedy. But in The Housewives Underground, Kaitlyn Tiffany resurrects the story of Maggie Field, Shirley Martin, and Sylvia Meagher, whose collaboration and friendship reshaped both their own lives and our national memory. Field hosted screenings of the Zapruder film and raised money to pursue new leads. Martin traveled frequently to Dallas, enlisted her children to help interview witnesses, and irritated J. Edgar Hoover with her “antagonistic” attitude toward the FBI.
And at the center of the story is Sylvia Meagher—a born-and-raised New Yorker who was devoted to the ballet and the Mets, cultivated fierce friendships and firm grudges, and dedicated twenty-five years to her conviction that the whole truth of JFK’s assassination had not been told.
Painstakingly researched and engrossing, The Housewives Underground takes readers back to the turbulent 1960s and 1970s—a time when Americans’ belief in their government was eroding—introducing readers to the so-called housewives who asked the first, hardest questions about one of the most shocking events in American history.

Kaitlyn Tiffany is a staff writer at The Atlantic and the author of Everything I Need I Get from You: How Fangirls Created the Internet as We Know It. She is also the co-author, with Lizzie Plaugic, of the collection On Nobody Famous: Guesting, Gossiping, Gallivanting. She lives in Brooklyn, New York.

Tiffany is in conversation with Adrienne LaFrance, the executive editor of The Atlantic. She was previously a senior editor and staff writer at The Atlantic, and the editor of TheAtlantic.com. Before joining The Atlantic in 2014, LaFrance was an investigative reporter for several local and national news organizations, covering politics, technology, and media. She is a former reporter at WBUR, Hawaii Public Radio, Honolulu Weekly, Honolulu Civil Beat, and Nieman Journalism Lab. Her writing has also appeared in The New York Times, The Washington Post, and several other newspapers and magazines.

PURCHASE:

https://politics-prose.com/book/9780593728628?ic_referral=0fGP2qc69WqnRUmslrarhXDPYG7Mb3DvE9HqZQgs-s4wM37Ebbh4Btuf4_6e1GPdXKB2rPEg8zSZBHFYyo2wvAA4t9a8bGUfl-RzUTPViXYYLNCq8M4mRQwDJedpZYTcKKCYzuQ

A Pulitzer-finalist historian charts a 250-year-old intellectual and political tradition—the conviction that all Americans are NOT created equal.

We think of the United States as a nation committed, at least on paper, to ideals of human equality, under God and/or under the law. But as robust as the notion of the “American dream” is a longstanding defense of social hierarchies, including vast gulfs between rich and poor.

Drawing on forgotten characters and neglected archives, Kim Phillips–Fein tells the story of the executives, intellectuals, and political leaders who have argued that the words of the Declaration of Independence—that “all men are created equal”—are a myth. John Adams, William Graham Sumner, Andrew Carnegie, journalist Lothrop Stoddard, Henry Ford, Harvard psychologist Richard Herrnstein, Peter Thiel, and others represent this counter-tradition of hostility to democratic government. Phillips-Fein explores their ideas, and the aspirations they were reacting to, in order to understand our political life today—in hopes we might imagine a more egalitarian way forward.

Kim Phillips-Fein is Robert Gardiner-Kenneth T. Jackson Professor of History at Columbia University. She is the author of Fear City, a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize, and Invisible Hands. She lives in New York City.

Phillips-Fein is in conversation with Timothy Shenk, a historian of modern American politics at George Washington University. His latest book, Left Adrift: What Happened to Liberal Politics, was named one of the best books of 2024 by the New Republic, and his previous book, Realigners: Partisan Hacks, Political Visionaries, and the Struggle to Rule American Democracy, was chosen as one of the best political books of 2022 by the Wall Street Journal. A former editor of Dissent, he was named GW’s best professor by the university’s student newspaper, the Hatchet, in 2024.

PURCHASE:

https://politics-prose.com/book/9781324074441?ic_referral=pnglwVR-pGf_UjLY8ivaCBdk09htANbd25sUQhpL5SowMxFUbtWfjcnFlcywmnww7meUMjBRz0bf-Nh8yltVyL6bck7fNRRrd3bh1k8_wykkQB8lLsFjmxLSJEe_ptcGKuLGHWM

Thirteen-year-old Maggie lives in a trailer on the edge of a rural New Hampshire town, where her brother barely speaks, her father works double shifts at the gun factory, and her mother disappeared without a trace. She finds comfort in the warmth of her best friend Sarah’ s seemingly perfect family— until a classmate’ s mother goes missing, and the girls are drawn to Erin, the daughter left behind.
Compelled by a need to understand what makes mothers vanish, Maggie convinces the others to search for answers in the woods and abandoned backroads. But a charged encounter with older boys shifts their path and challenges everything they thought they knew about themselves— and each other.
Set in the early 1990s, When We Were Feral is a haunting coming-of-age story about friendship, longing, and the dangerous terrain between girlhood and adulthood. In a world where mothers vanish and truths stay buried, the girls begin to realize the wilderness they fear most isn’t outside— it’ s within.

Shasta Grant grew up in New Hampshire and now lives in Indianapolis. An Aspen Words Emerging Writer Fellow, Kenyon Review Short Fiction Contest winner, and recipient of writing residencies from Hedgebrook and The Kerouac Project, she holds an MFA from Sarah Lawrence College. She is the author of Gather Us Up and Bring Us Home and her stories and essays have appeared in cream city review, Epiphany, wigleaf, and elsewhere.

Grant is in conversation with Chloe Yelena Miller. Miller lives in Washington, D.C., with her family. She is the author of Perforated (Lily Poetry Review Books, 2026), Viable (Lily Poetry Review Books, 2021) and Unrest (Finishing Line Press, 2013). She holds an MFA in Writing from Sarah Lawrence College (poetry) and a BA from Smith College (Italian language and literature). She has received residencies from Bread Loaf, A Room of Her Own and Vermont Studio Center and has received three DC Arts and Humanities grants for her writing.

PURCHASE:

https://politics-prose.com/book/9781646037384?ic_referral=XzVK9DrHIiJnlEGAw7bjB4RyHJZtWyT4oASYC7RGsNAwM5DpJGPt7zTRYaxh-Qrxqx8UBdV8REVEpPalT_YI5MWRzpM5Al-E1JQR5hGgUOTH8b-j9tS0af0_Lrste5FA6lzg-qU

From the Pulitzer Prize finalist, a story of guilt, innocence, and a boy on the cusp of adolescence.
A spellbinding exploration of American masculinity and family dynamics as seen through the confused eyes of a prepubescent child of immigrants, A Tender Age joins the rich tradition of the American bildungsroman. The natural descendent of characters like Huckleberry Finn and Holden Caufield, Korean-American Jeon-Gi is torn between competing ideas of himself. At home, his working-class parents dote on him. Outside, he is part of a roving pack of kids with dominion over a derelict baseball field, weedy parking lot, and rusty jungle gym. Getting into and out of trouble is all-consuming. But the summer he turns eleven, he becomes embroiled in a staggering series of events reverberating far beyond himself and his family.
Devastating in its emotional precision, A Tender Age captures a family and community in striking distance of the American dream, and a young person on the precipice of adult knowledge, looking at his own culpability and looking away—then thinking about it for the rest of his life.

Chang-rae Lee is the author of six other novels, including Native Speaker, winner of the Hemingway Foundation/PEN Award for first fiction, and The Surrendered, winner of the Dayton Peace Prize and a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize. A 2021 winner of the Award of Merit for the Novel from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, Chang-rae Lee teaches writing at Stanford University.

Lee is in conversation with Kat Chow, the author of Seeing Ghosts: A Memoir, named a Notable Book by The New York Times. She was a reporter at NPR, where she helped start the Code Switch team and podcast. Her work has appeared in The New York Times Magazine, The Paris Review, and on Radiolab, among others. She’s received residency fellowships from Storyknife and Millay Arts, and taught creative writing at The George Washington University as the Jenny McKean Moore Writer-in-Washington. Currently, she is a visiting professor at Columbia University’s Graduate School of Journalism.

PURCHASE:

https://politics-prose.com/book/9798217048441?ic_referral=7dpTRzz4QCWGWdn7LDo50mo9KG5ypCMYfkjDkKACxM4wMwtAffYCDdeQolrBw05RT8XJwisxAsSlkvMTbmHbLdaETOceHev22RxsQ0bPKz_766q0lws9Vq4_lt3fVFbbEPx0n2I

A practical road map to become a more empowered patient and reclaim agency over your health.
As a primary care physician with her own healthcare struggles, Dr. Lucy McBride knows what it’s like to feel powerless—caught between a health care system that rushes through appointments focused on testing and prescriptions, and a wellness industry full of expensive false promises. She understands the frustration of transactional encounters, not knowing who to trust, and the sense that nobody sees you as a whole person.
In Beyond the Prescription, Dr. McBride offers a solution: a proven five-step process to help you take charge of your health and shift the locus of control from external checklists to your own informed decisions.
The Five Steps to Becoming the CEO of Your Health:
1. Redefine health on your own terms: Move beyond narrow metrics like BMI and cholesterol to understand what health truly means for you
2. Understand your broad health ecosystem: Expand the aperture on your health to include nutrition, mental health, and crucial elements of your life story using Dr. McBride’s four-quadrant framework (Informatics, Inputs, Infrastructure, and Insight)
3. Reckon with your patient personality: Discover how you naturally approach healthcare and how to leverage your strengths while addressing your blind spots
4. Ask for—and get—the help you need: Learn to navigate the medical system, ask better questions, and find trusted guides
5. Accept what you cannot control: Make peace with uncertainty and focus your energy where it matters most
This isn’t about becoming your own doctor or rejecting modern medicine. It's about moving from awareness to acceptance to agency—transforming yourself from a passive patient into an empowered partner who knows how to advocate for comprehensive, relationship-centered care.
Beyond the Prescription is like having a trusted doctor by your side, helping you ask better questions, advocate for yourself, and reframe what it means to be healthy. Whether you're managing a chronic condition, navigating a new diagnosis, seeking better care, or trying to make sense of conflicting health advice, this book is your guide to getting the care you need.

Lucy McBride, MD, is a primary care physician and co-founder of the Ackerly McBride Group in Washington, DC. For over twenty-five years, she has practiced evidence-based, relationship-centered medicine. A graduate of Princeton and Harvard Medical School, with a master's degree in Pharmacology from Cambridge as a Fulbright Scholar, she completed her internal medicine residency at Johns Hopkins Hospital. She writes the weekly newsletter Are You Okay? and hosts the podcast Beyond the Prescription. Her work has appeared in The Atlantic, The Washington Post, and USA Today. She has contributed to CNN, MSNBC, and PBS, advocating for a holistic, patient-centered approach to health. A native Washingtonian, she lives in DC with her husband and is the proud mother of three grown children. You can find her work at lucymcbride.com.

McBride is in conversation with Franklin Foer, a staff writer at The Atlantic and former editor of The New Republic. He is the author of several books, including most recently The Last Politician: Inside Joe Biden’s White House and the Struggle for America’s Future. He lives in Washington, DC, with his family.

PURCHASE:

https://politics-prose.com/book/9781668024386?ic_referral=vwAgeEORNHXbl-Cy7xEUC3Z6llQPlNDRjo-yboQuwAEwM0pwrBH9EddEIO4ZutWTHLn0y4mzAi2_DJLsqBjR7op9FWVZYkCy_bccvorcc-v-LorowHyoplU_LiUrxx3uiXTt0fQ