Politics and Prose Presents

The government is a vast, complex system that Americans pay for, rebel against, rely upon, dismiss, and celebrate. It’s also our shared resource for addressing the biggest problems of society. And it’s made up of people, mostly unrecognized and uncelebrated, doing work that can be deeply consequential and beneficial to everyone.

Michael Lewis invited his favorite writers to find someone doing an interesting job for the government and write about them in a special in-depth series for the Washington Post. The stories they found are unexpected, riveting, and inspiring, including a former coal miner devoted to making mine roofs less likely to collapse, saving thousands of lives; an IRS agent straight out of a crime thriller; and the manager who made the National Cemetery Administration the best-run organization, public or private, in the entire country. Each essay shines a spotlight on the essential behind-the-scenes work of exemplary federal employees.

Whether they’re digitizing archives, chasing down cybercriminals, or discovering new planets, these public servants are committed to their work and universally reluctant to take credit. Expanding on the Washington Post series, the vivid profiles in Who Is Government? blow up the stereotype of the irrelevant bureaucrat. They show how the essential business of government makes our lives possible, and how much it matters.

PURCHASE BOOK HERE: https://politics-prose.com/book/9798217047802?ic_referral=kYRekQ3j7b-aTrTJDDeDtf1wlphJP-sksZZrttriBKMwM3MP6X6jCW8faa5AgYXRQmz2oGteivRdreoYWSolqx4_iYvQcECuMPdvmrpBTaYv2iYv9QLMnZZzp2Oc86Yne3-KVQ

Michael Lewis is the best-selling author of Liar's Poker, Moneyball, The Blind Side, The Big Short, The Fifth Risk, and Going Infinite. He lives in Berkeley, California, with his family.

Casey Cep is a staff writer at The New Yorker and the author of Furious Hours: Murder, Fraud, and the Last Trial of Harper Lee, which was a New York Times bestseller and named one of the best books of the year by The Washington Post, The Economist, Time Magazine, and President Barack Obama. She lives on the Eastern Shore of Maryland with her family.

David Shipley is an American journalist, book author, and the editorial page editor at The Washington Post.

Reginald Dwayne Betts is our foremost chronicler of the ways prison shapes and transforms American life. In Doggerel, Betts examines this subject through a more prosaic--but equally rich--lens: dogs. He reminds us that, as our lives are broken and put back together, the only witness often barks instead of talks. In these poems, which touch on companionship in its many forms, Betts seamlessly and skillfully deploys the pantoum, ghazal, and canzone, in conversation with artists such as Freddie Gibbs and Lil Wayne.

Simultaneously philosophical and playful, Doggerel is a meditation on family, falling in love, friendship, and those who accompany us on our walk through life. Balancing political critique with personal experience, Betts once again shows us "how poems can be enlisted to radically disrupt narrative" (Dan Chiasson, The New Yorker)--and, in doing so, reveals the world anew.

PURCHASE BOOK HERE: https://politics-prose.com/book/9781324089254?ic_referral=y6AHj1VcR1n57M16Xap7uPJCOgOLKBqQPK8fB1F_SPIwM3LVDfpzuq7XBn0U4JaDq7k59fVlQygxqy6QN40f_TMSS3ol-sZ8tf4zGvH2Zr6J6SV25xLyzKbk2xN8R8EtINIvPA

Reginald Dwayne Betts is the author of three books of poetry, including the best-selling Felon. He is a poet, lawyer, and the founder and CEO of Freedom Reads. He lives in New Haven, Connecticut, with his dog.

Without fail, almost every writer--new or experienced--has faced dire questions of permission and story ownership: there is something that they want to write about, that they need to write about. Yet: they can't. They have been warned not to. They might be paralyzed with shame, threatened with shunning, chastened into silence. Even if what they need to write about has defined them and their worldviews.

But what if they did? What if you did?

After writing three critically-acclaimed memoirs and a decade of teaching memoir workshops at every level, Elissa Altman has helped students face the elephant in every writer's room: how to craft the stories that are most vital to them despite the voices that have told them not to. Permission is a master course, not only on how to craft memoir, but how to begin and keep going when you've been told you can't, and how to how to give yourself permission to transcend the fear that keeps vital stories from being written.

We are the storytelling species; this book will inspire and guide all creatives to a place of transformation, of freedom from the constraints of shame and fear in all their forms, and to the understanding and recognition of the ethics of story-making, art-making, truth-telling, and creative soul-saving.

PURCHASE BOOK HERE: https://politics-prose.com/book/9781567927634?ic_referral=9D0JjW9RVHPcndbQrij75vYD4TUtJ3SBvyBiXfvxVI0wM7nwCGR-NfffCzkd_Fm_c266_BanLjuwXXhq-qGVkTXdAn1XUVvV6X0WVamg1l9rD1Fcmi9LPK_F9Jr6E0IRaXIFzw

Elissa Altman is the award-winning author of the memoirs Motherland, Treyf, and Poor Man's Feast, and the bestselling essay substack of the same name. A longtime editor, she has been a finalist for the Lambda Literary Award, Connecticut Book Award, Maine Literary Award, and the Frank McCourt Memoir Prize, and her work has appeared in publications including Orion, The Bitter Southerner, On Being, O: The Oprah Magazine, LitHub, the Wall Street Journal, The Guardian, and the Washington Post, where her column, "Feeding My Mother," ran for a year. Altman writes and speaks widely on the intersection of permission, storytelling, and creativity, and has appeared live on the TEDx stage and at the Public Theater in New York. She teaches the craft of memoir at Fine Arts Work Center, Maine Writers & Publishers, Kripalu, Truro Center for the Arts, Rutgers Community Writing Workshop, and beyond, and lives in Connecticut with her wife, book designer Susan Turner.

Altman is in conversation with Brittany Kerfoot. Kerfoot is the former Events Director for Politics and Prose. She holds a variety of positions including: writing and literature instructor for Politics and Prose Bookstore; advisory board member for the Alan Cheuse International Writers Center; and co-producer and host of Generation Women DC, a new storytelling series in the District that celebrates women and non-binary performers of all ages. Her writing can be found in various online literary journals and websites. She is at work on her first novel.

*recorded 3/15/2025

Northern Ireland, 1975. Violence has erupted on the streets of Belfast. After years as a sleepy, guerilla army, the IRA is clashing with Loyalist gangs and heavily armed British soldiers. But the Troubles have spilled beyond the small island: An ocean away, in the heart of Philadelphia's Irish enclave, a teenage girl finds a letter in her mailbox. Inside is a bullet, and the message is clear: The next one is for you or your family. 

As celebrated New York Times reporter Ali Watkins reveals in this exquisitely reported nonfiction thriller, the conflict in Northern Ireland might have gone very differently had it not been for a small, ragtag band of carpenters, family men, and fugitives in the United States. The Philadelphia Five, as they came to be known, supplied the Irish Republican Army at its moment of greatest need, bolstering the fight for a united Ireland but fueling the Troubles at an untold cost. This small group of Irish nationalists smuggled hundreds of rifles, rocket launchers, explosives, and armor-piercing bullets across the Atlantic Ocean and into Northern Ireland. Whether they were skimming money from innocuous-seeming charities, coolly slipping weapons into hidden compartments of vans and houses, or scouring local graveyards for the names of dead Irishmen to use on federal firearm forms, the gunrunners approached their mission--to unite Ireland under one flag, by any means necessary--with ruthless poise, even as European and American investigators closed in, members of their own movement began to turn on them, and bodies stacked up on all sides.

A gripping tale of crime, rebellion, and the hazy line between them, The Next One Is for You is the definitive account of America's hand in the Troubles--a conflict whose resonance is still felt today, in the United States and Ireland alike.

PURCHASE BOOK HERE: https://politics-prose.com/book/9780316538275?ic_referral=7pMhSJG1p9BUyQ_0ujy-43oILuiiGAZ_E3vKDh0E4SQwM4-bPjyJdk4d7Q0g5iOE3byTiRYVCzEjE51pe_yrytL0yL9AkAeDH8EebW2PpNqCAulpW95RUDHMHtdGLuxIvbsdug

Ali Watkins is a journalist for The New York Times, based out of the London bureau. Previously, she covered crime and law enforcement on the Metro desk and national security in Washington, also at The New York Times. She has also worked for BuzzFeed and at McClatchy Newspapers, where she was a finalist for the 2015 Pulitzer Prize in national reporting for coverage of the Senate's report on the C.I.A.'s post-9/11 torture program. Watkins is a graduate of Temple University in Philadelphia, where she began her journalism career as an intern at the Philadelphia Daily News. She grew up in Fleetwood, PA and now lives between Northern Ireland and Galway.

Watkins is in conversation with Sopan Deb. Deb is a playwright, author and writer for The New York Times, where his topics have included sports and culture. He is the author of the novel "Keya Das's Second Act," and the memoir, "Missed Translations: Meeting The Immigrant Parents Who Raised Me." Before joining the Times, Deb covered Donald Trump's 2016 presidential campaign as a campaign embed for CBS News. His work has previously appeared on NBC, the Boston Globe and Al Jazeera America. His debut play, "The Good Name," received a reading directed by Trip Cullman as part of New York Stage and Film's 2023 summer season.

*recorded 3/16/2025

In 1789 Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart visits the grave of Johann Sebastian Bach in Leipzig, looking for a sign, a signal, an answer to an enigma that has haunted him since childhood: Was Bach murdered by a famous oculist? And years later, was Handel a victim of the same doctor?

Allegro follows his investigation, from the salons of London to the streets of Paris, recreating an enthralling and turbulent time, full of rogues and brilliant composers, charlatans and presumptuous nobles. Running parallel to this search is the rise of Mozart, his knowledge and fame, his trials and losses.

PURCHASE BOOK HERE: https://politics-prose.com/book/9781635424485?ic_referral=dYd3p-mwGyC6yvZ2-ryEs8xHUe7DHS21fDxf2UKPW9kwMzUWZUORtr7BkHr_g4syEJtKT2e96-2evwzzVSh1-4XVjwC1VSwMOaiqZ-qPPRE1iIapPjr30j--2j44K-_OhPFzLw

Ariel Dorfman is a Chilean-American author, born in Argentina, whose award-winning books in many genres have been published in more than fifty languages and his plays performed in more than one hundred countries. Among his works are the plays Death and the Maiden and Purgatorio, the novels The Suicide Museum (Other Press, 2023), Widows, and Konfidenz, and the memoirs Heading South, Looking North and Feeding on Dreams. He writes regularly for the New York Times, Washington Post, Los Angeles Times, New York Review of Books, The Nation, The Guardian, El País, and CNN. His stories have appeared in The New Yorker, The Atlantic, Harper's, The Threepenny Review, and Index on Censorship, among others. A prominent human rights activist, he worked as press and cultural advisor to Salvador Allende's chief of staff in the final months before the 1973 military coup, and later spent many years in exile. He lives with his wife Angélica in Santiago, Chile, and Durham, North Carolina, where he is the Walter Hines Page Emeritus Professor of Literature at Duke University.

*recorded 3/16/2025

Joan Didion opened The White Album (1979) with what would become one of the most iconic lines in American literature: "We tell ourselves stories in order to live." Today, this phrase is deployed inspirationally, printed on T-shirts and posters, used as a battle cry for artists and writers. In truth, Didion was describing something much less rosy: our human tendency to manufacture delusions that might ward away our anxieties when society seems to spin off its axis. Nowhere was this collective hallucination more effectively crafted than in Hollywood.
In this riveting cultural biography, New York Times film critic Alissa Wilkinson examines Joan Didion's influence through the lens of American mythmaking. As a young girl, Didion was infatuated with John Wayne and his on-screen bravado, and was fascinated by her California pioneer ancestry and the infamous Donner Party. The mythos that preoccupied her early years continued to influence her work as a magazine writer and film critic in New York, offering glimmers of the many stories Didion told herself that would come to unravel over the course of her career. But out west, show business beckoned.
We Tell Ourselves Stories eloquently traces Didion's journey from New York to her arrival in Hollywood as a screenwriter at the twilight of the old studio system. She spent much of her adult life deeply embroiled in the glitz and glamor of the Los Angeles elite, where she acutely observed--and denounced--how the nation's fears and dreams were sensationalized on screen. Meanwhile, she paid the bills writing movie scripts like A Star Is Born, while her books propelled her to celestial heights of fame.
Peering through a scrim of celluloid, Wilkinson incisively dissects the cinematic motifs and machinations that informed Didion's writing--and how her writing, ultimately, demonstrated Hollywood's addictive grasp on the American imagination. More than a portrait of a writer, We Tell Ourselves Stories shines a new light on a legacy whose impact will be felt for generations.

PURCHASE BOOK HERE: https://politics-prose.com/book/9781324092612?ic_referral=TJY3ewjSmjrk1IlkWlnWG6KsOax9NojDH73GIdSHgrMwM5xuAm_2ISWH8G6_13iYUhi2PbFP1U3Jogod7hYW8cV2lERy4LK5fEvfL4FXn7nx37p-NFdGWQVIEUdLA80K9P7hzw

Alissa Wilkinson is a film critic at the New York Times and was formerly a senior correspondent and critic at Vox. Her previous book, Salty: Lessons on Eating, Drinking, and Living from Revolutionary Women, was published in 2022. She lives in Brooklyn, New York.

Wilkinson is in conversation with Dan Kois. Kois is a longtime writer and editor at Slate, and the author of five books, most recently the novel Hampton Heights. He also hosts the Martin Amis podcast, the Martin Chronicles. He lives in Arlington with his family.

*recorded 3/15/2025

In this moving, hilarious, and insightful memoir, Laurie Woolever traces her path from a small-town childhood to working at revered restaurants and food publications, alternately bolstered and overshadowed by two of the most powerful men in the business. But there's more to the story than the two bold-faced names on her resume: Mario Batali and Anthony Bourdain.

Behind the scenes, Laurie's life is frequently chaotic, an often pleasurable buffet of bad decisions at which she frequently overstays her welcome. Acerbic and wryly self-deprecating, Laurie attempts to carve her own space as a woman in this world that is by turns toxic and intoxicating. Laurie seeks to try it all--from a seedy Atlantic City strip club to the Park Hyatt Tokyo, from a hippie vegetarian co-op to the legendary El Bulli--while balancing her consuming work with her sometimes ambivalent relationship to marriage and motherhood.

As the food world careens toward an overdue reckoning and Laurie's mentors face their own high-profile descents, she is confronted with the questions of where she belongs and how to hold on to the parts of her life's work that she truly values: care and feeding.

PURCHASE BOOK HERE: https://politics-prose.com/book/9780063327603?ic_referral=oaRsyZ61C06Icl54TYZ21kRl33qS6OEAwG8JD7XC-yIwMw1PaJ9BlqDz1hbnR9mXjOsdx6OGs_gN49lkhkOJqMBF4FrSHRsbw6Xe1ozKMX1qZyPCpCO_0qvYwhJVKT-LSsE3-w

Laurie Woolever is a writer and editor. She spent nearly a decade assisting Anthony Bourdain, with whom she coauthored the cookbook Appetites and World Travel. She's written about food and travel for the New York Times, GQ, Food & Wine, Lucky Peach, Saveur, Dissent, Roads & Kingdoms, and others, and has worked as an editor at Art Culinaire and Wine Spectator. She is also the New York Times bestselling author of Bourdain: The Definitive Oral Biography.

Woolever is in conversation with Daniela Galarza. Galarza is a staff writer for the Food section at The Washington Post who also writes "Eat Voraciously," a newsletter offering easy dinner recipes, cooking tips and inspiration. A former restaurant pastry chef, Galarza has been writing about food and cooking for more than 10 years. Before joining The Post, she was a features editor at Serious Eats, senior editor at Eater.com and deputy food editor at Los Angeles magazine. Her work has appeared in the New York Times, New York magazine, Wall Street Journal and other publications. She earned her bachelor’s degree from Cornell University and a certificate in pastry arts from the International Culinary Center in New York. After studying pastry and bread making in Paris and central France, she worked as a pastry chef and in product development in New York and Los Angeles before entering journalism.

*recorded 3/13/2025

Shortly before dusk on November 3, 1870, just as the ferryboat El Capitan was pulling away from its slip into San Francisco Bay, a woman clad in black emerged from the shadows and strode across the crowded deck. Reaching under her veil, she drew a small pistol and aimed it directly at a well-dressed man sitting quietly with his wife and children. The woman fired a single bullet into his chest. "I did it and I don't deny it," she said when arrested shortly thereafter. "He ruined both myself and my daughter."

Though little remembered today, the trial of Laura D. Fair for the murder of her lover, A. P. Crittenden, made headlines nationwide. As bestselling author Gary Krist reveals, the operatic facts of the case--a woman strung along for years by a two-timing man, killing him in an alleged fit of madness--challenged an American populace still searching for moral consensus after the Civil War. The trial shone an early and uncomfortable spotlight on social issues like the role of women, the sanctity of the family, and the range of acceptable expressions of gender, while jolting the still-adolescent metropolis of 1870s San Francisco, a city eager to shed its rough-and-tumble Gold Rush-era reputation.

Trespassers at the Golden Gate brings readers inside the untamed frontier town, a place where--for a brief period--otherwise marginalized communities found unique opportunities. Readers meet a secretly wealthy Black housekeeper, an enterprising Chinese brothel madam, and a French rabble-rouser who refused to dress in sufficiently "feminine" clothing--as well as familiar figures like Mark Twain and Susan B. Anthony, who become swept up in the drama of the Laura Fair affair.

Krist, who previously brought New Orleans to vivid life in Empire of Sin and Chicago in City of Scoundrels, recounts this astonishing story and its surprisingly modern echoes in a rollicking narrative that probes what it all meant--both for a nation still scarred by war and for a city eager for the world stage.

PURCHASE BOOK: https://politics-prose.com/book/9780593444214?ic_referral=HqcUCIQvCNpn316GPHDNfJohWmH5jgLFyYaS40GZUc8wM5nOLCghC-lpKELO090xfAnxNLQieeeicsu_mQibMqqJ4cXVXgLrt9JrQJG95Z7YOaldPXqbHR2Vhnn_yMxKoxnEAQ

Gary Krist is the author of four previous narrative nonfiction books The White Cascade, City of Scoundrels, Empire of Sin, and The Mirage Factory. He has also written three novels and two short story collections. A widely published journalist and book reviewer, Krist has been the recipient of the Stephen Crane Award, the Sue Kaufman Prize from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, a Lowell Thomas gold medal for travel journalism, a fiction fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts, and a Public Scholar grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities.

Krist is in conversation with Margaret Talbot. Talbot joined The New Yorker as a staff writer in 2004, writing Profiles and also dispatches and commentary on legal issues, cultural history, social movements, and indie music. She was one of the founding editors of Lingua Franca and was a senior fellow at New America. In 1999, she received a Whiting Award. Talbot is the author of The Entertainer: Movies, Magic, and My Father's Twentieth Century a history of twentieth-century entertainment told through the adventures of her actor father, Lyle Talbot. She also wrote, with her brother David Talbot, By the Light of Burning Dreams: The Triumphs and Tragedies of the Second American Revolution about left-wing activism in the nineteen-sixties and seventies. A native of Los Angeles, she now lives in Washington, D.C.

*recorded 3/12/2025

This event is in partnership with The Atlantic. 

In recent years, Olga Khazan had been spiraling toward an existential crisis. Though she treasured her loving relationship and her dream job, her neurotic personality often left her snatching dissatisfaction from the jaws of happiness. While her overachieving had always been a professional asset, Olga lately felt like her brittle disposition could shatter under the weight of just one more thing--but could she really change her entire personality?

Research shows that you can alter your personality traits by behaving in ways that align with the kind of person you'd like to be--a process that can make you happier, healthier, and more successful. In Me, But Better, Olga embarks on an experiment to see whether it's possible to go from dwelling in dread to "radiating joy." For one year, Olga reluctantly clicked "yes" on a bucket list of new experiences--from meditation to improv to sailing--that forced her to at least act happy. With a skeptic's eye, Olga brings you on her journey through the science of personality, presenting evidence-backed techniques to help you change your mind for the better. Sharply witty and deeply fascinating, Me, But Better offers a probing inquiry into what it means to live a fulfilling life, and how you can keep diving into change, no matter how uncomfortable it feels

PURCHASE BOOK: https://politics-prose.com/book/9781668012543?ic_referral=-ffTn628PthWFvMFh_3WcyDNXgenN1sPUNz7NKK4Lf8wMztDI-Q4jgDzMFJQiodz7kZByFghDymmHlYtgCf4EGkbAeudJc3rKbcyxvFSz8jQHMhDDYMM1pAtKT3JCi5h3ybq7A

Olga Khazan is a staff writer for The Atlantic and the author of Weird: The Power of Being an Outsider in an Insider World. She has written for The New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, and other publications. She is a two-time recipient of journalism fellowships from the International Reporting Project and winner of the 2017 National Headliner Award for Magazine Online Writing. She lives with her husband and son in Northern Virginia.

Khazan is in conversation with Daniel H. Pink. Pink is the author of five New York Times bestsellers, including his latest, The Power of Regret: How Looking Backward Moves Us Forward. His other books include the New York Times bestsellers When and A Whole New Mind — as well as the #1 New York Times bestsellers Drive and To Sell is Human. Dan’s books have won multiple awards, have been translated into 46 languages, and have sold millions of copies around the world. He lives in Washington, DC, with his family. 

*recorded 3/12/2025

All or Nothing takes readers on a journey accompanying Donald Trump on his return to power as only Michael Wolff, the foremost chronicler of the Trump era, can do it. As Trump cruelly and swiftly dispatches his opponents, heaps fire and fury on the prosecutors and judges who are pursuing him, and mocks and belittles anyone in his way, including the president of the United States, this becomes not just another election but perhaps, both sides say, the last election. The stakes could not be clearer: Either the establishment destroys Donald Trump, or he destroys the establishment.

What soon emerges is a split-screen reality: On one side, a picture that could not be worse for Trump: an inescapable, perhaps mortal legal quagmire; on the other side, an entirely positive political outlook: overwhelming support within his party, ever-rising polling numbers, and lackluster opposition. Through personal access to Trump's inner circle, Wolff details a behind-the-scenes, revealing landscape of Trumpworld and its unlikely cast of primary players as well as the candidate himself, the most successful figure in American politics since, arguably, Roosevelt, but who might easily seem to be raving mad.

Threading a needle between tragedy and farce, the fate of the nation, the liberal ideal, and democracy itself, All or Nothing paints a gobsmacking portrait of a man whose behavior is so unimaginable, so uncontrolled, so unmindful of cause and effect, that it defeats all the structures and logic of civic life. And yet here in one of the most remarkable comebacks in American political history, Trump is victorious. This is not just a story about politics: It is a vivid exposé of the demons, discord, and anarchy--the fire, fury, and future--of American life under Trump.

PURCHASE BOOK HERE: https://politics-prose.com/book/9780593735381?ic_referral=42cgied2kxfcW9BiCzRrqHf4e65lCcvMRZYJNLjDF4YwM10Cy7MbD5LSoob8XnANO78stoDuPpES2Ubf27OY3H8iNYF4Y9On2F40OakKLChXkH0dXGuDkIdcz8o_Rddk7fqIyDY

Wolff is in conversation with Alexander Nazaryan, who writes about science, politics and culture for The New York Times and other publications. He was previously a national correspondent for Newsweek and a White House correspondent for Yahoo News. He is the author of The Best People a book about the first Trump cabinet. 

*recorded 3/11/2025