Politics and Prose Presents

Founded in 1970, NPR is America's most powerful broadcast news network. Despite being overshadowed by the larger and more glamorous PBS, public radio has long been home to shows such as All Things Considered, Morning Edition, and This American Life that captivate millions of listeners in homes, cars, and workplaces across the nation. NPR and its hosts are a cultural force and a trusted voice, and they have created a mode of journalism and storytelling that helps Americans understand the world in which we live. In On Air, a book fourteen years in the making, journalist Steve Oney tells the dramatic history of this institution, tracing the comings and goings of legendary on-air talents (Bob Edwards, Susan Stamberg, Ira Glass, Cokie Roberts, and many others) and the rise and fall and occasional rise again of brilliant and sometimes venal executives. It depicts how NPR created a medium for extraordinary journalism--in which reporters and producers use microphones as paintbrushes and the voices of people around the world as the soundtrack of stories both global and local.

Featuring details on the controversial firing of Juan Williams, the sloppy dismissal of Bob Edwards, and a $230 million bequest by Joan B. Kroc, widow of the founder of McDonalds, On Air also chronicles NPR's daring shift into the digital world and its early embrace of podcasting formats, establishing the network as a formidable media empire. Fascinating, revelatory, and irresistibly dishy, this is a riveting account of NPR's unlikely launch, chaotic ascent, and ultimate triumph--a must-read for anyone interested in the history of public radio and its impact on American culture.

PURCHASE BOOK HERE: https://politics-prose.com/book/9781451656091?ic_referral=WoQYQQT00SWSqt3E9EI0yt1bNba4b8Wsavg55pC5hacwM-dX8t-xyYK7TKxbSd4FvWNdlCcIihvvxobNpuO-zfT3OOM81U7UqfbWaL5UZmLKHDE6d0tyGQKC81fyuJ7Anb_PCZ4

Steve Oney is a longtime journalist who worked for many years as a staff writer for The Atlanta Journal-Constitution Magazine and Los Angeles magazine. He has also contributed articles to many national publications, including Esquire, The Wall Street Journal, New York magazine, GQ, and The New York Times Magazine. His history of the lynching of Leo Frank, And the Dead Shall Rise, won the American Bar Association's Silver Gavel Award and the National Jewish Book Award. Oney was educated at the University of Georgia and at Harvard, where he was a Nieman Fellow. He lives in Los Angeles with his wife, Madeline Stuart.

Oney is in conversation with Jack Shafer. Shafer is a former editor of Washington City Paper, has worked as a columnist for Slate, Reuters and, most recently, Politico, where wrote about media and politics.

*recorded 3/11/2025

Blue Basin Island is the final resting spot of formerly enslaved Africans whose souls have flown from Earth--not to heaven or purgatory but toward freedom and a new life. Lucille, the island's seamstress, takes two forms. She lives among the inhabitants in human form and, along with the evil-repelling blue of the houses, her divine form protects people from the violence of the their former lives. Yet, even there, outside of time, the souls are not totally insulated from the world in which they were enslaved. Each time a Black person anywhere is harmed, a piece of Blue Basin disintegrates: an earthquake leaves hundreds of thousands dead, and bricks crumble on the island; when police kill a Black child asleep in her bed, the blue paint on homes throughout the island drips and then runs from the walls. Lucille must hold the island together, but she struggles to juggle the responsibility of ensuring everyone's safety while also seeking and losing her own private love. Grounding the story in African folklore and dipping into the rich literary tradition around African people with the power of flight, Zoë Gadegbeku visualizes the destination at the end of the flight and the new life that awaits them.

PURCHASE BOOK HERE: https://politics-prose.com/book/9781959000396?ic_referral=tbfTpLuWy4Mc92DA6BiAtrxViyau43N6eh13FJ2Y0RowM9cfPMcGGHRJjxcBcCPDN1728z0xQIRMv3IDJRcpjK-UJ6wZDy7JVahBCnR38JIVuv3_Uohh9m1sZPM8h6xFvI2ZUSI

Zoë Gadegbeku is a Ghanaian writer. She received an MFA in creative writing from Emerson College and was a fellow at the Callaloo Creative Writing Workshop. Her writing has appeared in Saraba Magazine, AFREADA, Blackbird, The Washington Post, and the anthology Pan African Spaces: Essays on Black Transnationalism. This is her first book.

Gadegbeku is in conversation with Hannah Grieco. Grieco is the author of First Kicking, Then Not, forthcoming from Stanchion in 2025. She writes a literary column for Washington City Paper, edits prose at a variety of small presses and literary journals, and teaches literature at Marymount University. You can read her work in The Washington Post, The Independent, Al Jazeera, Huffington Post, Brevity, Craft Literary, Poet Lore, Shenandoah, Fairy Tale Review, and more. Find her online at www.hgrieco.com and on most social media @writesloud.

*recorded 3/11/2025

How did the female body drive 200 million years of human evolution? - Why do women live longer than men? - Why are women more likely to get Alzheimer's? - Why do girls score better at every academic subject than boys until puberty, when suddenly their scores plummet? - Is sexism useful for evolution? - And why, seriously why, do women have to sweat through our sheets every night when we hit menopause?

These questions are producing some truly exciting science - and in Eve, with boundless curiosity and sharp wit, Cat Bohannon covers the past 200 million years to explain the specific science behind the development of the female sex: "We need a kind of user's manual for the female mammal. A no-nonsense, hard-hitting, seriously researched (but readable) account of what we are. How female bodies evolved, how they work, what it really means to biologically be a woman. Something that would rewrite the story of womanhood. This book is that story. We have to put the female body in the picture. If we don't, it's not just feminism that's compromised. Modern medicine, neurobiology, paleoanthropology, even evolutionary biology all take a hit when we ignore the fact that half of us have breasts. So it's time we talk about breasts. Breasts, and blood, and fat, and vaginas, and wombs--all of it. How they came to be and how we live with them now, no matter how weird or hilarious the truth is."

Eve is not only a sweeping revision of human history, it's an urgent and necessary corrective for a world that has focused primarily on the male body for far too long. Picking up where Sapiens left off, Eve will completely change what you think you know about evolution and why Homo sapiens has become such a successful and dominant species.

PURCHASE BOOK HERE: https://politics-prose.com/book/9780345806208?ic_referral=MrmJEvwzXAaIJ6x-V2zNWa2TiDRrnExNf-7KbrgxM_4wM58PhAp_0AomYri0Dm7ygGiOtz_bvNBmrLi0BOz2pfGK_fMF21RFuadXXmI2NYBiOTZm-n4HAcvgR52Gc7xRoJ7r4g

Cat Bohannon is a researcher and author with a Ph.D. from Columbia University in the evolution of narrative and cognition. Her essays and poems have appeared in Scientific American, Mind, Science Magazine, The Best American Nonrequired Reading, The Georgia Review, The Story Collider, and Poets Against the War. She lives with her family in Seattle.

*recorded 3/10/2025

Andrew Mellon, one of the most accomplished businessmen of his era, is almost unknown today. To this shy, diffident (but brilliant) man fell the daunting task of collecting the war debts from European governments still devastated by World War I and struggling to recover economically. Dealing with the U.S. Congress and the heads of foreign governments on the world stage became one of the great adventures of his life.

Winston Churchill is one of the best-known figures in history. Mellon vs. Churchill presents Churchill through a different lens, focusing on his service as Chancellor of the Exchequer when Great Britain was the largest debtor to the United States. That he became the most vocal critic of American foreign policy during that time is a scarcely told chapter of economic history--and his long and contentious debate with Mellon has seldom been explored.

Yet, during the five years that Churchill served as Chancellor of the Exchequer (1924-1929), Mellon was his counterpart at the United States Treasury, and their debate and fierce differences of opinion about the handling of what Churchill called "the monstrous war debts" made frequent headlines on both sides of the Atlantic.

No mention of any of their five meetings are included in the official biographies of either man. Now these confrontations are brought to vivid life in Mellon vs. Churchill, as are many other vignettes from their very public, but largely forgotten, rivalry. Mellon vs. Churchill brings the reader inside the adventurous lives of these two great public figures--men who were not afraid to take huge risks to pursue their grand ambitions.

After a career in investment management, Jill Eicher served at the U.S. Department of the Treasury as a specialist in credit risk and worked at the Bipartisan Policy Center as a financial policy analyst. She has been a visiting scholar at Stanford University and, most recently, at the International Churchill Society. Mellon vs. Churchill is her first book. She lives in Washington, DC.

PURCHASE BOOK HERE: https://politics-prose.com/book/9781639366422?ic_referral=bTwpAqZuJkS3Qa0jSBpI0L8BKtvAKAtZUW-ZHAKqhj4wM6ZnXNSh2DeYqay7TIREIRNGKBZQcDcmMA7rJr8oxwtLkorh1fhVjLfT64vUmxvUQNPugM_BpVocQfTiKyaH5al8JHY*recorded 3/9/2025

In the summer of 1954, educator Septima Clark and small businessman Esau Jenkins travelled to rural Tennessee's Highlander Folk School, an interracial training center for social change founded by Myles Horton, a white southerner with roots in the labor movement. There, the trio united behind a shared mission: preparing Black southerners to pass the daunting Jim Crow era voter registration literacy tests that were designed to disenfranchise them.

Together with beautician-turned-teacher Bernice Robinson, they launched the underground Citizenship Schools project, which began with a single makeshift classroom hidden in the back of a rural grocery store. By the time the Voting Rights Act was signed into law in 1965, the secretive undertaking had established more than nine hundred citizenship schools across the South, preparing tens of thousands of Black citizens to read and write, demand their rights--and vote. Simultaneously, it nurtured a generation of activists--many of them women--trained in community organizing, political citizenship, and tactics of resistance and struggle who became the grassroots foundation of the Civil Rights Movement. Dr. King called Septima Clark, "Mother of the Movement."

In the vein of Hidden Figures and Devil in the Grove, Spell Freedom is both a riveting, crucially important lens onto our past, and a deeply moving story for our present.

PURCHASE BOOK HERE: https://politics-prose.com/book/9781668002698?ic_referral=SGLiwsqQSkbaB4IUwV1z22XKmXKtLyY8KLL3Y6a3wzswMw0zWoJWtb9Wb_gQZ2SbVqwkhLDHiE3VS4gbo3YH5NnJVvbLd14Wt0hEogDVITT25Dwsoyo5rbbEcUgyf3F84XZxhQ

Elaine Weiss is an award-winning journalist, author, and public speaker. In addition to Spell Freedom, she is the author of Fruits of Victory: The Woman's Land Army of the Great War; and The Woman's Hour: The Great Fight to Win the Vote. Elaine lives with her husband in Baltimore, Maryland. Find out more at ElaineWeiss.com.

Weiss is in conversation with Marcia Chatelain, the Presidential Penn Compact Professor of Africana Studies at the University of Pennsylvania. Her most recent book, Franchise: The Golden Arches in Black America (Liveright Publishing Co./W.W. Norton, 2020) examined the intricate relationship among African American politicians, civil rights organizations, communities, and the fast-food industry. Franchise won the 2021 Pulitzer Prize in History. She is currently writing a book about the 1963 March on Washington. 

*recorded 3/8/2025

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

With the help of a distinguished group of panelists, our initial event will examine the recent challenges to individual rights and liberties posed by some early Trump administration actions. These include the effort to undo birthright citizenship, expel massive numbers of immigrants, roll back LGBTQ+ protections, and eradicate initiatives promoting diversity, equity, and inclusion. The panel also will explore how traditional norms are being discarded and the rule of law eroded by extensive attacks on the administrative state, bold assertions of executive power, disregard for congressional mandates, and questioning of judicial authority. 

In addition to elaborating on these developments, the discussion will suggest ways for people to act on their concerns. How, for instance, can citizens ensure existing legal precedents are enforced effectively? What new mechanisms might be developed to better protect the civil rights and civil liberties currently under threat? What can we all do--as lawyers and non-lawyers alike--to come together as a community and stand up for the principles that motivate and define us as Americans? 

We are calling these events “teach-ins,” echoing the teach-ins of the 1960s that provided a foundation for education and tools for action during the civil rights and anti-war movements. We hope our sessions will serve a similar purpose in these times.

Our panelists for the first teach-in include:

David Cole is the Hon. George J. Mitchell Professor in Law and Public Policy at Georgetown University Law Center and former National Legal Director of the ACLU. He writes regularly for the New York Review of Books and is legal affairs correspondent for The Nation.

Skye L. Perryman is President and CEO of Democracy Forward, a nonpartisan, national legal organization that promotes democracy and progress through litigation, regulatory engagement, policy education, and research. Perryman took the helm at Democracy Forward a few months after January 6, 2021, in the midst of rising extremism in communities and courts across the country.
Rep. Jamie Raskin proudly represents Maryland’s 8th Congressional District in the U.S. House of Representatives. Prior to his time in Congress, Raskin was a three-term State Senator in Maryland, where he also served as the Senate Majority Whip. He was also a professor of constitutional law at American University’s Washington College of Law for more than 25 years.

Kelley J. Robinson, President of the Human Rights Campaign (HRC), is a pioneering advocate in the realm of LGBTQ+ equality and social justice. As the first Black, queer woman to helm HRC, the largest LGBTQ+ civil rights organization in the U.S., she brings over 15 years of experience, leading numerous successful campaigns for LGBTQ+, racial, and gender equity. Under her leadership, HRC declared a national State of Emergency, responding to a concerning surge in anti-LGBTQ+ legislation. Mobilizing HRC's extensive network of over 3 million members, supporters, and volunteers, Robinson has fought discrimination and fostered safer, more inclusive environments for LGBTQ+ communities. Her efforts have secured significant political victories, countering anti-transgender rhetoric and mobilizing "Equality Voters" to historic wins in 2023. To date, Robinson's presidency has witnessed landmark legislative achievements, including the passage of the Respect for Marriage Act and the defeat of numerous anti-LGBTQ+ amendments in the U.S. House.

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.

In 2014, a well-trained, mysterious band of mercenaries arrived in Ukraine, part of Russia's first attempt to claim the country as its own. Upon ceasefire, the "Wagner Group" faded back into shadow, only to reemerge in the Middle East, where they'd go toe-to-toe with the U.S., and in Africa, where they'd earn praise for "tough measures" against insurgencies yet spark outrage for looting, torture, and civilian deaths. As Russia gained a foothold of influence abroad, Wagner founder Yevgeny Prigozhin, known as "Putin's Chef," went from caterer to commander to single greatest threat Putin has faced in his over-twenty-year rule.

Dually armed with military and strategic prowess, the Wagner Group created a new market in a vast geopolitical landscape increasingly receptive to the promises of private actors. In this trailblazing account of the Group's origins and operations, John Lechner-the only journalist to report across its many warzones-brings us on the ground to witness Wagner partner with fragile nation states, score access to natural resources, oust peacekeeping missions, and cash in on conflicts reframed as Kremlin interests. After rebelling, Prigozhin faced an epic demise-but Wagner lives on, its political, business, and military ventures a pillar of Russian operations the world over.

Featuring exclusive interviews with over thirty Wagner Group members, Death Is Our Business is the terrifying true tale of the renegade militia that proved global instability is nothing if not an opportunity.

PURCHASE BOOK HERE: https://politics-prose.com/book/9781639733361?ic_referral=2-9feyZ46J_wIcZZuVC5OhFSp_KMeMQ7kTKxOtjFJPcwM9VY_MCM8MUfbcep00Z4d-QrkcDvG-oS2QFudGCC7m6_xlwWhT_jgfPTbfijBlyhLmWLFTnzOP5ZZniizy_4faeZ7g

John Lechner is a journalist and an independent researcher and consultant to NGOs and other institutions working in Africa. He holds a master's degree in foreign service from Georgetown University. He speaks Russian, French, Turkish, Georgian, Chechen, Sango, and more. His reporting has been featured in outlets such as the New York Times, the Atlantic, the Washington Post, and the BBC and published in Foreign Policy, Lawfare, and War on the Rocks, among others. A native of Boston, Massachusetts, he lives in Washington, D.C.

Lechner is in conversation with Brett Forrest, a national-security and intelligence reporter for The Wall Street Journal, where his investigative work has focused on espionage, arms, and the former Soviet Union. In the Russo-Ukrainian war, Brett was the first reporter to reach the town of Bucha and uncover evidence of atrocities. He is the author of Lost Son, The Big Fix, and Long Bomb. Brett co-directed the ESPN true-crime documentary, Pin Kings, an Emmy nominee, and is an executive producer on Netflix’s feature adaptation of The Big Fix. Brett was a part of a team at the Journal that won the National Press Club's Edwin M. Hood Award for diplomatic and foreign policy correspondence for reporting on wrongful detention and hostage diplomacy. He has lived and worked in Russia, Ukraine, Brazil, and other countries. www.brettforrest.com

*recorded 3/7/2025

Long before the Moneyball-era, the Earl of Baltimore reigned over baseball. History's feistiest and most colorful manager, Earl Weaver transformed the sport by collecting and analyzing data in visionary ways, ultimately winning more games than anybody else during his time running the Orioles from 1968-1982

When Weaver was hired by the Orioles, managers were still seen as coaches and inspirational leaders, more teachers of the game than strategists. Weaver invented new ways of building baseball teams, prioritizing on-base average, elite defense, and strike throwing. Weaver was the first manager to use a modern radar gun, and he pioneered the use of analytical data. By moving 6'4" Cal Ripken, Jr. to shortstop, Weaver paved the way for a generation of plus-sized superstar shortstops, including Alex Rodriguez and Derek Jeter. He foreshadowed almost everything that Bill James, Billy Beane, Theo Epstein, and hundreds of other big brain baseball types would later present as innovation

Beyond being a great baseball mind, Weaver was a rare baseball character. Major League Baseball is show business, and Weaver understood how much of his job was entertainment. Weaver's outbursts offered players cathartic relief from their own frustration, signaled his concern for the team, and fired up fans. In his frequent arguments with umpires, he hammed it up for the crowds, faked heart attacks, ripped bases out of the ground, and pretended to toss umpires out of the game. Weaver also fought with his players, especially Jim Palmer, but that creative tension contributed to a stunning success, and a hilarious clubhouse. During his tenure as major league manager, the Orioles won the American League pennant in 1969, 1970, 1971, and 1979, each time winning over 100 games.

The Last Manager uncovers the story of Weaver's St. Louis childhood with a mobster uncle, his years of minor league heartbreak, and his unlikely road to becoming a big league manager, while tracing the evolution of the game from the old-time baseball of cross-country trains and "desk contracts" to the modern era of free agency, video analysis, and powerful player agents. Weaver's career is a critical juncture in baseball history. He was the only manager to hold a job during the five years leading up to, and five years after, free agency upended baseball in 1976.

Weaver was inducted into the Baseball Hall of Fame in 1996. In his retirement, he even admitted that "if he had been an umpire, he would have thrown himself out of more games than he actually was." Belligerent, genius, infamous-- The Last Manager tells the story of one man who left his mark on the game for generations.

PURCHASE BOOK HERE: https://politics-prose.com/book/9781668030929?ic_referral=g8X1WXmOl3vTLzKH4-s9cISU_lDswKVQr6OrSv0NCDswM3MfntLcmMHK48nipjyIF_WY3w0EuXiYkzlIc76uzpgLu2QBE-RgVzHL3kvGo0wusFf3jMItWCxvlC4B6hX0xwx2Eg

John W. Miller is a writer, baseball coach, and contributing writer at America Magazine. He has reported from six continents and over forty countries for The Wall Street Journal and has also written for Time, NPR, and The Baltimore Sun. Miller is the codirector of the acclaimed 2020 PBS film Moundsville and the founder of Moundsville.org. He has coached two Brussels teams to Little League World Series tournaments and has scouted for the Baltimore Orioles. He lives in Pittsburgh with his wife and can be found on X at @JWMJournalist.

Miller is in conversation with Tom Gilbert. Gilbert is the author of How Baseball Happened: Outrageous Lies Exposed, The Truth Revealed (release date: September 2020). His other works include Baseball and the Color Line, Roberto Clemente, and Playing First. From his Greenpoint, Brooklyn stoop he can throw a baseball to the former site of the Manor House tavern, where members of the Eckford Baseball Club enjoyed a post-game drink or two in the 1850s.

*recorded 3/6/2025

On her second birthday in 1967, Bernice McFadden died in a car crash near Detroit, only to be resuscitated after her mother pulled her from the flaming wreckage. Firstborn Girls traces her remarkable life from that moment up to the publication of her first novel, Sugar.

Growing up in 1980s Brooklyn, Bernice finds solace in books, summer trips to Barbados, and boarding school to escape her alcoholic father. Discovering the works of Alice Walker and Toni Morrison, she finally sees herself and her loved ones reflected in their stories of "messy, beautiful, joyful Black people."

Interwoven with Bernice's personal journey is her family's history, beginning with her four-times enslaved great-grandmother Louisa Vicey Wilson in 1822 Hancock County, Georgia. Her descendants survived Reconstruction and Jim Crow, joined the Great Migration, and mourned Dr. King's assassination during the Civil Rights Movement. These women's wisdom, secrets, and fierce love are passed down like Louisa's handmade quilt.

A memoir of many threads, Firstborn Girls is an extraordinarily moving portrait of a life shaped by family, history, and the drive to be something more.

PURCHASE BOOK HERE: https://politics-prose.com/book/9780593184974?ic_referral=REZTfrFZ9-USTGhIzfbUOWA69mMcBAktSUZkrySl3xUwM-JIp8wJseEWLDClGIPBobWG5k582k0xsq_QwpYGaQtOAwzZgsFrJ40exzmPqVqDgFx1UIDt_7pnmpUoX9V9r5vT_Q

Bernice L. McFadden is an Assistant Professor of Creative Writing at Tulane University and the author of several critically acclaimed novels, including Sugar, The Warmest December, Loving Donovan, Nowhere Is a Place, Glorious, Gathering of Waters (a New York Times Editors' Choice and one of the 100 Notable Books of 2012), The Book of Harlan (winner of a 2017 American Book Award and the NAACP Image Award for Outstanding Literary Work, Fiction), and Praise Song for the Butterflies (long-listed for the 2019 Women's Prize for Fiction). She is a four-time Hurston/Wright Legacy Award finalist, as well as the recipient of three awards from the Black Caucus of the American Library Association.

McFadden is in conversation with Glory Edim, a literary tastemaker, entrepreneur, and advocate for diverse voices in literature. In 2015, she founded Well-Read Black Girl (WRBG), an online platform and book club dedicated to celebrating the works of Black women authors and creating a supportive online community for readers. Under Edim's leadership, WRBG has grown into a nonprofit organization, hosting events, book festivals, and author conversations that highlight the richness and diversity of Black literature. Her efforts have earned her accolades such as the 2017 Innovator's Award from the Los Angeles Times Book Prizes and the Madam C.J. Walker Award from the Hurston/Wright Foundation. As an author herself, Edim has contributed to the literary landscape with her bestselling anthologies Well-Read Black Girl: Finding Our Stories, Discovering Ourselves , and On Girlhood: 15 Stories from the Well-Read Black Girl Library and her recently published book Gather Me.

*recorded 3/6/2025

How Americans think about work changed profoundly over the course of the twentieth century. Thrift and persistence came to seem old-fashioned. Successful workers were increasingly expected to show initiative and enthusiasm for change--not just to do their jobs reliably but to create new opportunities for themselves and for others. Our culture of work today is more demanding than ever, even though workers haven't seen commensurate rewards.

Make Your Own Job explains how this entrepreneurial work ethic took hold, from its origins in late nineteenth-century success literature to the gig economy of today, sweeping in strange bedfellows: Marcus Garvey and Henry Ford, Avon ladies and New Age hippies. Business schools and consultants exhorted managers to cultivate the entrepreneurial spirit in their subordinates, while an industry of self-help authors synthesized new ideas from psychology into a vision of work as "self-realization." Policy experts embraced the new ethic as a remedy for urban and Third World poverty. Every social group and political tendency, it seems, has had its own exemplary entrepreneurs.

Historian Erik Baker argues that the entrepreneurial work ethic has given meaning to work in a world where employment is ever more precarious--and in doing so, has helped legitimize a society of mounting economic insecurity and inequality. From the advent of corporate capitalism in the Gilded Age to the economic stagnation of recent decades, Americans have become accustomed to the reality that today's job may be gone tomorrow. Where work is hard to find and older nostrums about diligent effort fall flat, the advice to "make your own job" keeps hope alive.

PURCHASE BOOK HERE: https://politics-prose.com/book/9780674293601?ic_referral=UOMScgg_oO4jYfChf3enihMrwuzixEzlHq71NyDrS3QwM87eR39z0YRFbCTDHk8Mi2LVhz0uZYvWM6u_YPPiEHDUnlFIuLqiexOOEEbTRgxQ9kGA_UOXPlo8D3b6u-vXnVgPsJQ

Erik Baker is Lecturer on the History of Science at Harvard University. His writing has appeared in Harper's, n+1, The Baffler, Jewish Currents, and The Drift, where he is Associate Editor.

Baker is in conversation with Jamelle Bouie, a columnist for the New York Times and political analyst for CBS News. He covers campaigns, elections, national affairs, and culture. Previously, Jamelle was chief political correspondent for Slate magazine and a staff writer at The Daily Beast ; he also held fellowships at The American Prospect and The Nation magazine.

*recorded 3/5/2025