Politics and Prose Presents

onsters are central to how we think about the human condition. Join award-winning historian of science Dr. Surekha Davies as she reveals how people have defined the human in relation to everything from apes to zombies, and how they invented race, gender, and nations along the way. With rich, evocative storytelling that braids together ancient gods and generative AI, Frankenstein's monster and E.T., Humans: A Monstrous History shows how monster-making is about control: it defines who gets to count as normal.

In an age when corporations increasingly see people as obstacles to profits, this book traces the long, volatile history of monster-making and charts a better path for the future. The result is a profound, effervescent, empowering retelling of the history of the world for anyone who wants to reverse rising inequality and polarization. This is not a history of monsters, but a history through monsters.

PURCHASE BOOK HERE: https://politics-prose.com/book/9780520388093?ic_referral=noyhLrjzSHD5iYvNhq26DqOIBZvl7Ug_zvjiKlshFzkwM9X_qVYgVGdK9HjZRhqgwIEaNC6EKLOMhwSrZLSSZToBYFpo1TsplQIBQL9ibUztRtMC2P0I3i3hjwH_jCP0VIei8w

Dr. Surekha Davies is a British author, speaker, and historian of science, art, and ideas. Her first book, Renaissance Ethnography and the Invention of the Human, won the Morris D. Forkosch Prize for the best first book in intellectual history from the Journal of the History of Ideas and the Roland H. Bainton Prize in History and Theology. She has written essays and reviews about the histories of biology, anthropology, and monsters in the Times Literary Supplement, Nature, Science, and Aeon.

*recorded 3/4/2025

This event is in partnership with the Kettering Foundation.

After the collapse of the Soviet Union, six US presidential administrations of both parties pursued policies for Russia, Ukraine, and Eurasia that emboldened Russia, playing into its imperialist, centuries-long mythos of regional hegemony. The result: military aggression and full-scale invasion. It was all too foreseeable.

In The Folly of Realism, leading national security expert and bestselling author Alexander Vindman argues that America's mistakes in Eastern Europe result from policymakers' fixation on immediate, short-term problem-solving and misplaced hopes and fears. He proposes a new long-term, values-based approach that insists on the fundamentals of liberal democracy and a rules-based world order.

Enlivened by firsthand accounts and behind-the-scenes interviews with leading Washington and international policymakers and culminating in the shocking brutality of Putin's invasions of Ukraine, the book exposes the follies of western foreign policymaking, sources of the dangerous return of Russian imperialism, and proscribes how it can be contained.

PURCHASE BOOK HERE: https://politics-prose.com/book/9781541705043?ic_referral=RTMv91vYYecM4_m7aUxhFhXiRSVH74LycjGXDSTI6xIwMygtzYpAxU_YXmSmZ6pI4GkhDNBFo8l-YMmLaLmnmAPtbUX0HNC1txLF6J1DBGoDDb16XLhP0fj4oBdLVyx08tLYxA

Alexander Vindman, lieutenant colonel US Army (retired), was the director for European Affairs on the White House's National Security Council, former Political-Military Affairs Officer for Russia, and diplomat at the American Embassies in Moscow and Kyiv. He is a senior fellow at the Foreign Policy Institute and Kettering Foundation, the author of the New York Times-bestselling memoir Here, Right Matters, and leads the Here Right Matters Foundation organization which focuses on helping Ukraine win the war against Russia. He lives in Fort Lauderdale, Florida.

Vindman is in conversation with Sharon L. Davies, the president and chief executive officer of the Charles F. Kettering Foundation. Davies’ career experiences span both academic and nonacademic fields. From 2017-2021, she was provost and senior vice president for academic affairs at Spelman College. She joined Spelman from The Ohio State University, where she was vice provost for diversity and inclusion and chief diversity officer. Davies was also a member of OSU’s Moritz College of Law faculty for 22 years, serving as the Gregory H. Williams Chair in Civil Rights and Civil Liberties. In addition, she directed the university’s Kirwan Institute for the Study of Race & Ethnicity. Davies has an undergraduate degree from the University of Massachusetts at Amherst and a law degree from Columbia University School of Law. Davies is a member of the Council on Foreign Relations, a board member of the Campaign to Create the Julius Rosenwald & Rosenwald Schools National Historical Park, and a commissioner of the Council on Higher Education as a Strategic Asset. She was included among the Dayton Business Journal’s Bizwomen Power50 2023.

*recorded 3/3/2025

In this deeply reported narrative, Jeffrey Toobin recreates the behind-the-scenes political melodrama during the tumultuous period leading up to and following Nixon's resignation. The narrative features a rich cast of characters--including Alexander Haig, Nixon's last chief of staff, who pushed for the pardon, and a young Justice Department lawyer named Antonin Scalia, who provided the legal justification. The Pardon also introduces you to a largely forgotten figure, Benton Becker, the Washington lawyer sent personally by Ford to negotiate the pardon with Nixon. Becker's fresh reflections provide a startling and cinematic picture of the former President--who proved a master manipulator even in exile.

Ford's shocking decision to pardon Nixon was widely criticized at the time, yet it has since been reevaluated as a healing gesture for a divided country even by former critics. Toobin anticipates the next turn in the debate by arguing that Ford's pardon was a disaster--an unwise gift to an undeserving recipient, and one that creates an unsettling precedent that is likely to be tested by the next occupant of the Oval Office.

The Pardon is a must-read for anyone interested in American history, the complex dynamics of power within the highest office in the nation, and the implications of presidential mercy.

PURCHASE BOOK HERE: https://politics-prose.com/book/9781668084946?ic_referral=VPNWjfG3RimdJsWf7q0LD6-S21LwUnJoIu38gwM2dHQwM3pOwno_WOGq5LXNK8k5UUWk9VBbpg9x3xQ7jxWPKXnS8LNP53qyuq8KOL_POUNhZrnPR4rA0IbktpOwyhg4NLSSiQ

Jeffrey Toobin, the longtime CNN legal commentator, is the author of ten books, including The Nine: Inside the Secret World of the Supreme Court, The Run of His Life: The People vs. O.J. Simpson, Homegrown: Timothy McVeigh and the Rise of Right-Wing Extremism, American Heiress, The Oath, Too Close to Call, and A Vast Conspiracy. A magna cum laude graduate of Harvard Law School, he lives with his family in New York.

You can recall the first TV show, movie, book, or song that made you feel understood--that shaped how you live, what you love, and whom you would become. It gave you an entire worldview. For Ira Madison, that book was Chuck Klosterman's Sex, Drugs, and Cocoa Puffs, which cemented the idea that pop culture could be a rigorous subject--and that, for better or worse, it shapes all of us.

In Pure Innocent Fun, Madison explores the key cultural moments that inspired his career as a critic and guided his coming of age as a Black gay man in Milwaukee. In this hilarious, full-throttle trip through the '90s and 2000s, he recounts learning about sex from Buffy the Vampire Slayer; facing the most heartbreaking election of his youth (not George W. Bush's win, but Jennifer Hudson losing American Idol); and how never getting his driver's license in high school made him just like Cher Horowitz in Clueless "a virgin who can't drive."

Brimming with a profound love for a bygone culture and alternating between irreverence and heartfelt insight, Pure Innocent Fun, like all the best products of pop culture, will leave you entertained and surprisingly enlightened.

PURCHASE BOOK HERE: https://politics-prose.com/book/9780593446188?ic_referral=4IkohOtCueOkTM5TrD3wZeNB_5hP5Q2qndgAsHPY9ecwM4C1S-2fs1mUA51pnrz7DBwlg1SOXhbQb-lmMf7DGx6eUf1R6UW6vLOCJwtwHxB8r4f7leauFapxLAx32uXa3jdfLXM

Ira Madison III is the host of Crooked Media's pop culture podcast Keep It. His television writing credits include Uncoupled, Q-Force, Nikki Fre$h, and So Help Me Todd. He has written for GQ, New York Magazine, Interview, MTV News, and Cosmopolitan, among other publications. Nylon named him one of the "most reliably hilarious and incisive cultural critics writing now." He has appeared on The Late Show with Stephen Colbert, Watch What Happens Live, The Wendy Williams Show, and the second season of the Netflix drama You. Ira Madison III lives in New York City.

Madison is in conversation with Dan Zak, a journalist for The Washington Post, where for nearly 20 years he has covered everything under the sun. He is the author of the 2016 nonfiction book Almighty, about an 82-year-old nun who broke into a nuclear weapons facility in Tennessee. He lives in Northeast D.C. and these days he's an editor in the features department of The Post.

*recorded 3/2/2025

As World War III rages, the scientists in Antarctica are thankful for the isolation - until a group of Chinese scientists arrive at the American research base in search of help. In their truck is a horrifying sight, the first ever murder victim in Antarctica. The potential for a geopolitical firestorm is great, and, with no clear jurisdiction, the Americans don't know what to do. But they soon realize the Chinese scientists have brought far more with them than the body...

Within seventy-two hours, thirteen more lie dead in the snow, murdered in acts of madness and superhuman strength.

An extremophile parasite from the truck, triggered by severe cold, is spreading by touch. It is learning from them. Evolving. It triggers violent tendencies in the winter crew, and, more insidiously, the beginnings of a strange symbiotic telepathy.

A small group of survivors try to resist the siren call of the growing hive mind and stay alive long enough to solve the mystery of the symbiotic microbe's origins. But the symbiote is more than a disease - it could be the key to shifting the balance of power in a time of war.

The survivors cannot let anyone infected make it to the summer season, when planes will arrive to take them - and potentially the symbiote - back to civilization.

PURCHASE BOOK HERE: https://politics-prose.com/book/9781915998422?ic_referral=RlUzb7rZgay7Q20IXWfRCMCngFf95kYzoRDjYzExVhYwM3WB1HkzxYjdVlWiz8k8lghF1YoOYTiaVdJNvtQgNZyNJm228BTwJci-TcYhsc6n2EaPvyvqpTHNstIvi6_5c5Ifrg

Michael Nayak was born in Los Angeles and now lives in Washington, DC. By day, he is Doctor/Major Nayak, working for DARPA (Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency). He is a USAF Test Pilot School graduate, Rotary National Award for Space Achievement recipient, and has 1,000+ hours of flight time in 40+ aircraft including the F-16, T-38, EA500 and BE-76. His real-world experience in the science and intelligence communities adds next-level authentic details and a touch of hyper-realism to his work.

Nayak is in conversation with CJ Rivera. Rivera is an adult dystopian author with her head in a world of high-tech turmoil and her feet firmly planted in reality. She is crafting tales that grapple with society's disparities in a future not so far removed from our own. Prior to immersing herself in the world of speculative fiction, she enjoyed a vibrant career as a Creative Producer based in Washington, DC. Her body of work includes an array of content written and produced for CNBC, with segments featured in shows like "Secret Lives of the Super Rich," "The Suze Orman Show," and "Power Pitch". Her expertise also extends to content creation for NBC Universal, Viacom, and the Food Network.

*recorded 3/1/2025

It used to be that ravaging another country's economy required blockading its ports and laying siege to its cities. Now all it takes is a statement posted online by the U.S. government.

In Chokepoints, Edward Fishman, a former top State Department sanctions official, takes us deep into the back rooms of power to reveal the untold history of the last two decades of U.S. foreign policy, in which America renounced the gospel of globalization and waged a new kind of economic war. As Vladimir Putin, Xi Jinping, and Ayatollah Khamenei wreaked havoc on the world stage, mavericks within the U.S. government built a fearsome new arsenal of economic weapons, exploiting America's dominance in global finance and technology. Successive U.S. presidents have relied on these unconventional weapons to address the most pressing national-security threats, for good and for ill.

Chokepoints provides a thrilling account of one of the most critical geopolitical developments of our time, demystifying the complex strategies the U.S. government uses to harness the power of Wall Street, Silicon Valley, and Big Oil against America's enemies. At the center of the narrative is an eclectic group of policy innovators: the diplomats, lawyers, and financial whizzes who've masterminded America's escalating economic wars against Russia, China, and Iran.

Economic warfare has become the primary way the United States confronts international crises and counters rivals. Sometimes it has achieved spectacular success; other times, bitter failure. The result we live with today is a new world order: an economic arms race among great powers and a fracturing global economy. Chokepoints is the definitive account of how America pioneered this new, hard-hitting style of economic war--and how it's changing the world.

PRCHASE BOOK HERE: https://politics-prose.com/book/9780593712979?ic_referral=r6O-wEHlyJkm50l0mDSF6I10X-OWS7DRCzlVmP1WE4MwM4o1qX-W0eNm4y3KKbF0YiPHpFuXs__nMroQRD8O7qGA5evs0_PZUMC86I5EjDmHx1C8wnCFMkQCpAlVbEXvcLS98A

Edward Fishman is a leading authority on economic statecraft and sanctions. He teaches at Columbia University's School of International and Public Affairs and is a senior research scholar at the Center on Global Energy Policy. He also advises companies on geopolitical strategy and invests in early-stage technology startups. Previously, he served at the U.S. State Department as a member of the Secretary of State's Policy Planning Staff, at the Pentagon as an advisor to the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and at the U.S. Treasury Department as special assistant to the Under Secretary for Terrorism and Financial Intelligence. His writing and analysis are regularly featured by outlets such as The New York Times,  The Wall Street Journal,  The Washington Post, Foreign Affairs, Politico, and NPR. He holds a BA in History from Yale, an MPhil in International Relations from Cambridge, and an MBA from Stanford. He lives with his wife and two children in New York City.

Fishman is in conversation with Elizabeth Ralph. Ralph is the editor of POLITICO Magazine and a managing editor at POLITICO.

*recorded 3/1/2025

If all children could just get an education, the logic goes, they would have the same opportunities later in life. But this historical tour de force makes it clear that the opposite is true: The U.S. school system has played an instrumental role in creating and upholding racial hierarchies, preparing children to expect unequal treatment throughout their lives.

In Original Sins, Ewing demonstrates that our schools were designed to propagate the idea of white intellectual superiority, to "civilize" Native students and to prepare Black students for menial labor. Education was not an afterthought for the Founding Fathers; it was envisioned by Thomas Jefferson as an institution that would fortify the country's racial hierarchy. Ewing argues that these dynamics persist in a curriculum that continues to minimize the horrors of American history. The most insidious aspects of this system fall below the radar in the forms of standardized testing, academic tracking, disciplinary policies, and uneven access to resources.

By demonstrating that it's in the DNA of American schools to serve as an effective and underacknowledged mechanism maintaining inequality in this country today, Ewing makes the case that we need a profound reevaluation of what schools are supposed to do, and for whom. This book will change the way people understand the place we send our children for eight hours a day.

PURCHASE BOOK HERE: https://politics-prose.com/book/9780593243701?ic_referral=T4fcNXN5iucuas3n5NRtE3sOD1zXc3bcZA8rp-xVXA8wM6GDsYBQZ5sWSadsJVf8WiYGD6P8SKxXakvzOl9Wf8g5_fsyjfyglDOLsOWTTMtPnpf2HAjU5-M2iZ61IJBIQSHDFjY

Eve L. Ewing is a writer, scholar, and cultural organizer from Chicago. She is the award-winning author of four books: Electric Arches, 1919, Ghosts in the Schoolyard, and Maya and the Robot. She is the co-author (with Nate Marshall) of the play No Blue Memories: The Life of Gwendolyn Brooks and has written several projects for Marvel Comics. Ewing is an associate professor in the Department of Race, Diaspora, and Indigeneity at the University of Chicago. Her work has been published in The New Yorker, The Atlantic, The New York Times, and many other venues.

Ewing is in conversation with Clint Smith, a staff writer at The Atlantic. He is the author of the #1 New York Times bestselling author of How the Word Is Passed: A Reckoning With the History of Slavery Across America, winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award for Nonfiction, the Hillman Prize for Book Journalism, the Stowe Prize, the Dayton Literary Peace Prize, and selected by the New York Times as one of the 10 Best Books of 2021. He is also the author of two books of poetry, the New York Times bestselling collection Above Ground as well as Counting Descent. Both poetry collections were winners of the Literary Award for Best Poetry Book from the Black Caucus of the American Library Association and both were finalists for NAACP Image Awards. Smith is also the host of the YouTube series Crash Course Black American History. Born and raised in New Orleans, he currently lives in Maryland with his wife and their two children.

*recorded 3/1/2025

The American Dream of homeownership is becoming an American Delusion. As renters seek an escape from record-breaking rent hikes, first-time buyers find that skyrocketing interest rates and historically low inventory leave them with scant options for an affordable place to live. With home valued more than ever as a commodity, even social housing programs meant to insulate families from cut-throat markets are under threat--sometimes by residents themselves.

In Homes for Living, urban planner and oral historian Jonathan Tarleton introduces readers to 2 social housing co-ops in Brooklyn and Manhattan. Longtime residents of St. James Towers and Southbridge Towers lock horns over whether to maintain the rules that have kept their homes affordable for decades or to cash out at great personal profit, thereby denying future generations the same opportunity to build thriving communities rooted in mutual care.

With a deft hand for mapping personal histories atop the greater housing crisis, Tarleton explores housing as a public good, movements for tenant rights and Indigenous sovereignty, and questions of race and class to lay bare competing visions of what ownership means, what homes are for, and what neighbors owe each other.

PURCHASE BOOK HERE: https://politics-prose.com/book/9780807017807?ic_referral=5iPQyVcVU0bpCNoA0BD2jsmoBHjk_eKxgYiKbxSgA2EwM41qtyqmqH6rB7_EFLSvI2HQ9y9acOAdQQxPyAN04z7gm6O2DWs01Gs-Oo3ZMav0A3-8JSKEBvHb2FH4CvwisTLeww

Jonathan Tarleton is a writer, an urban planner, and an oral historian. He previously served as the chief researcher on Nonstop Metropolis: A New York City Atlas and as the editor in chief of the online magazine Urban Omnibus. His essays have appeared in Orion, Jacobin, Hell Gate, Dirt, and beyond .

Tarleton is in conversation with Amanda Huron. Huron was born and raised in Washington D.C. She attended Macalester College in St. Paul, Minnesota, where she majored in urban studies and geography. She worked for several years in community radio before earning a masters of city and regional planning from the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, after which she worked on local affordable housing policy and advocacy in Washington, D.C. She received a Ph.D. in earth and environmental sciences/geography from the City University of New York Graduate Center, and taught for a year at CUNY's Hunter College. She is an associate professor of interdisciplinary social sciences in the College of Arts & Sciences at the University of the District of Columbia. Her research interests are in D.C. history, urban geography, and housing justice. Her first book, Carving out the Commons: Tenant Organizing and Housing Cooperatives in Washington, D.C., is out now from the University of Minnesota Press. She has played music in punk and experimental bands since 1991. Her current musical projects are Weed Tree and Sensor Ghost.

*recorded 2/28/2025

Decades before the impeachment of an American president for a similar offense, Angelo Herndon was charged under Georgia law with "attempting to incite insurrection"--a crime punishable by death. In 1932, the eighteen-year-old Black Communist Party organizer was arrested and had his room illegally searched and his radical literature seized. Charged under an old slave insurrection statute, Herndon was convicted by an all-white jury and sentenced to eighteen to twenty years on a chain gang. You Can't Kill a Man Because of the Books He Reads chronicles Herndon's five-year quest for freedom during a time when Blacks, white liberals, and the radical left joined forces to define the nation's commitment to civil rights and civil liberties.

Herndon's champions included the young, Black Harvard Law School-educated attorney Benjamin J. Davis Jr.; the future historian C. Vann Woodward, who joined the interracial Herndon defense committee; the white-shoe New York lawyer Whitney North Seymour, who argued Herndon's appeals; and literary friends Ralph Ellison, Langston Hughes, and Richard Wright. With their support, Herndon won his freedom and reinvented himself as a Harlem literary star until a dramatic fall from grace.

A legal odyssey of Herndon's narrow escape from certain death because of his unpopular political beliefs, You Can't Kill a Man Because of the Books He Reads explores Herndon's journey from Alabama coal miner to Communist Party organizer to Harlem hero and beyond. Brad Snyder tells the stories of the diverse coalition of people who rallied to his cause and who twice appealed his case to the U.S. Supreme Court. They forced the Court to recognize free speech and peaceable assembly as essential rights in a democracy--a landmark decision in 1930s America as well as today.

PURCHASE BOOK HERE: https://politics-prose.com/book/9781324036548?ic_referral=Jh06O-avAS4qI_KUrf-bK_qCERXaNrJLEZi6_qXfRJowMzHX7bNyKar4Z-LnGJcBapBpw5Z6bpZpKJVEo4HftB6a1yNNLr28ZYLJAVDecILiFKVIUU_1rbJkKu_EzLv8B-8C0w

Brad Snyder, author of Democratic Justice, is a professor of constitutional law and twentieth-century American legal history at Georgetown Law. In addition to his legal scholarship, he has written for Politico, Slate, and the Washington Post. He lives in Washington, DC.

Snyder is in conversation with Stephen I. Vladeck. Vladeck is a professor of law at the Georgetown University Law Center, and is a nationally recognized expert on the federal courts; the Supreme Court; national security law; and military justice.

*recorded 2/28/2025

Everything is about to change.

Paige Mahoney is outside the Republic of Scion for the first time in more than a decade-but she has no idea how she got to the free world. Half a year has been wiped from her memory.

Her journey back to the revolution soon takes her to Venice, where the Domino Programme has uncovered evidence of a secret Scion plan. Before Paige can return to London, she must help the network unravel the sinister Operation Ventriloquist, which threatens to bring Europe to its knees in weeks.

And it soon becomes clear that the one person who could recover her memories-Arcturus Mesarthim-might also hold the key to thwarting Scion, allowing the revolution to strike an unprecedented blow . . .

With its intricate worldbuilding, slow burn romance, and "complex, ever evolving, scrappy yet touching" ( NPR) heroine, the Bone Season series shows Samantha Shannon at the height of her considerable powers.

PURCHASE BOOK HERE: https://politics-prose.com/book/9781639733965?ic_referral=e3jUxuq29ta6vO12DDpO1VxWpL8yr8yE8WEfn0-jVYAwM_1n9Eq-FB0BEDAP4lt3BD176B2_ZbcO1-PJwd1eYsEGdlv-Pbo8ooAhcF9xW1xRKsiY4LeqTSfp-F2XRcXJN2U6Ug

Samantha Shannon is the New York Times and Sunday Times bestselling author of The Bone Season and Roots of Chaos series. Her work has been translated into twenty-six languages. She lives in London. samanthashannon.co.uk / @say_shannon

Shannon is in conversation with Sabaa Tahir, a former newspaper editor who grew up in California’s Mojave Desert at her family’s eighteen-room motel. There, she spent her time devouring fantasy novels, listening to thunderous indie rock, and playing guitar and piano badly. Her #1 New York Times bestselling An Ember in the Ashes series has been translated into more than thirty-five languages, and the first book in the series was named one of TIME’s 100 Best Young Adult Books of All Time. Tahir’s most recent novel, All My Rage, won the National Book Award for Young People’s Literature, the Michael L. Printz Award, the Boston Globe-Horn Book Award for Fiction and Poetry, and was an instant New York Times bestseller.

*recorded 2/27/2025