Politics and Prose Presents

Pick-Up - Harkening to the witty and swoon-worthy rom-coms of Christina Lauren and Kate Clayborn, a new enemies-to-lovers romp whisking us from the stress of city life to lush Caribbean beaches. Sasha Rubinstein is not on her game. Parenting with an absent (and objectively douchey) ex has never been easy, but, lately, the judgmental side-eye from people at school pick-up feels extra. It doesn't help that some entitled dad--with his perfect t-shirts and perfectly punchable (yet adorable) face--keeps stealing the last after-school spots and school hoodies out from under her. Ethan Jones is not trying to trip Sasha up... at school or otherwise. In fact, ever since they met (which she promptly forgot), he's been hoping for the exact opposite...or at least to stop thinking about her. When a game-changing job lands them trapped together on an exclusive private island, they resolve to stop sniping at each other and keep things professional. But with tension building between them and the permeating intoxication of island time, temptation blows in on every tropical breeze.

PURCHASE BOOK HERE: https://politics-prose.com/book/9781668061169?ic_referral=7Ax6vYcPaPG-uSqPuJcur-2b4WYLxkLlJq0NeN5ppbowMweDXFeYlAqujlEuTQY2zbJIkLaaQCdT4bd8bxmKxdl-2NBLUKGyn8_x59g0LPq3_cllqNNbkxSJ_7Lw_sFZnLbXzQ

Nora Dahlia is a style writer whose work has appeared in The New York Times, Elle, The Wall Street Journal, Vanity Fair, among others. Nora is also a branded content expert, book doctor, ghostwriter, collaborator, and writing coach. She lives in Brooklyn with her husband, two kids, and enormous cat, Waldo. Pick-Up is her first romance novel.

Rosie, an idealistic and passionate Peruvian American, leaves her Tennessee hometown to pursue her dream of making it in New York as a writer. But her plan is derailed when she ends up in class with her archnemesis and ex-crush, Aiden Huntington--an obnoxious, surly, and gorgeous literary fiction writer who doesn't have much patience for the romance genre or for Rosie.

Not in My Book - Rosie and Aiden regularly go to verbal battle in workshop until their professor reaches her breaking point. She allows them to stay in her class on one condition: they must cowrite a novel that blends their genres.

The reluctant writing duo can't help but put pieces of themselves into their accidentally steamy novel, and their manuscript-in-progress provides an outlet for them to confess their feelings--and explore their attraction toward each other.

When Rosie and Aiden find themselves competing against each other for a potentially career-changing opportunity, the flames of old rivalry reignite, and their once-in-a-lifetime love story is once again at risk of being shelved--unless they can find a way to end the book on their own terms.

PURCHASE BOOK HERE: https://politics-prose.com/book/9781639109753?ic_referral=1RjCs-opMPEbjWBDtOeJzsFhVD7qhJEjsZzpCyUA7vAwM0vuh9YBCPcQHjmkCqnqIaElq9N5WRA0lgqB1BbbxIyzjlG6q6VB7hLmQD3yhRSEpHB0XTZS8Q_-CPieCoxnZdfHnQ

Katie Holt is a New York City resident but a Tennessee native. She studied English with a concentration in creative writing at NYU and fought with every professor to prove that romance novels were worthy of their time. She's a Nora Ephron fanatic, Swiftie, and warm chocolate chip enthusiast. Not in My Book is her first novel.

Dahlia and Holt are in conversation with Taj McCoy, an Oakland-born law grad who is committed to championing stories that include Black and multiracial women of color, plus-size protagonists, Black love, Black joy, and strong senses of sisterhood and familial bonds. Taj started writing as a small child, enjoying her first publications in elementary school. When she's not writing, Taj may be on Twitter boosting other marginalized writers, practicing yoga, sharing recipes, or cooking private supper club meals for close friends.

*recorded 2/14/2025

Taking over her parents' estate-sale business is not the life's work that Emma Lewis bargained for. Yes, she grew up helping them empty people's nests, but nothing prepared her for her biggest and stickiest "get"--the grand, beautiful house of ill repute masquerading as a decidedly beddable B and B. Should Emma turn down potential clients in need of decluttering just because they are shady, escort-y, and proud of it?

No. A girl must make a living.

Around some hairpin turns Lipman ingeniously reveals a straight shot to happiness.

PURCHASE BOOK HERE: https://politics-prose.com/book/9780063322257?ic_referral=WVBdeoZI1o0-ZDZgaespp139mPKOwF6NPxzKZcx0SCEwMyDM_TW4aBPxiaWh35BgECrdxTcTSHn5XEGw5kbW7tEltYqAEXk-8jQGcZd3bd1fMh0YZ2FbYehOL-dOc4IxU-_Mlg

Elinor Lipman is the award-winning author of sixteen books of fiction and nonfiction, including The Inn at Lake Devine, Isabel's Bed, I Can't Complain: (All Too) Personal Essays, On Turpentine Lane, Rachel to the Rescue, and Ms. Demeanor, a finalist for the Thurber Prize for American Humor. Her first novel, Then She Found Me, was adapted into a film directed by and starring Helen Hunt, with Bette Midler, Colin Firth, and Matthew Broderick. Lipman was the 2011-12 Elizabeth Drew Professor of Creative Writing at Smith College and divides her time between Manhattan and the Hudson Valley.

Rich Benjamin's mother, Danielle Fignolé, grew up the eldest in a large family living a comfortable life in Port-au-Prince. Her mother was a schoolteacher, her father a populist hero--a labor leader and politician. The first true champion of the black masses, he eventually became the country's president in 1957. But two weeks after his inauguration, that life was shattered. Soldiers took Danielle's parents at gunpoint and put them on a plane to New York, a coup hatched by the Eisenhower administration. Danielle and her siblings were kidnapped, and ultimately smuggled out of the country.

Growing up, Rich knew little of this. No one in his family spoke of it. He didn't know why his mother struggled with emotional connection, why she was so erratic, so quick to anger. And she, in turn, knew so little about him, about the emotional pain he moved through as a child, the physical agony from his blood disease, while coming to terms with his sexuality at the dawn of the AIDS crisis. For all that they could talk about--books, learning, world events--the deepest parts of themselves remained a mystery to one another, a silence that, the older Rich got, the less he could bear.

It would take Rich years to piece together the turmoil that carried forward from his grandfather, to his mother, to him, and then to bring that story to light. In Talk to Me, he doesn't just paint the portrait of his family, but a bold, pugnacious portrait of America--of the human cost of the country's hostilities abroad, the experience of migrants on these shores, and how the indelible ties of family endure through triumph and loss, from generation to generation.

PURCHASE BOOK HERE: https://politics-prose.com/book/9780593317396?ic_referral=p4XaFfitqSPSnkti-AHIZtpp7NWDCuGW7eBt9YkPyEYwM-OwOJPp6cWt4WO6HfrnROhwOp-SCBxtqPMAs0v2CQaIF1LmbokXP2GqsT51ixeRwgdhCFwLaINrvzy9ojQQvV69ng

Rich Benjamin is a cultural anthropologist and the author of Searching for Whitopia. His writing has appeared in the New Yorker, the New York Times, the Washington Post, the Los Angeles Times, and elsewhere, and he's appeared as a commentator on MSNBC and CNN. His work has received support from the Bellagio Center, Civitella Ranieri Foundation, Columbia Law School, the Cullman Center for Scholars and Writers, the Ford Foundation, Princeton University, the Rockefeller Foundation, the Russell Sage Foundation, and the Harvard-Radcliffe Institute.

Benjamin is in conversation with Edgar Kunz, the author of Fixer (Ecco/HarperCollins, 2023), a New York Times Editors' Choice book, and Tap Out (Ecco/HarperCollins, 2019). He has been a National Endowment for the Arts Fellow, a MacDowell Fellow, and a Wallace Stegner Fellow at Stanford University. Recent poems appear in The New Yorker, The Atlantic, and The Washington Post. He lives in Baltimore where he teaches at Goucher College and in the Newport MFA.

*recorded 2/13/2025

Prudence Wright seems to have it all: a loving husband, Davis; a spacious home in Washington, D.C.; and the former glories of a successful career at McKinsey, which now enables her to dedicate her days to her autistic son, Roland. When she and Davis head out for dinner with one of Davis's new colleagues on a stormy summer evening filled with startling and unwelcome interruptions, Prudence has little reason to think that certain details of her history might arise sometime between cocktails and the appetizer course.

Yet when Davis's colleague turns out to be Matshediso, a man from Prudence's past, she is transported back to the formative months she spent as a law student in South Africa in 1996. As an intern at a Johannesburg law firm, Prudence attended sessions of the Truth and Reconciliation hearings that uncovered the many horrors and human rights abuses of the Apartheid state, and which fundamentally shaped her sense of righteousness and justice. Prudence experienced personal horrors in South Africa as well, long hidden and now at risk of coming to light. When Matshediso finally reveals the real reason behind his sudden reappearance, he will force Prudence to examine her most deeply held beliefs and to excavate inner reserves of resilience and strength.

Lauren Francis-Sharma's previous two novels have established her as a deft chronicler of history and its intersections with flawed humans struggling to find peace in unjust circumstances. With keen insight and gripping tension, Casualties of Truth explosively mines questions of whether we are ever truly able to remove the stains of our past and how we may attempt to reconcile with unquestionable wrongs.

PURCHASE BOOK HERE: https://politics-prose.com/book/9780802163783?ic_referral=IBqfotK1NBgx-6ZpMZedXKWz8kTRvZWqOMEiud7DbLUwM0Kc1mjC56tZ0etkZ2YUWRYmlWATYTGtFiINPhovGBs4Byz9eNnIqZS7lO5lSIsJBAOtWE0gXw-yFUb15xQhQBDPwQ

Lauren Francis-Sharma is the author of Book of the Little Axe, a finalist for the Hurston/Wright Legacy Award, and the critically acclaimed novel 'Til the Well Runs Dry. She was a MacDowell fellow and is the Assistant Director of Bread Loaf Writers' Conference at Middlebury College. She resides near Washington, DC, with her family.

Francis Sharma is in conversation with Kwame Alexander. Alexander is a poet, educator, publisher, Emmy® Award-winning producer, and #1 New York Times bestselling author of 40 books, including This is the Honey, Why Fathers Cry at Night, An American Story, The Door of No Return, Becoming Muhammad Ali (co-authored with James Patterson), Rebound, which was shortlisted for the prestigious UK Carnegie Medal, and The Undefeated, the National Book Award nominee, Newbery Honor, and Caldecott Medal-winning picture book illustrated by Kadir Nelson. His mission is to change the world, one word at a time.

*recorded 2/12/2025

Jennifer Finney Boylan's She's Not There was the first bestselling work written by a transgender American. Since its publication twenty years ago, she has become the go-to person for insight into the impact of gender on our lives, from the food we eat to the dreams we dream, both for ourselves and for our children. But Cleavage is more than a deep dive into gender identity; it's also a look at the difference between coming out as trans in 2000--when many people reacted to Boylan's transition with love--and the present era of blowback and fear.

How does gender affect our sense of self? Our body image? The passage of time? The friends we lose--and keep? Boylan considers her womanhood, reflects on the boys and men who shaped her, and reconceives of herself as a writer, activist, parent, and spouse. With heart-wrenching honesty, she illustrates the feeling of liminality that followed her to adulthood, but demonstrates the redemptive power of love through it all.

With Boylan's trademark humor and poignancy, Cleavage is a sharp, witty, and captivating look at the triumphs and losses of a life lived in two genders. Cleavage provides hope for a future in which we all have the freedom to live joyfully as men, as women, and in the space between us.

PURCHASE BOOK HERE: https://politics-prose.com/book/9781250261885?ic_referral=wriybB3EFVLWTvJUZb5KKxR_EZj2us358wlAjI7eXdQwMxVlA4H32QyaZUmQGkAr_fMMLvn4fateODdrOQKOjHowio8BGHvGyBhesoZn0zbAxaGKKpXYddUnkBOwM4d3VnyURQ

Jennifer Finney Boylan is the author of nineteen books, including Mad Honey, coauthored with Jodi Picoult. Her memoir, She's Not There, was the first bestselling work by a transgender American. Since 2014, she has been the inaugural Anna Quindlen Writer in Residence at Barnard College of Columbia University; she is also on the faculty of the Bread Loaf Writers' Conference of Middlebury College and the Sirenland Writers Conference in Positano, Italy. She is the President of PEN America, and from 2011 to 2018 she was a member of the Board of Directors of GLAAD, including four years as national cochair. In 2022-23 she was a Fellow at the Harvard Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study. She graduated from Wesleyan University and Johns Hopkins, and she holds doctorates honoris causa from Sarah Lawrence College, the New School, and Wesleyan University. For many years she was a contributing opinion writer for the opinion section of the New York Times. Her work has also appeared in the New Yorker, the Washington Post, the Boston Globe, Literary Hub, Down East, and many other publications. She lives in Maine and New York with her wife, Deirdre. They have two children: a daughter, Zai, and a son, Sean.

Finney Boylan is in conversation with Congresswoman Sarah McBride. Congresswoman Sarah McBride proudly represents the greatest state in the nation, and our country’s First State, Delaware, as its sole member of Congress. Sarah grew up in Wilmington and has been serving our state for decades as a public servant and advocate. From 2020-2025, Congresswoman McBride served as State Senator for the First State Senate District. She worked for former Governor Jack Markell and the late Attorney General Beau Biden and served as the national spokesperson for the Human Rights Campaign, the nation’s largest LGBTQ equal rights organization.

*recorded 2/12/2025

Books can seduce you. They can, Sarah Chihaya believes, annihilate, reveal, and provoke you. And anyone incurably obsessed with books understands this kind of unsettling literary encounter. Sarah calls books that have this effect "Life Ruiners".

Her Life Ruiner, Toni Morrison's The Bluest Eye, became a talisman for her in high school when its electrifying treatment of race exposed Sarah's deepest feelings about being Japanese American in a predominantly white suburb of Cleveland. But Sarah had always lived through her books, seeking escape, self-definition, and rules for living. She built her life around reading, wrote criticism, and taught literature at an Ivy League University. Then she was hospitalized for a nervous breakdown, and the world became an unreadable blank page. In the aftermath, she was faced with a question. Could we ever truly rewrite the stories that govern our lives?

Bibliophobia is an alternately searing and darkly humorous story of breakdown and survival told through books. Delving into texts such as Anne of Green Gables, Possession, A Tale for the Time Being, The Last Samurai, Chihaya interrogates her cultural identity, her relationship with depression, and the intoxicating, sometimes painful, ways books push back on those who love them.

PURCHASE BOOK HERE: https://politics-prose.com/book/9780593594728?ic_referral=aZlMb8ysIebzFtvcbDHymh67vJu4LDHpR0SSgUbs2kcwMziuzB4UZ2XzRVPpRjI3HPfwGLF1bQS7Ey_QenzwVoRBAsJuK2MigtQoEuZjOjahmCY2umzDRMcDTT05ZMd8spQxOg

Sarah Chihaya is a book critic, essayist, and editor. Her work has appeared in The New Yorker, The New York Review of Books, The Nation, New York magazine, The Atlantic, and The Yale Review, among other places, and she is the co-author of The Ferrante Letters: An Experiment in Collective Criticism. She has taught at Princeton University, New York University, and UC Berkeley. She is currently a contributing editor at Los Angeles Review of Books and lives in Brooklyn.

Chihaya 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 2/8/2025

When the jolly Italian peasant-turned-cardinal Angelo Giuseppe Roncalli of Venice was elected Pope John XXIII in 1958, change was in the air. The Church, many said, had refused to enter the twentieth century. In response, Pope John launched Vatican II, an "ecumenical council" that summoned hundreds of church leaders to Rome. It marked one of the most progressive turns the Church had taken in centuries: "medicine of mercy," as Pope John called it. Yet not everyone in the Church was prepared to accept this modernization. The lines were drawn--in a battle that continues to rage into the twenty-first century.

In Jesus Wept, Philip Shenon takes us inside the Holy See to reveal its intricacies, hypocrisies, and hidden maneuverings, bringing all the momentous disputes and issues vividly to life: priestly celibacy, birth control, homosexuality, restoring ties with other Christians and Jews, shameful sex abuse crimes, the role of women in the Church.

In his rich portrayals of the popes from John to Francis, Shenon draws on research across four continents, including hundreds of interviews and the exhaustive archival material. He also brings to light other key figures in the Church, such as Cardinal Alfredo Ottaviani, the incredibly powerful, conservative, and staunchly anticommunist director of the Holy Office under Pius XII, who lived proudly by the motto semper idem--"always the same." This is a consummate, vibrant history of the modern Church.

PURCHASE BOOK HERE: https://politics-prose.com/book/9781101946411?ic_referral=YcardjgabyVTxPdnMSV2_TaC92xHe6lI1UBUQHycv34wM6DI1YrLlayoeUwt9KfPcf2ZxV_RZ0BbHw00C7MZq58erfIY8gV8Xgw6brkeMiZB2MwRCRdcVOULvCWwZyzelxdrMQ

Philip Shenon is an award-winning investigative reporter and bestselling author who spent more than twenty years at The New York Times. As a Washington correspondent for the paper, he covered the Pentagon, the Justice Department, the State Department and Congress. As a foreign correspondent, he reported from more than sixty countries and several warzones. He is the author of two New York Times-bestselling books: A Cruel and Shocking Act: The Secret History of the Kennedy Assassination and The Commission: The Uncensored History of the 9/11 Investigation. A native of San Francisco, he now lives in Washington, D.C.

Shenon is in conversation with Neil Lewis. Lewis was a correspondent with the New York Times from 1985 until 2009 when he resigned his full time assignment and became a contract writer for the paper. During that period, his assignments included the Justice Department, the State Department and a variety of other issues including investigative projects and presidential campaigns. In November, 2015 he became the Press Freedom Fellow at the University of Maryland Merrill School of Journalism.

*recorded 2/10/2025

In September of 1890, the academic year begins at the Carlisle School, a military-style boarding school for Indians in Pennsylvania, founded and run by Captain Richard Henry Pratt. Pratt considers himself a champion of Native Americans. His motto, "To save the man, we must kill the Indian," is severely enforced in both classroom and dormitory: Speak only English, forget your own language and customs, learn to be white.

As the young students navigate surviving the school, they begin to hear rumors of a "ghost dance" amongst the tribes of the west--a ceremonial dance aimed at restoring the Native People to power, and running the invaders off their land. As the hope and promise of the ghost dance sweeps across the Great Plains, cynical newspapers seize upon the story to whip up panic among local whites. The US government responds by deploying troops onto lands that had been granted to the Indians. It is an act that seems certain to end in slaughter.

As news of these developments reaches Carlisle, each student, no matter what their tribe, must make a choice: to follow the white man's path, or be true to their own way of life . . .

PURCHASE BOOK HERE: https://politics-prose.com/book/9781685891411?ic_referral=jiTKCXaPsiPa3WVEhl9BnO-He8EOJSVbkbk829vhpFkwM3TdHV8wmwYyk3p2dq5lb_wDDQdBsvl87XkWDSt9sx_TStxb9KKRFB-FDqZiqtxwEc3NBLeY2GWHczeTIRZg25k-bQ

John Sayles is an American independent film director, screenwriter, actor, and novelist. He has twice been nominated for the Academy Award for Best Original Screenplay, for Passion Fish (1992) and Lone Star (1996). He has written eight novels, the most recent being Yellow Earth (2020) and JAMIE MACGILLIVRAY: The Renegade's Journey (2023), which was a New York Times Book Review Editor's Choice.

*recorded 2/9/2025

Tom Rosshirt, like millions of people chasing peace, put his faith in the scripture of our culture: we find peace by becoming who we want to be. So Tom aimed high, worked hard and excelled. But instead of peace, he experienced debilitating anxiety, depression, and discouraging bouts of brain fog that forced him out of his life. He was one of a rising number of people now getting sidelined by conditions doctors can't cure. Many sufferers never find their way back, but Tom got lucky. After another dead-end session with a psychiatrist, Tom heard about self-directed neuroplasticity--a daily practice of retraining the brain based on the discovery that pain and illness often start in the brain's neural circuits, and what the brain learns, the brain can unlearn. After months of using this approach, Tom began to see an alignment between neuroplasticity and the principles of spiritual practice. Reversing the patterns that made him ill did more than make him well; it opened the path from stress to peace--from striving to be who we want to be to becoming who we are.

Brimming with hope, Chasing Peace is for anyone who is sick of chasing peace--but might be willing to read one more book.

PURCHASE BOOK HERE: https://politics-prose.com/book/9780593653289?ic_referral=vayPbJo5GKFwOTsUWlyOhW_msIBoryu1FzP6i7d15iYwM-wZohBl7tKSJ7XRlWb7VLtZGeviqvLAqYn8FiuvR5u6J7VDRuE4DztG5CHvO929nS2PMWGnSo9qsidldhBMRLfArQ

Tom Rosshirt is a co-founder of UNITE, a co-creator of The Dignity Index, and an editor of The Call to Unite. Previously, Tom was a high school teacher, a Capitol Hill press secretary, a White House speechwriter, and a co-founder of West Wing Writers.

Rosshirt is in conversation with Tim Shriver. Shriver is husband, father, educator, best-selling author, Chairman of the Special Olympics, Chairman of UNITE, and CEO of Bigger Picture Media. As Chairman of Special Olympics, he has driven the largest expansion of the organization in its history—growing the movement from one million athletes to over six million athletes in 193 countries around the world. As Chairman of UNITE, a non-profit that also emerged from this exploration, he has helped to pioneer the Dignity Index—a new tool to help Americans disagree without demonizing each other—and catalyze dozens of moonshots that unite Americans in common purpose to tackle our country’s most intractable challenges.

*recorded 2/8/2025

What do artworks look like in extreme cases of collective experience? What signals do artists send when enemies are at the city walls and the rule of law breaks down, or when a tyrant suspends the law to attack from inside? Art in a State of Siege tells the story of three compelling images created in dangerous moments and the people who experienced them--from Philip II of Spain to Carl Schmitt--whose panicked gaze turned artworks into omens.

Acclaimed art historian Joseph Koerner reaches back to the eve of iconoclasm and religious warfare to explore the most elusive painting ever painted. In Hieronymus Bosch's Garden of Delights, enemies are everywhere: Jews and Ottomans at the gates, witches and heretics at home, sins overtaking the mind. Following a paper trail leading from Bosch's time to World War II, Koerner considers a monumental self-portrait painted by Max Beckmann in 1927. Created when Germany was often governed by emergency decree, this image brazenly claimed to decide Europe's future--until the Nazis deemed it to be a threat to the German people. For South African artist William Kentridge, Beckmann exemplified "art in a state of siege." Koerner shows how his work served as beacon during South Africa's racialist apartheid rule and inspired Kentridge's breakthrough animations of drawings being made, erased, and remade.

Spanning half a millennium but urgent today, Art in a State of Siege reveals how, in dire straits, art becomes the currency of last resort.

PURCHASE BOOK HERE: https://politics-prose.com/book/9780691267210?ic_referral=kIoTcDcnp1SlDCJOAsmGbnpLmPqcC5VC4vffEaub49AwM5i19gQyFGtcbUWmv6541HhZOpMV2P9H3XFfA0xiHKZKC1_L34QtBnPJsGsWxVsvbgvlcep7aFqoZUkHr2nAH_iNdg

Joseph Leo Koerner is the Victor S. Thomas Professor of History of Art and Architecture and Professor of Germanic Languages and Literatures, Harvard University, and Senior Fellow of Harvard's Society of Fellows. The author of Bosch and Bruegel: From Enemy Painting to Everyday Life (Princeton) and Caspar David Friedrich and the Subject of Landscape, he has written and presented documentaries for the BBC and wrote, produced, and directed The Burning Child, a feature film on Viennese homemaking in the shadow of the Holocaust.

Sebastian Smee is a Pulitzer Prize-winning art critic at the Washington Post and the author of The Art of Rivalry. Formerly the chief art critic at the Boston Globe and national art critic for the Australian, he has also written for the Daily Telegraph, Guardian, Financial Times, and the Independent, among other publications. He lives in Boston.

*recorded 2/8/2025