Politics and Prose Presents

Politics and Prose
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Calling all book lovers: experience our renowned author talks in podcast form. Politics and Prose Presents allows you to visit our legendary independent bookstore from anywhere in the world. Listen to top authors and journalists discuss their latest books- ranging from topics like biography, politics, science, poetry, fiction, and everything in between. Make sure to like and Subscribe and visit us at www.politics-prose.com

  1. 19h ago

    Emily Yahr — Taylor Swift: The Debut Years - with Chris Richards

    Meet Taylor, 2003. She's a teen who came to Nashville with blisters on her fingers from learning to play a 12-string guitar. In every room she enters, she’s the youngest person (by decades) and often the only woman. And if anyone asked if she could see herself becoming the biggest superstar on the planet, her answer probably would have been yes.Writing alongside industry veterans after school, Taylor Swift’s songwriting ability set her apart. But her origins are more complex than a teen tapping into a new generation of country music fans. It’s a story of taking risks, like walking away from powerhouse label RCA to strike out with an unknown, unfunded new label, and of trusting her instincts when no one else did.Washington Post reporter Emily Yahr pulls back the curtain on the country music industry—from executives who said yes to Taylor (and those who regret saying no), to collaborators like Scott Borchetta, Nathan Chapman, and Liz Rose, to Nashville itself. Intimate and immersive, Yahr takes us to iconic locations like Music Row and The Bluebird Cafe, as well as to Hendersonville High and the Swifts’ own lakefront house.Taylor Swift: The Debut Years tells the definitive origin story of today’s biggest star, with never-before-published interviews. Taylor’s decade in Nashville shaped her as a musician, and ultimately changed country music itself long after she left the genre. Emily Yahr is an award-winning pop culture reporter in the Style section at The Washington Post, where she writes about TV, celebrities, music and movies. She is known for her coverage of country music and her coverage of Taylor Swift. Her first book is Taylor Swift: The Debut Years, a deep dive into Taylor Swift’s first 10 years in Nashville as a country music star. Yahr lives in Washington, DC. Yahr is in conversation with Chris Richards, a writer and critic living in Silver Spring, Maryland. He is the former pop music critic for The Washington Post where he shared a cubicle with Emily Yahr for many happy years. His work has recently appeared in The Washington Sun, The Guardian, POW Magazine, The Times Literary Supplement, and most frequently in his music newsletter The Future is Ours to Make. PURCHASE: https://politics-prose.com/book/9781250379252?ic_referral=Bbj4A2I4OgkdAXZUqmUuoMuISlD7PdhK6nl0omd9ENcwM6XJhYxmZR_Ekx9edH-CkPjvWxUSfSgpgvRbadphHocf0PfUJBmKA9wA7kKJNTjp_5iEYeiubBFrzqYrwXivv3KuD1Q

  2. 1d ago

    JS Tan & Clarissa Redwine — Against Tech Oligarchy: Worker Resistance in the World's Most Powerful Industry - with Dave Karpf

    As tech bosses fall in line with fascism, tech workers are fighting back. This is the rousing inside story of their movement—and how it spawned the right-wing, anti-worker backlash now reshaping the industry.After Donald Trump’s election in 2016, the tech industry sprang into action to oppose his right-wing agenda, with workers staging walkouts against ICE contracts and CEOs joining mass mobilizations against the so-called Muslim ban. But it wasn’t long before the tech bosses started to fall in line with the new administration. Using the autonomy afforded to them by the industry’s progressive and mission-driven culture, tens of thousands of tech workers began speaking out against their own executives. This burgeoning resistance included organizing against military contracts, walkouts to protest sexism, agitation about tech’s role in the climate crisis, and even a wave of union drives. By the early 2020s, tech workers had sparked an exciting movement that seemed to hold the potential to check the industry’s rapid growth and reactionary drift.But as their struggle grew, so did the employers’ backlash. A new class consciousness took root among the billionaire owners. Hellbent on stamping out any and all dissent, tech executives embraced Trumpism, fired organizers, and began lashing out against the “woke” ideology they blamed for turning their once loyal employees against them.Against Tech Oligarchy provides a gripping account of this inspiring movement’s development and offers a balance sheet of its successes and failures that will prove crucial for anyone looking to challenge right-wing billionaires anywhere. JS Tan is getting his PhD at MIT and formerly worked in tech. His work has been featured in The New York Times, MIT Technology Review, Dissent, Jacobin, Foreign Policy, The Baffler, and The Guardian, among other outlets. Clarissa Redwine helped organize the Kickstarter union and cofounded the tech organizing conference Circuit Breakers. Her organizing work has been featured in The New York Times, the BBC, The Guardian, The Verge, TechCrunch, and elsewhere. Moderating this event is Dave Karpf, an Associate Professor in the School of Media and Public Affairs at George Washington University and author of The MoveOn Effect: The Unexpected Transformation of American Political Advocacy. His research explores the internet’s impact on political associations —  both in the formation of novel organizational structures seen in MoveOn and DailyKos, and also tracing implications for more traditional advocacy organizations.  PURCHASE: https://politics-prose.com/book/9798888908570?ic_referral=QNA8EpzQ7WrKILCujV_8rJvDpJuKQ9dmrRg-Ft0YmZ4wM21SKDmCMgdZvDYvOzpz0fjNNEI8LRwwBllYXP97ACiJ5Bq2CVOfkBt_sZmcAJX1aNyF2xzW_lz_ob2vMS_7IjuxVhs

  3. 2d ago

    Jason Horowitz — The Italian Job: A Memoir of an American Reporter in Rome - with Maureen Dowd

    From Venetian canals to Vatican conclaves, New York Times correspondent Jason Horowitz takes you on a tour of the real Italy.Italy’s deep history, stunning landscapes and glorious food have uniquely captured our imagination. In The Italian Job, Jason Horowitz, a longtime Rome bureau chief for The New York Times, tells the story of how he too fell under that Tuscan-sun enchantment before ultimately discovering a more fascinating place in the country's long shadows. He shows us an Italy conducting experiments in populist politics, confronting global challenges like immigration, climate change and an aging population.In telling this story, Horowitz introduces us to an extraordinary range of characters. He flies with popes and drinks Spritzes with prime ministers, talks beauty with top fashion designers in Milan, ponders the big questions with cardinals in Rome, and gets his feet wet in the Venice lagoon with engineers trying to save the sinking city. Throughout, Italy’s streets, layered with history, and its cafés, vibrating with conversation, are full of lessons. So is his life at home, where his Italian wife and their two children offer an even more intimate, concentrated and rollicking view of Italian life. As years pass and the world turns upside down, Italy, more than a vacation destination or land of the past, reveals itself as a vivid lens through which to understand our present and future. Jason Horowitz is a senior European correspondent for The New York Times who worked for nearly a decade as the paper’s Rome bureau chief, covering Italy, the Vatican, and the region’s culture and politics. He was part of the team that was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in international reporting. He got his start in journalism in Rome, where he met his wife as a young reporter, and for more than a quarter century maintained a connection to Italy, both personally and politically. Prior to joining The New York Times in 2013, Jason was the roving political features and profiles writer at The Washington Post, and he has written for The New Yorker, GQ, Vogue, Observer, and other publications. He has two children. Horowitz is in conversation with Maureen Dowd, a Pulitzer Prize-winning columnist for the New York Times and author of Notorious. She is known for her sharp and incisive commentary on politics and culture. She is the author of three additional bestselling books: Bushworld, Are Men Necessary?, and The Year of Voting Dangerously. She lives in Washington, DC. PURCHASE: https://politics-prose.com/book/9781250363350?ic_referral=Q8ff-JALaqHf-ExtEvOUjTHedtPYNVVDgPS4a_PnRnUwM69WtLVZhJoY0y3ZBtlc9XeHyDlsKa5evA7mPve0iCmvojadWuz9dU0DYq_F6AgvLbJE2hAtKXyZd0h-1HuhOiDyDF8

  4. 3d ago

    Emily Ogden — Darkness Becomes Bright: On the Brief Life and Immortal Art of Edgar Allan Poe -With Leon Wieseltier

    A fascinating and intimate inquiry into the shadowy life and horrifyingly compelling work of Edgar Allan Poe and why we are drawn to darkness in artSince Edgar Allan Poe’s mysterious death in 1849, his stories and poems have captivated millions of readers around the world. Two centuries later, why do we continue to descend into the darkness of his imagination—and of the genres, from horror to crime, that he pioneered?In this spellbinding and singular book, Guggenheim Fellow and Whiting grant recipient Emily Ogden plumbs the darkness within Poe and enters it alongside him. She interweaves stories from his mysterious and tragic life—from his strange disappearances and tortured romances to his nearly fatal use of opium—with those of his most famous readers and translators, including poet Charles Baudelaire, writer Julio Cortázar, and psychoanalyst Marie Bonaparte, a descendant of Napoleon and a patient of Sigmund Freud.Tracing their passionate attachments to Poe—and Ogden’s own, unexpectedly sparked when she taught an introductory Poe course at the University of Virginia, where Poe himself was once a student—Darkness Becomes Bright makes a different case for literature from the one we most often hear. This exquisite volume shows how Poe’s vision and its echoes across the generations allow us to make peace with our own flawed humanity. Emily Ogden is the author of On Not Knowing: How to Love and Other Essays and Credulity: A Cultural History of US Mesmerism. The recipient of a Guggenheim fellowship, a Whiting Creative Nonfiction Grant, and a Mellon Fellowship in the Columbia Society of Fellows, she is a professor of English at the University of Virginia. Emily is in conversation with Leon Wieseltier, the editor of Liberties. The former literary editor of The New Republic, Wieseltier’s essays on culture, religion, and history have been published in many international journals and magazines. In addition, his books include Kaddish and Against Identity, and he has published many translations of Hebrew poetry into English. In 2013 he won the prestigious Dan David Prize for outstanding achievement in the humanities. PURCHASE: https://politics-prose.com/book/9780593832509?ic_referral=U-tfvnSx9jc1zPGPFiLVqUVqmVmI8WS6ea-hF3h5HMwwM_-e8BTlsQ-6ft0F52nsak6uo0POWbyba2U4Ux5Z-gXQ5KklxFk_FsnAJ86vVJW5NmWHUFMIzhLV4D2G8x0v8Eo6zA4

  5. 4d ago

    Routes to a Nation: The Post Office in the Colonies and Early United States - A panel with Daniel A. Piazza, Lynn Heidelbaugh & Alison R. Bazylinski - moderated by Susan N. Smith

    This richly illustrated volume evokes the early history of the US postal system with 130 new full-color images of artifacts and historical documents from the Smithsonian's National Postal MuseumTravel back to the postal system’s humble origins in colonial America with Routes to a Nation, which traces the development of the post from trans-Atlantic communication through the Revolutionary War and follows its growth as the nation expanded through the 18th and early 19th centuries. The story of the network's early days emerges from the 130 all-new high-quality photographs of letters, covers, seals, newspapers, stamps, and other artifacts, including many rarely seen archival images from the National Postal Museum's collections.From colonists resisting a postal network to the taxation debates of the early republic, the fledgling postal service was often entangled with its era’s hot-button political issues. This book illuminates the postal system’s role in the larger process of nation-building, as well as its impacts on the lives of the ordinary people who sent, received, and delivered the mail that fostered communication, facilitated trade, and connected communities. Mail carriers who completed the first postal routes across treacherous terrainFolded letters that offer first-hand accounts of 18th century lifeBen Franklin’s tumultuous decades as colonial deputy postmaster general, marked by administrative reform and political conflictMail that helped keep the patriot's military informed during the Revolutionary WarPolitics of the post in the early republic: freedom of expression in newspapers, debates in financing expansion, and handling diplomatic channelsRoutes to a Nation explores the personalities, controversies, and planning that shaped the continent-spanning postal system that has grown to provide service to more than 169 million addresses across every state, city, and town in the United States today. The SMITHSONIAN'S NATIONAL POSTAL MUSEUM is located in the historic City Post Office Building, which was constructed in 1914 and served as the Washington, DC, post office from 1914 through 1986. It showcases the largest and most comprehensive collection of stamps and philatelic material in the world. DANIEL A. PIAZZA is the Chief Curator of Philately. LYNN HEIDELBAUGH is a curator specializing in the history of postal service in the U.S. ALISON R. BAZYLINSKI is a curator specializing in U.S. cultural history and material culture. SUSAN N. SMITH is the Museum's Winton M. Blount Research Chair.   This panel will be moderated by SUSAN N. SMITH, the Winton M. Blount Research Chair at the Smithsonian’s National Postal Museum and editor of Routes to a Nation: The Post Office in the Colonies and Early United States. Authors, also from the National Postal Museum, joining the panel are: DANIEL A. PIAZZA is the Chief Curator of Philately.  LYNN HEIDELBAUGH is a curator specializing in the history of postal service in the U.S.  ALISON R. BAZYLINSKI is a curator specializing in U.S. cultural history and material culture PURCHASE: https://politics-prose.com/book/9781588348241?ic_referral=cGnrM8fNx6uLTaP1RidoVg4Q-PD_CyH0uOo7C7LWamwwM0k1j9ojee0vtdRnFs_kieK3CvVNgYk70iWiP5NiztNksQkKlNmSCcy_UPE_Nvnz7xzNSEQ9gnm90ImkrhnXhQ4WLPw

  6. 5d ago

    Brian D. Goldstein — Max Bond: The Life and Work of the People's Architect - with Steven Nelson

    The first biography of a preeminent postwar architect who championed the cause of freedom through architecture and transformed Black history and modernism J. Max Bond Jr. (1935-2009) was a civil rights activist, educator, and architect who shaped such iconic structures as the King Center for Nonviolent Social Change in Atlanta, the Smithsonian's National Museum of African American History and Culture in Washington, DC, and the 9/11 Memorial & Museum in Manhattan. Driven by the concerns of the civil rights movement, he insisted on a practice centered on deep social engagement during years when his profession became preoccupied with celebrity and spectacle. Harvard educated and son of an eminent African American family, Bond designed housing, cultural institutions, community centers, and campuses amid an era of sweeping changes in architecture, urbanism, and American culture. He expressed an architectural vision that was democratic and inclusive, international in orientation, and celebratory of cities and their diverse residents. Yet his work has often been overlooked. Award-winning historian Brian Goldstein renders it visible. Beautifully illustrated, Max Bond is the definitive biography of one of the most important architects of our time, whose aspiration toward an architecture by and for the people was as urgent in his day as it remains in our own. Brian D. Goldstein is associate professor of architectural history in the Department of Art and Art History at Swarthmore College. He is the author of The Roots of Urban Renaissance: Gentrification and the Struggle over Harlem (Princeton). Goldstein is joined in conversation with Steven Nelson, the inaugural Executive Director of the Sam Gilliam Foundation. Professor emeritus of art history and African American Studies at the University of California, Los Angeles and former dean of the Center for Advanced Study in the Visual Arts at the National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC, he has published widely on the arts, architecture, and urbanism of Africa and its diasporas and on queer studies. Nelson has presented the Richard D. Cohen Lectures on African and African American Art at Harvard University and has held visiting appointments at the Universidad de los Andes in Bogotá and the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales in Paris. While at UCLA, he also served as director of the African Studies Center. Both at UCLA and the National Gallery, he advanced diversity, equity, access, and inclusion and contributed to institutional strategic planning. Nelson is a member of Boards of Trustees of the Kress Foundation, the Bard Graduate Center, and Educare DC. He is a member of the Society of Architectural Historian’s 2021 as well as the Association for Art History’s 2022 Class of Fellows. Nelson earned a BA in studio art from Yale University and an AM and a PhD in art history from Harvard University. PURCHASE: https://politics-prose.com/book/9780691220666?ic_referral=Psk94eguoYSL90aYmDdmZjN72ikS8EK3tpUzJYd33H0wM0edHFUVwSw1WABomprirmafJoIkibRUylH19XSIQjxS9J9PSd5znMD4_Z9IrUPy8OGMCmi1TKNyhSWVf4tFH1Y-Buo

  7. 6d ago

    Barbara Kingsolver — Partita

    Livia Cable has made her peace with her marriage and modest livelihood in the farm country where she grew up, until a shocking phone call from an old lover shakes her to the core. Decades earlier, this man knew her as Livia Bohusz, a music conservatory student estranged from her home and family, uncertain of anything except her passion for music and promise as an extraordinary pianist. His request, now, to see her again stirs up ghosts she’s kept at bay for a lifetime. Shifting between past and present, Livia’s decision to meet or reject the reunion means confronting step by step, in memories framed as musical dances, the experiences of childhood loss, abandonment, self-immolating passion, and perilous attachment to a man who broke her belief in love and ruptured the course of her life. With razor-sharp acuity and deep affection, Pulitzer Prize winner Barbara Kingsolver’s unforgettable new novel reflects on class barriers, the risks of ambition, and the timeless, life-changing power of art. Barbara Kingsolver is the author of ten bestselling works of fiction, including the novels Unsheltered, The Bean Trees, and The Poisonwood Bible, as well as books of poetry, essays, creative nonfiction, and Coyote’s Wild Home, a children’s book co-authored with Lily Kingsolver. She also collaborated with family members on the influential Animal, Vegetable, Miracle: A Year of Food Life. Kingsolver’s work has been translated into more than thirty languages and has earned a devoted readership at home and abroad. She is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters, and has received numerous awards and honors including the 2023 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction for her novel, Demon Copperhead, the National Humanities Medal, and most recently, the National Book Foundation's Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters. She lives with her husband on a farm in southern Appalachia. PURCHASE: https://politics-prose.com/book/9780063577541?ic_referral=1Pxrngk4se0goDPeFNNZkTzCu5H1q7-dDyRIKmRd2qwwMwFrkFpdiDU_e-QrpJie-kRylBsOaJ0ueszVShP83lHzFTDjkvwWV2HcHD2mNauPpWqEX1RMge0sZ455iabejoSrvSQ

  8. Oct 28

    Richard Kurin — History by a Hair: Thomas Jefferson, Sally Hemings & Solving a 200-Year-Old Mystery - with Steve Inskeep

    The definitive account of how a discarded strand of hair found in Thomas Jefferson’s Bible led to a sweeping, multi-year genomic investigation, drawing on technological advances in DNA to finally resolve a 200-year national controversy.“Written with the gravitas of history and the pace of a thriller, Richard Kurin’s landmark account is vital and compelling.”—Jon Meacham, Pulitzer Prize–winning author of Thomas Jefferson: The Art of PowerIn 2011, staff at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of American History discovered what appeared to be a hair—light red, possibly human—pressed between the pages of the Thomas Jefferson Bible. That hair sparked an unprecedented scientific quest: determining if modern genomics could recover Jefferson’s DNA and finally resolve the most divisive and enduring question surrounding his life—the paternity of the children of Sally Hemings, one of hundreds of African Americans enslaved by Thomas Jefferson.For over two centuries, the Jefferson–Hemings controversy has shaped American debates about race, power, slavery, and the mythology of the Founding Fathers. Historians have argued fiercely. Descendants have lived with uncertainty. DNA technology in the 1990s brought us closer, but not all the way; the evidence remained incomplete. Until now. In this riveting narrative—part scientific detective story, part historical epic—Richard Kurin, distinguished scholar and museum official, leads readers through the fifteen-year-long genomic investigation conducted with leading DNA scientists, archaeologists, genealogists, forensic experts, and Jefferson and Hemings’ descendants across the country.The result is the first conclusive, scientifically validated answer to a question that has reverberated since the eighteenth century—an answer that settles the historical record, deepens our understanding of Jefferson, honors generations of family oral history, and asks America to confront the full complexity of its origins. Richard Kurin is the Smithsonian Institution’s Distinguished Scholar and Ambassador-at-Large and previously served as Under Secretary overseeing all museums and scientific centers. An author of several popular books on American history and Fellow of the American Academy of Arts & Sciences, Kurin has led major national cultural initiatives and produced award-winning public history. Kurin is in conversation with Steve Inskeep. Inskeep is a cohost of Morning Edition, the most widely heard radio program in the United States, and of NPR’s Up First, one of the nation’s most popular podcasts. His reporting has taken him across the United States, the Middle East, Latin America, Africa, Pakistan, and China. His search for the full story behind the news has led him to history; he is the author of Instant City, Jacksonland, and Imperfect Union, and now Differ We Must. PURCHASE: https://politics-prose.com/book/9798217088508?ic_referral=794ycoLUGLq6wWO4PAo81qUtxKpplmwrtSEig1NimhQwM_sWRWBn6T_3IrOo3lKAdz4a8fvGYuwR-XBGRtYPRImkj9TVWYILBjIqIkSW9c8xiuc8hiuEW1pNtBhZbocXe70Y5wA

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About

Calling all book lovers: experience our renowned author talks in podcast form. Politics and Prose Presents allows you to visit our legendary independent bookstore from anywhere in the world. Listen to top authors and journalists discuss their latest books- ranging from topics like biography, politics, science, poetry, fiction, and everything in between. Make sure to like and Subscribe and visit us at www.politics-prose.com

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  • Creator
    Politics and Prose
  • Years Active
    2026
  • Episodes
    837
  • Rating
    Clean
  • Copyright
    © Politics and Prose
  • Show Website
    Politics and Prose Presents

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