Politics and Prose Presents

Politics and Prose is a large, independent bookstore uniquely situated in the nation’s capital and serving a broad array of Washington readers, writers, thinkers, teachers, and policy-makers. In addition to our incredible selection of titles, Politics and Prose offers more than 500 public events each year, bringing leading authors across all genres to venues in Washington, DC. Visit us online at www.politics-prose.com.

Politics and Prose Presents is a arts podcast hosted by Unknown Host, with 786 episodes on record and a Required Pod Score of 80.

Unknown Host hosts Politics and Prose Presents, a arts show with 786 episodes published.

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  Politics and Prose Presents

  Rebecca Blumenstein & Diana Kapp — The Last Free Women: A Daring Escape from Afghanistan and Coming of Age in America - with Andrea Mitchell & Mursal Rahim

  Sep 29, 202657 min

  An inside account of the extraordinary effort by The New York Times to evacuate more than 200 Afghans after the fall of Kabul, highlighting four exceptional young women as they forge a new life in America. Kabul; August 15, 2021: The Taliban were coming. The world watched in shock: After the longest war in American history, the Taliban swept into Kabul in a morning. Desperation reigned as the US pulled out. Some clung to the wheels of departing airplanes, only to fall to certain death. Reprisal was near-certain for anyone who had worked with Americans. Marwa, the 21-year-old sister of a Times reporter, was in the vanguard of a fast-modernizing Afghanistan. That morning, she had ironed her pink dress for the first day of medical school. Instead, she had 30 minutes to pack her life into a backpack and flee. Across the world, Rebecca Blumenstein, a top Times editor, and a determined team scrambled to evacuate Kabul bureau’s Afghan employees and families. After a harrowing two-week ordeal, the FIRST WAVE OF refugees landed in Houston, and became part of the largest wave of refugees since the Vietnam War. THE LAST FREE WOMEN is an intimate portrait of the journey of four brave young women as they seek to rebuild their lives. Marwa, Maryam, Mursal and Samira try to make the most of their precious freedom in America. They start over -- learning English, repeating college and forging identities – while back home, the Taliban bans the education of girls past sixth grade and women from leaving their homes alone. “Why is it always about the women?” Mursal despairs. Their gripping account wrestles with women’s rights to basic freedoms and aspirations. It is also a meditation on duty – what we owe to those who work with Americans abroad, those who seek freedom, and the humanity that links us all. Rebecca Blumenstein spent 22 years at THE WALL STREET JOURNAL, rising to Deputy Editor-in-Chief, before joining THE NEW YORK TIMES in 2017 as Deputy Managing Editor. She served as deputy editor, Publisher’s Office, from February 2021 to May 2022, working closely with NEW YORK TIMES Publisher A.G. Sulzberger to support the paper’s rapidly growing journalism operations. In 2023, she moved to NBC, where she is President, Editorial, of NBC News. She was named chair of the board of the Columbia Journalism Review in August 2022, and also serves on the board of the Wallace House/Center for Journalists at The University of Michigan and as a final judge of the Gerald Loeb Awards. She led the team that won the 2007 Pulitzer Prize for international reporting and received the New York Newswomen’s Award in 1993, the Gerald Loeb Award in 2003, and was named to the Aspen Institute’s Henry Crown Fellowship for 2009. More information is available here: https://www.nbcuniversal.com/leadership/rebecca-blumenstein . Diana Kapp is a journalist who writes frequently about the intersection of women and modern culture, and has traveled in Afghanistan to report on the education of girls in the country’s rural northern provinces. Blumenstein & Kapp are joined in conversation with Andrea Mitchell , NBC News’ Chief Washington and Chief Foreign Affairs Correspondent. A veteran political correspondent, Mitchell has covered every presidential campaign since 1980 as well as reporting on national security issues across all NBC News platforms. From 2008 to 2025, Mitchell hosted Andrea Mitchell Reports on MSNBC. Mursal Rahim is a Cornell MPA graduate with a concentration in Human Rights and Social Justice and a bachelor’s degree in law from Afghanistan. She works in Immigration and Refugee Services. Her work focuses on human rights, refugee protection, and advocacy for Afghan women and girls. PURCHASE: https://politics-prose.com/book/9781538779002?ic_referral=HvC14qDJC3jn1oDXLitzajJyXlaiflsDfygkX_7E3cswM9s5ILeaiiVSYSPvDrJEfss68MapyB97Ww5-GKKUtjNosj5tZmqtNbPJinJ4OtaEwIGilxiVLugS8vWH7Iy_zsq9nnc

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  Politics and Prose Presents

  Nikolas Bowie & Daphna Renan — Supremacy: How Rule by the Court Replaced Government by the People -with Sherrilyn Ifill

  Sep 28, 202657 min

  From two acclaimed legal scholars, a new history of the Supreme Court that overturns our most basic assumptions about its role in our democracy, showing how it seized the power it now wields. The Supreme Court claims the extraordinary power to strike down laws passed by Congress—and for more than a century now, it has used this power to undermine democracy. But does the Constitution force us to live under the rule of nine robed lawyers? In this remarkable work, Harvard Law professors Nikolas Bowie and Daphna Renan dismantle “judicial supremacy,” the myth that the Court should have the final say on what the Constitution means. Far from an eternal principle, judicial supremacy gained prominence only in response to Reconstruction, when the Court took it upon itself to safeguard the interests of capital and white supremacy. Bowie and Renan trace how this distorted vision of constitutional authority has remade the country. Along the way, they challenge how liberals understand the Court’s most celebrated rulings, showing that the left has unwittingly subscribed to the very ideology that now threatens it. Recovering a lost constitutional tradition—one forged by abolitionists, labor leaders, and civil rights pioneers— Supremacy calls for power to be returned to where the Constitution put it: Congress. Nikolas Bowie is the Louis D. Brandeis Professor of Law at Harvard Law School and a former clerk to Justice Sonia Sotomayor. Daphna Renan is the Peter B. Munroe and Mary J. Munroe Professor of Law at Harvard Law School and a former clerk to Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg. Bowie and Renan are in conversation with Sherrilyn Ifill. PURCHASE: https://politics-prose.com/book/9781324092803?ic_referral=j9PKF-nkcLDsNrDqkaZVpbl83udGansm7O2T5gU-TtMwM2t3_AGH_cXImEsMxv9AGE61SEpccxGDzIxO_nreiQtXSY0mwwwj-oxjy8TrwMFfUKAlio6WpDMfFFmovo-fx3o-3g8

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  Politics and Prose Presents

  Naomi Klein & Astra Taylor — End Times Fascism: And the Fight for the Living World - with Wajahat Ali

  Sep 25, 20261h 5m

  A scathing investigation into the apocalyptic thinking of the Christian nationalists, tech-bro reactionaries, and populist survivalists who increasingly define the contemporary right—and a recipe for how to fight them. As the planet burns and shared reality melts, a new iteration of the far right is on the march. How can we understand this dangerous new development, and what resources can we draw on to resist it? In their scathing assessment of the contemporary scene, the celebrated activists and authors Naomi Klein and Astra Taylor explore how the religious fundamentalists, Silicon Valley technologists, and ethno-nationalists who make up this apocalyptic alliance share more than one might think: they are united in their belief that some kind of cleansing cataclysm is coming, whether through the manifestation of messianic prophecy, the rampages of a resource- and job-consuming artificial intelligence, or the purported existential threat of immigration and cultural replacement. Rather than avoiding this conflagration, they welcome it, convinced they will be among the saved on the other side. “End Times Fascism” is the ideology of the actors who strive to make the world unlivable and then seek to protect themselves from the fallout—whether by repairing to luxurious private islands, rocketing off to Mars, or bunkering the nation to keep their enemies at bay. The new survivalists have accumulated power, but they are far from impregnable. As Klein and Taylor show via original reporting and analysis, their many internal conflicts and contradictions and their nihilistic inability to envision a shared future, even for their ostensible allies, leave them vulnerable to a new kind of “pro-life” politics—rooted in reverence for our shared existence and regard for the earth we inhabit and must protect. Naomi Klein is an award-winning journalist and documentary filmmaker, and the bestselling author of Doppelganger , No Logo , The Shock Doctrine , and other classic books, which have been translated into thirty-five languages. She is an associate professor of geography and a codirector of the Centre for Climate Justice at the University of British Columbia, and she writes a regular column for The Guardian . Doppelganger won the Women’s Prize for Non-Fiction and was named one of the ten best books of the year by New York , Slate , and Time . Astra Taylor is an award-winning writer, activist, and documentarian, and a co-founder of the Debt Collective. She is the author of The People’s Platform , which won the American Book Award; Democracy May Not Exist, but We’ll Miss It When It’s Gone ; and The Age of Insecurity . Taylor regularly writes for publications including The New Yorker and The New York Times . Taylor toured with the band Neutral Milk Hotel and was the 2023 CBC Massey Lecturer. Klein and Taylor will be in conversation with Wajahat Ali , a tired, middle aged father of 3 kids who drives an Honda Odyssey Minivan and is now a Costco Executive Member. Previously, when he had hair, he was a contributor to The New York Times and CNN, author of the play The Domestic Crusaders, and co-host of "The Stream" on Al Jazeera America. Now, he edits The Left Hook Substack and writes a column for The Progressive. PURCHASE BOOK: https://politics-prose.com/book/9780374621384?ic_referral=YxX1Y1GFc7PPyUOJ1Buiqd8eHDPatQj7oifMIZduci8wM2xxr6jmvKQTIJ8n5b0eQTKkcm90Ufe_bb8X4CJjedilSQeTYKSHkfNoLApp-FHC-UTKMrunl0jjQWsJtGt4xTXJ_hw

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  Politics and Prose Presents

  Rachel Pastan — We're So Lucky to Live Here - with Matthew Klam

  Sep 24, 202657 min

  Grief, the transformative power of art, the meaning of family, and housing affordability are the subjects of this story about a young theater director returning to her childhood home after her mother's unexpected death. Gwen Rivlin, 27, wants to keep the big, shabby house with a turret in which she and her mother both grew up, but everyone tells her it's crazy: too expensive and too suburban for her. Her schemes to stay in the house keep running up against single-family zoning laws and the disapproval of the neighbors. To help the town wrestle with the way it's changing, and to assuage her grief, Gwen stages a production of Chekhov's The Cherry Orchard --a play about a family struggling to hold onto its own real estate--in the turret house, casting friends, coworkers from the local coffee shop, and various community members, including her estranged-best-friend's mother. Through the creation of this beautiful and transitory work of art, Gwen heals old breaches, reevaluates her relationship with her difficult mother, and weaves a new, non-traditional family for herself. Rachel Pastan 's novel, In the Field , based on the life of Nobel Prize-winning geneticist Barbara McClintock, won the inaugural Science + Literature award from the National Book Foundation in 2022. She has also published three other novels: Alena, Lady of the Snakes , and This Side of Married . She is the literary director of Celia Bookshop in Swarthmore, Pennsylvania, and former chair of Swarthmore's housing affordability task force. Pastan is in conversation with Matthew Klam , a recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship, a Robert Bingham/PEN Award, a Whiting Writer’s Award, and a National Endowment of the Arts. His first book, Sam The Cat and Other Stories, a finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book of the Year in the category of first fiction, was selected as a Notable Book of the Year by The New York Times , Esquire Magazine , The Los Angeles Times , The Kansas City Star , and by the Borders for their New Voices series. His second book, Who Is Rich?, was selected as Notable Book of the Year by The New York Times and The Washington Post , was nominated for the Center for Fiction First Novel Prize, and was named a best book of the year by Vogue . His work has been featured in The New Yorker , Harper’s Magazine , Esquire , GQ Magazine , and The New York Times Magazine . He currently teaches at Stony Brook University, and in the New Directions Program in Washington, DC. He’s taught creative writing in many places including Johns Hopkins University, St. Albans School, American University, and Stockholm University in Sweden. PURCHASE: https://politics-prose.com/book/9781953002778?ic_referral=SCJvu8PiePi1gGmh-Ft9IdrXiktWl1XXkLtNcKUZR50wMzxDTeyZ_KMPwZQx4DGa2KeQueCuG7Dr7_boT82xvVMVL95GZ7IdZNcaTxwECphXQfECOtJruAvvHzMOb-lMIUA3wi0

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  Politics and Prose Presents

  Allison Aubrey — Your Turn: How to Create a Midlife You Love - with Rachel Martin

  Sep 23, 20261h 2m

  Not long ago, celebrated journalist Allison Aubrey was having breakfast with her youngest child, who suddenly turned to her and said: Stop looking at me . In that moment, as her daughter signaled a need for independence, Aubrey felt a sting, like she’d been fired. She reminded herself: teenager, individuation. It’s her job to separate. But…ouch! That moment was a microcosm of what felt like a crisis of both identity and purpose. Many women come upon such moments of bewilderment at midlife: Beyond being a mother, beyond work, who am I? After years of striving, how do we broaden our horizons past parenting and a paycheck? What else is out there, now that the badges of achievement have started to feel less important? Aubrey had watched colleagues retire, leaving behind the frenetic pace and excitement of work life, only to flail from a lack of purpose and connection. If the smartest people she knew were struggling, who was thriving? Who was getting it right? To find the answers, she took a sabbatical and set out on a curiosity tour. She tuned her searchlight toward people oozing with energy and adventure. Deep within, she feared she wouldn’t find them, or that she would be disappointed. Maybe the best years are behind us? What she discovered “changed my life,” Aubrey says. The result is her first book, Your Turn: How to Create a Midlife You Love , which answers the question What’s next? with an electrifying message and a winning and deeply practical road map to reimagine your life. Aubrey presents a captivating collection of women, ages 45 to 105, who centered creativity, connection, and joy showing how it's possible to find meaning and momentum in midlife. She takes what she’s learned, from scores of fascinating women she met both on this journey and in her decades of reporting as a journalist, to give readers a playbook for what could be next. She weaves together incredibly powerful tools of rediscovery to help you reignite your passions and hit your stride in midlife and beyond. She curates all the best tools to help readers answer a key question: Who am I now? She walks us through strategies to excavate our passions and rediscover what lights us up. She cuts through the clutter of health and self-improvement advice and offers readers indispensable, evidence-backed strategies to thrive. A kind of What Color Is Your Parachute? for middle age, this book provides us surprisingly simple yet specific steps we can take now to make the most of our third turns. Aubrey combines the rigor her audiences have come to expect with the attunement, curiosity, and sense of service that have made so many of her health stories go viral. This book is for everyone seeking meaning and momentum. It is the new blueprint for your midlife reawakening, with an empowering, essential message for women: the best time of your life starts now. Allison Aubrey is an award-winning science and health correspondent for NPR and a contributor to CBS Sunday Morning . Her stories can be heard on Morning Edition and All Things Considered . She is a founding host of Life Kit and the creator of the How to Thrive as You Age project. Aubrey is the winner of two James Beard Broadcast Media Awards, a National Press Club award for consumer reporting, and a New York Press Club Award for Excellence in Journalism. Aubrey will be joined in conversation with NPR's Rachel Martin, the co-creator and host of Wild Card, an interview game show about life's biggest questions. She invites notable guests to play a card game that lets them open up about the memories, insights, and beliefs that have shaped their lives. PURCHASE BOOK: https://politics-prose.com/book/9781668207253?ic_referral=Vb0ycifFALyXk99c-7kdvo4U-JzO5Fo8zRISKJw3IY4wMxusJl8wKdV8-dA_YpK6TKE8VxonUnVpvC1ckeiecapHS1V8ZkubLx7FhReOWeSTWu0jEqACRnvg880rYfddjpvhKVI

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