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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
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- Today56 min
Raj Panjabi, MD — Safer: A Playbook—Turning Fear into Action and Crisis into Community - with Dr. Vivek Murthy
The essential guide for navigating crisis and uncertainty from the acclaimed physician who led the White House response to the world’s most dangerous health emergencies.When crisis hits — a sudden illness, a global disruption, or a career upheaval — our instinct is to retreat. Yet decades of research prove that our greatest protection isn’t isolation, it’s connection.From high-stakes decisions in the White House Situation Room and hospital emergency room to dramatic shocks of violence and illness his family struggled with in their own living room, Dr. Raj Panjabi has navigated humanity’s most precarious moments. Now, he translates hard-earned wisdom into a step-by-step roadmap. Through gripping storytelling and cutting-edge science, Safer reveals the eight practical "plays" to protect what matters most at home and work.You will learn how to:Navigate Fear and Denial: Use Situation Room insights to take decisive action without falling into paralysis.Cut Through the Noise: Use science to assess your risk and protect those you love amidst the flood of misinformation.Build Trust in Divided Times: Move from isolation to connection and find common ground.Gain Control Despite Chaos: Adapt to change and transform vulnerability into your greatest strength.In an era of uncertainty, you don’t have to live in fear. You just need a better playbook. Safer gives us the tools for emerging from any crisis more connected than ever before.Raj Panjabi, MD, has spent his life preparing for the crises no one sees coming, because he has lived through them. At nine years old, he arrived in America after fleeing civil war in Liberia, an experience that forged an unshakeable conviction: no one should be left behind when the world falls apart. Panjabi later served as White House Senior Director and Special Assistant to the President of the United States at the National Security Council, helping lead the world out of the COVID-19 pandemic and create the nation’s playbook for future public health emergencies.Before joining the National Security Council, he led the U.S. President’s Malaria Initiative and was founding CEO of Last Mile Health, bringing care to communities beyond the reach of any health system. Today, Panjabi is Senior Partner at Flagship Pioneering, where he helps invent and build companies using artificial intelligence and biotechnology to stop disease before it starts. He is also an associate physician and on faculty at Mass General Brigham and Harvard Medical School.Forbes has named him one of America’s 250 greatest living immigrants celebrating the American Dream, and he has also been named one of TIME’s 100 Most Influential People in the World and one of Fortune’s 50 World’s Greatest Leaders. Panjabi lives with his wife, three children, and a legendary collection of stuffed animals.Dr. Panjabi will be in conversation with Dr. Vivek Murthy. Dr. Murthy served as the 19th and 21st Surgeon General of the United States. As Vice Admiral of the U.S. Public Health Service Commissioned Corps, he commanded a uniformed service of 6,000 public health officers. Dr. Murthy’s service as the “Nation’s Doctor” has widened the lens through which we understand the forces shaping our health and well-being, particularly the epidemic of loneliness, mental well-being among youth, parents, and in workplaces, and the impact of social media on youth mental health.PURCHASE:https://politics-prose.com/book/9780063468894?ic_referral=4htgHFSlOwWBMO_RRCXdCYmjiy8FlG9bjxP8VvnDcXswM0kTr7m2DEAwjg7wYQT9j9On4T8IIqtuaiU0_5ahLoC9u2sV_xPr3lvQIPiat5OkHOrg4fvfBOpfH_I6bGcEMQDTups
- Yesterday56 min
Natalia Emanuel and Emma Harrington — In Person: How Working Together Fuels Creativity, Productivity, and Growth - with Brigid Schulte
Finally, the science-backed guide to making the most of in-person work—whether it’s one day in the office or fiveFor the first time in history, millions of workers can do their jobs from anywhere—and the result is the most contentious workplace debate in generations. Employees fight to protect their freedom. CEOs issue return-to-office mandates by gut instinct. Everyone argues, but no one has the data. Until now.Harvard-trained economists Natalia Emanuel and Emma Harrington are leading researchers on remote and in-person work. They've spent years tracking millions of work hours across industries, analyzing Fortune 500 companies, startups, tech companies, and call centers. Their findings? Remote work is good for crossing tasks off a to-do list, but it erodes the quality of our work, stifles creativity, and hurts mental health. When we're together, our brain-to-brain synchrony increases 10x, accelerating creativity, mentorship, and innovation. That’s why Pixar animators, Nobel Prize winners, and Silicon Valley founders have come up with their best ideas face-to-face with one another.Working side-by-side can be a powerful force to supercharge company performance. But many office policies miss this mark, focusing on butts in seats, instead of brains in sync. Emanuel and Harrington offer solutions on how to craft the right policy. Backed with the latest research on the science of work, In Person offers tactical steps to make the most of in-office time, covering:How to calculate the right number of on-site days for your specific organizationThe playbook for preserving employee flexibility without losing the power of being togetherWhy some RTO mandates fail spectacularly–and how to succeedAfter years of confusion, animosity, and conflicting mandates, In Person finally delivers the answers in a clear, evidence-based roadmap for making smarter decisions with your most valuable resource: your people.Emma Harrington and Natalia Emanuel received their PhDs in economics at Harvard, and both completed postdocs at Princeton. Natalia is a research economist, and Emma a professor of economics at the University of Virginia. Their work has been published in top journals including Science, the Quarterly Journal of Economics, and American Economic Journals. Their research has been featured in the BBC, The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, The Economist, The Atlantic’s Good On Paper podcast, and NPR’s PlanetMoney, among others.Harrington and Emanuel are in conversation with Brigid Schulte, an award winning journalist and bestselling author working at the intersection of personal transformation and systems change. Brigid’s first book, Overwhelmed: Work, Love and Play when No One has the Time, about time pressure, gender and leisure, was a New York Times bestseller, named a notable book of the year by the Washington Post and NPR, and won the Virginia Library award for literary nonfiction. Schulte is the author of Over Work: Transforming the Daily Grind in the Quest for a Better Life and the New York Times–bestselling book on time pressure, gender, and modern life, Overwhelmed: Work, Love & Play When No One has the Time. PURCHASE:https://politics-prose.com/book/9798217087235?ic_referral=sA75I3ph2fFopHWUO_5ak9UbgBgHeVE7VEW7p0mS0jkwM-m8fiNHv_vYnHMCQn-GcdaQEA6v4BJ_N3D_EUGTtSQDuPxOwADeB3iuFocZLRhsY0R_P7OKw80DJ1bXo08Pz9CT3Fc
- 2 days ago1h 9m
Eric Liu — Live Like a Citizen: 8 Ways to Change your Mindset and Our Country
A spiritual guide to creating hope and healing in American civic life.We live in a time of fracture and lost faith. But most Americans don’t want this feeling. Most of us, the exhausted majority, want to be invited into something better. That’s the call of Live Like a Citizen: to give everyone the tools to turn away from the resentment and cynicism eroding democratic life. To turn toward a healthier way of living together. Eric Liu, CEO of Citizen University, gives readers eight deep practices for rekindling our belief in democracy—and our own humanity.Each chapter centers on a single verb—an elemental civic way to be and to be with. Through powerful stories of Americans from many backgrounds, we learn anew how to:1. See: Seeing too quickly makes us manipulable by algorithms and exploitable by politicians. We’ve got to retrain our eyes to stop making three-dimensional humans as flat as our screens.2. Listen: Listening can’t solve everything—but nothing can be solved without listening. We’ve forgotten the transformative civic power of making someone feel truly heard.3. Feel: We will learn how to practice civic joy, civic love, and civic grief. To face ourselves so we can face each other. To make pain into a bridge rather than a moat.4. Join: Joining is more than lurking on the sidelines or being “alone together” online. It is finding purpose by committing to others, in person and in place, over and over.5. Fight: We don’t need fewer arguments. We need fewer stupid ones. When we argue to understand rather than to win, we make relationship possible. Fighting like a citizen means fighting like we must live together perpetually.6. Change: You cannot truly change another person’s mind unless you are willing to change your own. And you cannot change it unless you know your own mind and learn the minds of others—and resist being too sure you’re right.7. Imagine: Civic imagination is a powerful force—but it can be used to harm as well as heal. Imagining a shared future in our diverse society is therefore a practice—and an imperative.8. Commit: When we live out these habits of heart and mind, we are creating a new culture of commitment—to one another, and to the purposes of our continuing revolution.Democracy works only if enough of us believe democracy works. Live Like a Citizen will give you reason to believe—and the tools to transform belief into everyday action.Eric Liu is the cofounder and CEO of Citizen University and author of numerous acclaimed books on democracy and American identity. His TED Talks on power and democracy have been viewed over ten million times. Liu served as a White House speechwriter for President Bill Clinton and as the President’s deputy domestic policy adviser. He was later appointed by President Barack Obama to the board of the Corporation for National and Community Service. Liu is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. PURCHASE:https://politics-prose.com/book/9781668008867?ic_referral=S6ptcBpZoHHdEgKaqfhhh276SP3yAe9nrgLcEXW9ZLwwM4AbxAnjnVNeoleTT9blNcAUiHwCS3wHi6NfOUi-HcvuahnFBXnmruYPR0KkHlMNXPym0T4m5FNd3tf_wt_JXJjRARk
- 3 days ago50 min
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
- 4 days ago1h 0m
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
- 5 days ago1h 7m
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
- 6 days ago1h 0m
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
- 1 weeks ago55 min
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 culturePURCHASE:https://politics-prose.com/book/9781588348241?ic_referral=cGnrM8fNx6uLTaP1RidoVg4Q-PD_CyH0uOo7C7LWamwwM0k1j9ojee0vtdRnFs_kieK3CvVNgYk70iWiP5NiztNksQkKlNmSCcy_UPE_Nvnz7xzNSEQ9gnm90ImkrhnXhQ4WLPw
About Politics and Prose Presents
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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