Live at Politics and Prose
281 episodes - English - Latest episode: over 4 years ago - ★★★★ - 110 ratingsReadings and discussions featuring today’s best authors, recorded live at Washington DC’s famous Politics and Prose bookstore.
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Episodes
Rana Foroohar: Live at Politics and Prose
December 06, 2019 17:17 - 48 minutes - 67.1 MBTaking her title from Google’s early mantra, Foroohar, the award-winning CNN global economic analyst and Financial Times columnist and associate editor, chronicles how far Big Tech has fallen from its original vision of free information and digital democracy. Drawing on nearly thirty years of experience reporting on the technology sector, Faroohar traces the evolution of companies such as Google, Facebook, Apple, and Amazon into behemoths that monetize people’s data, spread misinformation and...
Susan Choi: Live at Politics and Prose
November 29, 2019 10:00 - 52 minutes - 71.5 MBChoi’s first novel, The Foreign Student, won the Asian-American Literary Award for fiction; her second, American Woman, was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize, and after that she was awarded the PEN/W.G. Sebald Award for A Person of Interest. Praised for narrative style, inventiveness, and keen insight, Choi in her latest work of fiction takes the novel to new places. At first a seemingly straightforward story of first love, the book follows two students at a performing arts high school who li...
Carmen Maria Machado: Live at Politics and Prose
November 22, 2019 16:30 - 56 minutes - 77.8 MBMachado’s electrifying Her Body and Other Parties—a finalist for the National Book Award—expanded our sense of what a short story could be and do. Her powerful new book draws on a similarly wide range of tones, cultural references, and formal innovations to redefine the memoir. Organizing each chapter around different themes—a haunted house, erotica, the bildungsroman—Machado explores an abusive lesbian relationship from multiple angles. As she chronicles her attraction to a charismatic and v...
Lindy West: Live at Politics and Prose
November 15, 2019 10:00 - 1 hour - 90.1 MBLindy West, New York Times columnist and bestselling author of Shrill, provides a brilliant and incisive look at how patriarchy, intolerance, and misogyny have conquered not just politics, but American culture itself in The Witches Are Coming. With her signature wit and in her uniquely incendiary voice, The Witches Are Coming lays out a grand theory of America that explains why Trump's election was, in many ways, a foregone conclusion. Whether it be the notion overheard since the earliest mom...
Sherrod Brown: Live at Politics and Prose
November 08, 2019 10:00 - 1 hour - 83.3 MBIn this engaging political history, Brown, senior U.S. senator from Ohio, tells the story of twentieth-century progressive politics through the profiles of eight of the senators who occupied his chair—desk 88—before him. In a series of insightful essays, Brown traces the achievements of Hugo Black, Robert F. Kennedy, Al Gore Sr., George McGovern, Herbert Lehman, Glen Taylor, Theodore Francis Green, and William Proxmire, extolling the men’s hard work and dedication, assessing and celebrating t...
Jack Goldsmith: Live at Politics and Prose
November 01, 2019 09:00 - 1 hour - 84 MBThere have been many theories about the fate of Jimmy Hoffa, the longtime president of the International Brotherhood of Teamsters, since he disappeared in 1975. Many involve Charles “Chuckie” O’Brien, Hoffa’s aide and Goldsmith’s stepfather. In this compelling investigation-cum-memoir, Goldsmith, Henry L. Shattuck Professor of Law at Harvard University and author of Terror Presidency and Power and Constraint, recounts how his childhood affection for O’Brien became more complicated as he pursu...
Ronan Farrow: Live at Politics and Prose
October 25, 2019 09:00 - 1 hour - 93.4 MBIn a dramatic account of violence and espionage, Pulitzer Prize-winning investigative reporter Ronan Farrow exposes serial abusers and a cabal of powerful interests hell-bent on covering up the truth, at any cost, in Catch and Kill: Lies, Spies, and a Conspiracy to Protect Predators. In 2017, a routine network television investigation led Ronan Farrow to a story only whispered about: one of Hollywood's most powerful producers was a predator, protected by fear, wealth, and a conspiracy of sil...
Ta-Nehisi Coates: Live at Politics and Prose
October 18, 2019 09:00 - 1 hour - 102 MBThe Water Dancer is a bracingly original vision of the world of slavery, written with the narrative force of a great adventure. Driven by Coates’ bold imagination and striking ability to bring readers deep into the interior lives of his brilliantly rendered characters, this is the story of America's oldest struggle—the struggle to tell the truth—from one of our most exciting thinkers and beautiful writers. Young Hiram Walker was born into bondage—and lost his mother and all memory of her when...
Olga Tokarczuk: Live at Politics and Prose
October 11, 2019 09:00 - 1 hour - 90.7 MBWinner of the 2018 Man Booker International Prize, Flights is narrated by a compulsive traveler eager to analyze experience from the perspective of motion rather than stability, and she reports from a wide range of places, vehicles, and eras. The stories start and stop, interrupt each other, continue, and subtly comment on each other, from a plot involving a Polish tourist in Croatia whose wife and children disappear then mysteriously reappear, to another unfolding at Chopin’s funeral, and a ...
Jacqueline Woodson: Live at Politics and Prose
October 04, 2019 09:00 - 54 minutes - 74.9 MBThe 2018-‘19 National Ambassador for Young People's Literature, Woodson is the award-winning author of dozens of books for children, young adults, and above, including the classic Brown Girl Dreaming. Her new novel, written for adults, and infused with her signature insight and rich, poetic prose, opens in 2001 in Brooklyn. The occasion is Melody’s sixteenth birthday, but it proves bittersweet as the assembled family recalls Melody’s mother—who never reached age sixteen. Charting the course o...
Margaret Atwood: Live at Politics and Prose
September 27, 2019 17:55 - 1 hour - 86.7 MBIn this brilliant sequel to The Handmaid's Tale, acclaimed author Margaret Atwood answers the questions that have tantalized readers for decades with The Testaments. When the van door slammed on Offred's future at the end of The Handmaid's Tale, readers had no way of telling what lay ahead for her—freedom, prison, or death. With The Testaments, the wait is over. Atwood's sequel picks up the story fifteen years after Offred stepped into the unknown, with the explosive testaments of three femal...
Billy Bragg: Live at Politics and Prose
September 20, 2019 18:01 - 56 minutes - 77.9 MBBragg’s extraordinary career as a singer-songwriter and activist has spanned over thirty-five years. In both his music—which includes cover versions of iconic protest songs and socialist anthems—and his politically-inflected lyrics, he’s dedicated himself to effecting social change and to moving others to get involved in grassroots activist causes. His new book is a direct and bracing call to action in which he shows that freedom is composed of three elements: liberty, equality, and accounta...
Caitlin Zaloom: Live at Politics and Prose
September 13, 2019 09:00 - 1 hour - 84.8 MBBased on a series of frank and personal discussions with students and parents across the nation, Zaloom‘s book documents how the struggle to finance college education is transforming middle-class life. An associate professor of social and cultural analysis at New York University, a founding editor of Public Books, and author of Out of the Pits, Zaloom reveals the hidden consequences of student debt, describes the wrenching moral decisions parents make having to choose between jeopardizing the...
Christopher Leonard: Live at Politics and Prose
September 06, 2019 19:19 - 46 minutes - 63.4 MBAwarded the J. Anthony Lukas Work-in-Progress Award, Leonard’s monumental work of investigative reporting charts the five-decade rise of Koch Industries. One of the largest privately held multinationals in the country, and one of the most secretive, Koch owns companies in businesses ranging from energy to chemicals to banking; its CEO, Charles Koch, and his brother, David, are together wealthier than Bill Gates. As Leonard shows, the brothers have consolidated power by practicing a single-min...
Téa Obreht: Live at Politics and Prose
August 30, 2019 22:26 - 50 minutes - 69.4 MBObreht made an unforgettable literary debut with The Tiger’s Wife, an international bestseller that won the 2011 Orange Prize and earned her a slot on The New Yorker’s prestigious “20 Under 40” list. Her eagerly awaited second novel unfolds in the drought-ridden lands of the Arizona Territory in 1893. Drawing on little known historical episodes, Obreht follows the intertwined fates of Nora, an intrepid frontierswoman whose husband and older sons have gone in search of water, and Luke, a forme...
Jia Tolentino: Live at Politics and Prose
August 23, 2019 09:00 - 1 hour - 89 MBTolentino, a staff writer at The New Yorker since 2016, has quickly become one of the most exciting and authoritative critical voices of the millennial generation. Praised for her fierce intelligence, formidable mix of skepticism and optimism, and her lyrical, lucid prose, Tolentino has written on a wide range of social and cultural topics, from music and marriage to female empowerment and race in publishing. Her eagerly awaited book presents nine new essays that see through the hype and cont...
J. Michael Straczynski & Alexandra Fuller: Live at Politics and Prose
August 16, 2019 17:05 - 1 hour - 102 MBStraczynski may be best known as the creator of the Babylon 5 and Sense8 TV shows, but his amazing four-decade career also encompasses screenwriting—Changeling, Thor, and World War Z—writing for several D.C. and Marvel Comics’ series, and creating his own award-winning graphic works. Now in this stunning memoir he tells his own story—perhaps his most fantastic feat yet. Straczynski grew up in the care of adults variously damaged by addiction, mental illness, and poverty. His only refuge from ...
Oyinkan Braithwaite: live at Politics and Prose
August 09, 2019 09:00 - 53 minutes - 73.7 MBNow available in paperback, Braithwaite’s spectacular debut novel is the story of two sisters, Ayoola and Korede, and the secrets that bind them together. As the book opens, Ayoola has just killed her boyfriend. She claims it was self-defense—as it was with the two previous boyfriends she killed. Korede, who works at a hospital, disposes of the body and tells no one. But her silent complicity is tested when Ayoola starts visiting her at work and attracts the attention of a doctor Korede is in...
Emily Nussbaum: Live at Politics and Prose
August 02, 2019 09:00 - 1 hour - 91.2 MBWinner of the 2016 Pulitzer for criticism, Nussbaum writes about TV like the art that it is. Gathered from some fifteen years of work for The New Yorker, New York, and other publications—along with several new pieces—the essays in this collection wholeheartedly celebrate television and guide us to new ways of looking at it. Arguing that TV demands more than just watching, Nussbaum outlines her struggle with “prestige television”—an awakening she traces to Buffy the Vampire Slayer—and questio...
Michael Kellogg: Live at Politics and Prose
July 26, 2019 18:34 - 37 minutes - 51.4 MBKellogg follows his revelatory study of medieval thought, The Wisdom of the Middle Ages, with a similarly wide-ranging and accessible look at the major intellectual and artistic advances during the Renaissance. Starting with Petrarch (1304-1374), the scholar and poet often considered the inventor of humanism, and closing with Shakespeare (1564-1616), Kellogg examines two centuries’ worth of poetry, philosophical treatises, essays, letters, and dramas, tracing how ideas evolved, how they drove...
Asma T. Uddin: Live at Politics and Prose
July 19, 2019 20:05 - 59 minutes - 81.6 MBA religious liberties lawyer, founding editor-in-chief of altmuslimah.com, and executive producer for the docuseries, The Secret Life of Muslims, Uddin has devoted her career to defending people of all faiths. In recent years, however, along with a trend toward secularizing and politicizing faith in general, she has seen an increase in attempts to criminalize Islam. In this timely and important book, Uddin intertwines legal arguments with her own experience, showing how a loss of religious li...
Michael Bennet: Live at Politics and Prose
July 12, 2019 20:24 - 1 hour - 92.6 MBBennet has represented Colorado in the U.S. Senate since 2009, earning a reputation as an independent thinker and a pragmatic centrist. In his closely observed analysis of today’s dysfunctional political landscape, he focuses on five key issues: the process for appointing judges, the recent tax cuts, the demise of the Iran nuclear agreement, the role of big money in politics, and immigration policies, examining each to illustrate exactly how and why partisan gridlock is undermining government...
Carl Hulse: Live at Politics and Prose
July 05, 2019 09:00 - 1 hour - 83.7 MBChief Washington correspondent for The New York Times, Hulse has covered legislative and judicial events for more than three decades. His important new book is a deeply reported account of the struggle over the Supreme Court seat left vacant by Antonin Scalia’s death in February 2016. Drawing on exclusive interviews with key figures including Mitch McConnell, Harry Reid, Chuck Schumer, Trump campaign operatives, court activists, and legal scholars, Hulse traces the polarizing political battle...
Anna Fifield: Live at Politics and Prose
June 28, 2019 09:00 - 1 hour - 89.6 MBFifield, Beijing bureau chief for The Washington Post and former Seoul correspondent for the Financial Times, has visited North Korea a dozen times, becoming one of our most knowledgeable journalists on that cryptic nation. In her new book she draws on her experience and connections to penetrate the layers of myth and propaganda surrounding Kim Jong Un. Granted exclusive access to Kim’s inner circle—including the aunt and uncle who posed as his parents while he was growing up in Switzerland, ...
Raphael Bob-Waksberg: Live at Politics and Prose
June 21, 2019 20:26 - 55 minutes - 75.7 MBIn his debut collection of stories, the creator and executive producer of the hit show BoJack Horseman—named by Thrillist magazine Netflix’s best original show ever—applies his distinctive dark humor to the mysteries of love. Combining romance, whimsy, and sharp cultural commentary, Bob-Waksberg plunges into the world of lonely commuters looking for—and failing to find—connections; follows a couple whose wedding plans founder on their relatives’ argument over how many goats to sacrifice; and...
Ocean Vuong: Live at Politics and Prose
June 14, 2019 09:00 - 59 minutes - 81.8 MBLike the stunning poems of his collection, Night Sky with Exit Wounds, Vuong’s kaleidoscopic first novel speaks from the heart of multi-generational PTSD, charting the fate of a Vietnamese-American family struggling to settle into life in Hartford, Connecticut. Vuong frames his novel as a letter from Little Dog, a young gay writer, to his mother. The only one of his family fluent in English, Little Dog sees language as the key to belonging in America, and his determination to record all he kn...
Eve Ensler: Live at Politics and Prose
June 07, 2019 20:44 - 49 minutes - 67.8 MBEnsler is a Tony-award winning playwright, author, performer, and activist, best-known for The Vagina Monologues, which examined consensual and nonconsensual sex, reproduction, sex work, body image, and other issues from the perspectives of women of various ages, races, and sexualities. Premiering in 1996, this groundbreaking performance piece has been published in nearly fifty languages and performed in more than 140 countries. Its popularity helped Ensler found V-Day, the global movement to...
Simon Tam: Live at Politics and Prose
May 31, 2019 16:59 - 53 minutes - 73.9 MBTam founded his Asian-American dance rock band, The Slants, in 2006. Known for their community activism, the band dedicated itself to overturning stereotypes—a mission that started with the name, which refers not only to individual perspectives and guitar chords, but to Asian ethnic identity. Seeking to reclaim this derogatory term as a badge of pride, Tam applied to register “Slant” as a trademark. When the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office rejected his application, Tam pursued his case to th...
Casey Cep: Live at Politics and Prose
May 24, 2019 09:00 - 1 hour - 83.4 MBAfter writing To Kill a Mockingbird and helping her lifelong friend Truman Capote research In Cold Blood, the late Harper Lee set to work on a true-crime book of her own. Never completed, the work was based on the case of Willie Maxwell, a rural Alabama preacher accused of killing five members of his family in the 1970s. Lee spent a year in Maxwell’s town reporting on the story, which took a further turn when Maxwell was shot at the funeral of his last victim, and his killer, despite many wit...
George Packer: Live at Politics and Prose
May 17, 2019 09:00 - 1 hour - 87 MBPacker’s biography of Richard Holbrooke (1941-2010) is also the story of the United States from the Vietnam War, where Holbrooke gained his first experience as an advisor, to the conflict in Afghanistan, which Holbrooke, by then a seasoned diplomat, sought to end. For both the man and the nation, the period was a series of crises, frustrations, and victories that showcased both strength and heedless self-confidence. Drawing on Holbrooke’s journals and letters, diaries of key government offici...
Robert Caro: Live at Politics and Prose
May 10, 2019 20:33 - 1 hour - 88.9 MBRobert Caro’s collection of personal essays is both a fascinating glimpse behind the scenes of his award-winning books and an engaging self-portrait of sorts by one of our most accomplished biographers. Writing with his signature grace, humor, and vigor, Caro recalls what it was like to interview a man as powerful as Robert Moses and how it felt to confront the vast holdings of the Lyndon B. Johnson Library. He details how he plans and composes his books and recounts how he decided to write n...
Anuradha Bhagwati: Live at Politics and Prose
May 03, 2019 12:50 - 52 minutes - 72.4 MBIt wasn’t until she was in graduate school that Bhagwati, now a writer and activist, rebelled against the expectations her family had imposed on her and left the Ivy League to join the Marines. She deliberately chose the toughest branch of the military, determined to prove herself in new ways. The experience turned out to be harder than she’d expected, and her memoir recounts her battles against racism, misogyny, and abuse of power. When she left the service she vowed to change the system, an...
Preet Bharara: Live at Politics and Prose
April 26, 2019 09:00 - 1 hour - 111 MBIn Doing Justice, one-time federal prosecutor Preet Bharara uses case histories, personal experiences, and his own inviting writing and teaching style to show the thought process we need to best achieve truth and justice in our daily lives and within our society. Bharara has spent much of his life examining our legal system, pushing to make it better, and prosecuting those looking to subvert it; he believes in our system and knows it must be protected, but to do so, we must also acknowledge a...
Stacey Abrams: Live at Politics and Prose
April 19, 2019 16:14 - 49 minutes - 68.5 MBLeadership is hard. Convincing others—and yourself—that you're capable of taking charge and achieving more requires insight and courage. Lead from the Outside: How to Build Your Future and Make Real Change by political leader, entrepreneur, and nonprofit CEO Stacey Abrams is the handbook for outsiders, written with an eye toward the challenges that hinder women, people of color, the working class, members of the LGBTQ+ community, and millennials ready to make change. Abrams uses her hard-won ...
Valerie Jarrett: Live at Politics and Prose
April 12, 2019 22:00 - 58 minutes - 79.8 MBIn Finding My Voice, Valerie Jarrett recounts her work ensuring equality for women and girls, advancing civil rights, reforming our criminal justice system, and improving the lives of working families. From a single mother stagnating in corporate law, to finding her voice in Harold Washington's historic administration, to ultimately becoming one of the most visible and influential African-American women of the twenty-first century, Jarrett shares her forthright, optimistic perspective on the ...
Albert Woodfox: Live at Politics and Prose
April 05, 2019 08:46 - 1 hour - 94.4 MBConvicted of armed robbery in his twenties, Woodfox was sentenced to fifty years in Angola prison. There he learned about the Black Panther’s code of living and commitment to social justice and joined the party. Then in April 1972 he was accused of killing a white guard and, without evidence, put into solitary confinement. For more than forty years, until he was freed in February 2016, he spent 23 hours a day in a 6-foot by 9-foot cell. In this extraordinary memoir, Woodfox, who began his act...
Amy Webb: Live at Politics and Prose
March 29, 2019 09:00 - 1 hour - 83.1 MBOne of our most respected and experienced futurists, Webb argues in her new book that the main danger posed by artificial intelligence is the power it gives the big corporations that control it. Each time we speak to Alexa or click on a link, the data is collected and used by one or more of the big nine: Amazon, Google, Facebook, Tencent, Baidu, Alibaba, Microsoft, IBM, and Apple. The ordinary people who supply the data have no say over how it’s used and little information about the system if...
Elaine Shannon: Live at Politics and Prose
March 22, 2019 09:00 - 57 minutes - 78.9 MBA veteran investigative reporter and author of Desperados, the basis for Michael Mann's NBC miniseries Drug Wars, Shannon has written a riveting account of the career and eventual downfall of Paul Calder LeRoux. A new kind of outlaw, LeRoux used encrypted mobile devices, cloud sharing, and other digital tools to build a global criminal network. This Cartel 4.0 raked in hundreds of millions of dollars by selling arms, drugs, chemicals, and more. But LeRoux met his match with a team of DEA oper...
Doug Jones: Live at Politics and Prose
March 15, 2019 09:00 - 1 hour - 91.3 MBTaking his title from Martin Luther King, Jr.’s statement that "the arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice," Jones chronicles the arduous struggle to punish those responsible for the 1963 bombing of Birmingham’s 16th Street Baptist Church, which killed four girls. Though the FBI strongly suspected four especially radical KKK members, investigators were thwarted by reluctant witnesses, lack of physical evidence, and racial bias and the case was closed. When it was re-op...
Don Winslow: Live at Politics and Prose
March 08, 2019 10:00 - 58 minutes - 80.3 MBWinslow’s crime thrillers have won audiences world-wide, and many—Savages, The Death and Life of Bobby Z, The Force—have been turned into acclaimed films. His latest book joins The Power of the Dog and The Cartel to conclude his award-winning trilogy on the drug trade. Again featuring Art Keller, now in the top ranks of the DEA after a forty-year career, the novel follows the agent from his successful efforts to defeat the Mexican drug kingpin Adán Barrera into an even more dangerous fight ag...
Andrew McCabe: Live at Politics and Prose
March 01, 2019 10:00 - 1 hour - 93.6 MBMcCabe started working at the FBI in 1996 and served in many capacities, from street agent on the Eurasian Organized Crime Task Force to leading the Counterterrorism Division, the National Security Branch, and the Washington Field Office as well as serving as the first director of the High-Value Detainee Interrogation Group. Yet that estimable career came to a sudden end when Trump fired McCabe on March 16, 2018. In this book McCabe refutes Trump’s assertion that the firing was “A great day f...
Pete Buttigieg: Live at Politics and Prose
February 22, 2019 10:00When Buttigieg left a successful business career to return to South Bend, Indiana, his hometown had been declared a “dying city” by Newsweek magazine. Elected mayor in 2011 and re-elected in 2015, Buttigieg, a Harvard-educated Rhodes Scholar and U.S. Navy veteran, was determined to change that. Going directly to the community, he met with residents, reclaimed abandoned houses, confronted gun violence, and attracted high-tech industry. Today South Bend is a shining success, and Buttigieg’s can...
Steve Luxenberg: Live at Politics and Prose
February 15, 2019 16:23 - 48 minutes - 66.1 MBAwarded the 2016 J. Anthony Lukas Work-in-Progress Award, Luxenberg’s second book is a deeply researched account of events leading up to the infamous “separate but equal” Plessy v. Ferguson decision. Announced on May 18, 1896, the decision had a deceptively quiet reception. But as Luxenberg shows, the case went to issues at the heart of the nation’s unresolved image of itself. Focusing on the individuals involved in bringing, arguing, and deciding the case as well as on the broader separatist...
Marlon James: Live at Politics and Prose
February 08, 2019 10:00 - 53 minutes - 73.2 MBDrawing from African history, mythology, and his own rich imagination, Marlon James’ new book, Black Leopard, Red Wolf, is a novel unlike anything that's come before it: a saga of breathtaking adventure that's also an ambitious, involving read. Defying categorization and full of unforgettable characters, it is both surprising and profound as it explores the fundamentals of truth, the limits of power, and our need to understand them both. Author of The New York Times’ bestseller A Brief Histor...
Jason Rezaian: Live at Politics and Prose
February 01, 2019 10:00 - 1 hour - 101 MBIn July 2014, Washington Post Tehran bureau chief Jason Rezaian was arrested by Iranian police and accused of spying for America. Initially, Rezaian thought the whole thing was a terrible misunderstanding, but soon realized that it was much more dire as it became an eighteen-month prison stint with impossibly high diplomatic stakes. In Prisoner, Rezaian writes of his exhausting interrogations and farcical trial, his bond with his Iranian father, and his life-changing decision to move to Tehra...
April Ryan's Race in America panel: Winter 2019
January 25, 2019 10:00 - 1 hour - 160 MBApril Ryan, Washington Bureau chief for American Urban Radio Networks and author of Under Fire, At Mama’s Knee, and The Presidency in Black and White returns for the sixth in an ongoing series of discussions focusing on race in America. As in previous presentations, Ryan will moderate a panel of leading writers and commentators to examine recent and longstanding issues. Panelists include Donna Brazile, Democratic political strategist, TV commentator, and co-author of For Colored Girls Who Ha...
Kamala Harris: Live at Politics and Prose
January 18, 2019 10:00 - 1 hour - 91.8 MBIn her new book, The Truths We Hold, Senator Harris draws on her own career and the work of those who have most inspired her to offer a master class in problem solving, crisis management, and leadership in challenging times. Known for being a voice for the voiceless, Senator Harris will explore the themes of The Truths We Hold and share her vision of our shared struggle, purpose, and values. Sen. Harris is in conversation with Jonathan Capehart, writer for The Washington Post's PostPartisan ...
Daniel H. Pink: Live at Politics and Prose
January 11, 2019 10:00 - 54 minutes - 75 MBNow in paperback, Pink’s fascinating study of timing starts with intriguing and seemingly inexplicable observations: why are prisoners eligible for parole more likely to get a favorable ruling earlier in the day? Why are adolescents who start school before 8 a.m. at an academic disadvantage? Drawing on research from psychology, biology, and economics, Pink shows that timing has strong and predictable effects on people’s thoughts and emotions, and that by understanding these patterns, we can m...
Susan Orlean: Live at Politics and Prose
January 04, 2019 10:00 - 54 minutes - 75.3 MBAt once a mystery, a cultural history, and a deeply personal love letter to reading, Orlean’s compelling new book starts with a disaster. On April 29, 1986, the Los Angeles Public Library went up in flames. The worst library fire in American history, the blaze destroyed more than 400,000 books and damaged another 700,000. It lasted for more than seven hours and temperatures reached 2,000 degrees. Over thirty years later, the cause of the fire is still unknown. Adding her own investigation to ...
2018 Year in Review
December 28, 2018 06:40 - 1 hour - 154 MBNearly a thousand authors visited Politics and Prose last year; here’s a collection of some of our favorite moments from 2018- including Michael Arceneaux, Kristin Hannah, Alexander Chee, Roxane Gay, Gary Trudeau, Lorrie Moore, Olga Tokarczuk, and Adam Hochschild. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices