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
Year in Review 2017: Live at Politics and Prose
December 29, 2017 08:27 - 1 hourThis episode features seven authors, who visited Politics and Prose this year and were not featured on a previous episode. First, Bob Schieffer tells a story about where he was the day President Kennedy was shot. Then, Jacqueline Woodson reads from her memoir "Brown Girl Dreaming". Angie Thomas discusses her inspiration for her debut young adult novel "The Hate U Give". Next, comedian John Hodgman shares his thoughts on white privilege, and Patricia Lockwood reads from her irreverent Cathol...
Dar Williams: Live at Politics and Prose
December 22, 2017 10:00 - 45 minutesWilliams has recorded nine albums, most recently Emerald, and her tours have taken her to small towns across the country. Deliberately avoiding stadiums, Williams plays in smaller venues and cultivates a direct, personal rapport with audiences. Williams’s deep affection for the communities she’s visited comes through in her book, which spotlights the decline of small-town America in the post-industrial, corporate age. Williams is as well known for her activism on environmental and social just...
Deb Perelman: Live at Politics and Prose
December 15, 2017 10:00 - 59 minutesPerelman’s The Smitten Kitchen Cookbookwon the IACP Julia Child First Book Award and was named one of Cooking Light magazine’s Top 100 Cookbooks of the Last 25 Years. In her second book, the creator of smittenkitchen.com, Time magazine’s Best Blog of the Year and a Saveur Best Cooking Blog, presents nearly one hundred new recipes, along with variations on a few old favorites. Beautifully illustrated with Perelman’s full-color photos, the dishes range from breakfast treats to dessert and incl...
Carmen Maria Machado: Live at Politics and Prose
December 08, 2017 10:00 - 46 minutesMachado’s electrifying stories destabilize the familiar truths of psychological realism with jolts of a surreality that’s usually more at home in speculative fiction or outright horror. Writing in the vein of Angela Carter and Clarice Lispector, Machado focuses on women and the unequal power structure that affects all facets of their lives, especially their relation to their own bodies. In one story, she tracks a mysterious epidemic that causes women to evaporate. In another a woman recoverin...
Reza Aslan: Live at Politics and Prose
December 01, 2017 10:00 - 1 hourReza Aslan is an acclaimed religious scholar, the host of the CNN series Believer, and the author of books including Zealot, Beyond Fundamentalism, and No God but God. In his new book, Aslan focuses on the notion of a humanized god and traces how the idea has developed in diverse times and places. As Aslan shows, the conception of a deity as a super-human power has been a fundamental part of most societies from the hunter-gatherers to today's modern urban dwellers, and he explores how this co...
Masha Gessen: Live at Politics and Prose
November 22, 2017 10:00 - 1 hourSince the 2016 election, Gessen’s articles and commentary on Trump, Putin, hypocrisy, demagogues, and related issues have become essential reading. A long-time journalist who has worked in both Russia and the U.S., and author of the acclaimed biography of Putin The Man Without a Face, Gessen in her latest book traces Russia’s unsettling post-Soviet trajectory by looking closely at the lives of four different people. All were born into a time that promised freedom; all have been bitterly disap...
Nikki Giovanni: Live at Politics and Prose
November 17, 2017 09:55 - 1 hourFrom her work in the 1960s with the Black Arts Movement and SNCC to her iconic status in today’s hip-hop community, Giovanni has been a vital public presence for more than four decades. Her many accomplishments as an activist, educator, and one of the country’s most inspiring poets, have earned her honors including the Rosa Parks Woman of Courage Award and a place on Oprah Winfrey’s list of twenty-five “Living Legends.” Giovanni has published more than two dozen books, and her latest collecti...
Khizr Khan: Live at Politics and Prose
November 10, 2017 10:00 - 1 hourKhan came to national prominence with his passionate speech at the Democratic Convention, where he chastised Trump for his anti-immigration stand. As the Gold Star father of an American Muslim Army Captain killed while preventing a suicide attack in Iraq, Khan is a living rebuke to xenophobia in mainstream politics, and his memoir is an inspiring look at the American dream. Expressing his “continued faith and belief in the innate goodness of America, even in these challenging times,” Khan rec...
Caitlin Doughty: Live at Politics and Prose
November 03, 2017 09:00 - 1 hourDoughty’s memoir, Smoke Gets in Your Eyes, was a funny and irresistible account of her experiences working in a crematorium. The job was a life-changer: Doughty now runs a nonprofit funeral home in Los Angeles and hosts the web series “Ask a Mortician.” Her second book is a fascinating catalog of funeral rituals and burial practices from around the world. Visiting Indonesia, Doughty reports on a family that dresses and cleans their grandfather’s mummified body—two years after the man’s death....
Colin Dickey: Live at Politics and Prose
October 27, 2017 09:00 - 54 minutesWhether or not the Salem witch hunts found any real witches, the story itself still gives us chills. Tourists flock to Salem, hoping to see—what, exactly? That’s one of the questions Dickey explores in this intriguing tour of some of the nation’s haunted places. Guiding us through haunted houses, institutions, and ghost towns around the country, Dickey, co-editor of The Morbid Anatomy Anthology, lays out the facts about the various strange goings-on and, more importantly, notes how the accou...
Eileen Myles: Live at Politics and Prose
October 20, 2017 09:00 - 48 minutesOne of today’s most innovative writers, Myles is the award-winning author of more than twenty books, including the novel Chelsea Girls and I Must Be Living Twice: New and Selected Poems 1975-2014. Combining memoir, fantasy, and an extraordinary empathy that leaps species boundaries, Myles’s latest book is a bittersweet memoir of Rosie, a pit bull that shared Myles’s life for sixteen years. As Myles looks back on the literature the two created together, the walks they took, and channels Rosie’...
Samhita Mukhopadhyay and Kate Harding: Live at Politics and Prose
October 14, 2017 09:00 - 59 minutesThe results of last year’s election turned what should have been a groundbreaking moment for women into a time of anger and resurgent intolerance and misogyny. Women themselves are deeply divided: 53% of white women voted for Trump while 94% of black women voted for Hillary. Yet women must bridge these differences and work together in order to move ahead and enact permanent change. This collection of essays by writers including Cheryl Strayed, Rebecca Solnit, Jessica Valenti, and Katha Pollit...
David Litt: Live at Politics and Prose
October 06, 2017 08:16 - 46 minutesLitt worked at the White House from 2011 to 2016, leaving as a special assistant to President Obama and senior presidential speechwriter—the youngest in history. He supplied remarks on the major issues of the day, but his focus was humor and his job might more accurately be termed “comic muse to the president.” Now the head writer/producer for Funny or Die’s D.C. office, LItt contributed jokes to Obama’s speeches as early as 2009 and was the lead writer on four White House Correspondents’ Din...
Claire Messud: Live at Politics and Prose
September 29, 2017 09:00 - 52 minutesMessud’s sixth novel, The Burning Goal, is the story of Cassie and Julia, best friends from nursery school until seventh grade. For Julia, who narrates their experiences, the two are as close as sisters, though their families fail to mesh and the differences between them grow more apparent over time. Without Julia to set limits and question plans, Cassie veers into potentially dangerous emotional territory, especially when she decides to track down her father, and Julia begins to see how her...
Danielle Allen: Live at Politics and Prose
September 22, 2017 09:00 - 55 minutesMichael Alexander Allen was arrested at age fifteen, served eleven years of a thirteen-year sentence for attempted carjacking, and was found shot to death three years after his release. He was Danielle Allen’s cousin, and she grew up with him, supported him, and encouraged him to pursue his dreams of becoming a writer and a firefighter. His death was a shock, and in her powerful memoir Allen, the James Conant Bryant University Professor at Harvard and author of the award-winning Our Declarati...
Zoë Quinn: Live at Politics and Prose
September 15, 2017 09:00 - 47 minutesQuinn, featured in Forbes 30 under 30 and one of Fast Company’s Most Creative People in Business, is among the most prominent indie developers in the gaming industry. When she released Depression Quest in 2013, the game was met with acclaim as well as hate mail. The online abuse intensified, and by August 2014, Quinn and several other women video game creators were the targets of relentless harassment, including rape and death threats. Quinn, who has testified at the United Nations about onli...
Mark Bowden: Live at Politics and Prose
September 08, 2017 13:05 - 1 hourHue, the ancient capital of Vietnam, was the country’s third-largest city in 1968 when it became the center of the Tet Offensive. The North Vietnamese stormed Hue from hidden outposts, surprising and then overwhelming American and South Vietnamese forces. The fight lasted twenty-four days and the 10,000 killed there made it the bloodiest battle of the war. It also definitively turned the tide against the U.S. Bowden’s comprehensive account vividly captures each stage of the action from multip...
Haroon Moghul: Live at Politics and Prose
September 01, 2017 09:00 - 1 hourMoghul became a public presence in the wake of 9/11, speaking out as an undergraduate leader at NYU’s Islamic Center. He was only just beginning to work out his personal relationship to Islam, and his memoir traces his struggle to come to terms with a faith he had long felt ambivalent about. Growing up, Moghul, a second-generation immigrant, wanted a typical American childhood. But his was complicated by encounters with anti-Muslim bias, bouts of depression, and his own reservations about man...
Ibram X. Kendi: Live at Politics and Prose
August 25, 2017 09:00 - 1 hourKendi’s National Book Award-winning study argues that racism in America has grown from deliberate policies rather than from emotional responses like fear or hatred. Starting with the Puritans, Kendi traces the development of racist ideas and their effect on racist practices through the lives of five thinkers, discussing Cotton Mather, Thomas Jefferson, William Lloyd Garrison, W.E.B. Du Bois, and Angela Davis. Within these profiles Kendi, professor of history and international studies at Ameri...
Tom Perrotta: Live at Politics and Prose
August 18, 2017 09:00 - 1 hourPerrotta’s seventh novel tells the dual coming-of-age stories of Eve Fletcher and her son. Eve, executive director of a senior center, adjusts to her empty nest and tests the limits of her new freedom by taking a course on gender. But she’s more interested in porn websites and may even have attracted a cyberstalker. Meanwhile her son Brendan, a freshman, is jolted by the reality of a college life that’s less indulgent of his privileged attitudes than he had anticipated. As the two struggle wi...
Tracy Crow and Jerri Bell : Live at Politics and Prose
August 11, 2017 09:00 - 58 minutesWomen have officially been allowed to serve in the military since 1917, but they’ve fought in America’s wars since the Revolution. In this illuminating anthology of women’s writings about their experiences in war, editors Bell, a retired naval officer and the managing editor of O-Dark-Thirty, and Crow, a former Marine Corps officer and the author of Eyes Right, present a wide range of excerpts from diaries, letters, oral histories, pension depositions, and published and unpublished memoirs. F...
Ann Hornaday : Live at Politics and Prose
August 04, 2017 09:00 - 1 hourTo get the most out of a film, Hornaday argues, viewers need to be as actively engaged in watching it as the filmmakers were in creating it. Film critic for The Washington Post, Hornaday guides us through the movie-making process and shows how to break down a film into its seven fundamental parts. For each component—screenplay, acting, production design, cinematography, editing, sound and music, and direction—she suggests key questions to ask and draws examples from a wide range of classic an...
Angela J. Davis: Live at Politics and Prose
July 28, 2017 09:00 - 1 hourThis timely and important collection of essays by writers including Bryan Stevenson, Sherrilyn Ifill, and Jeremy Travis, examines the role of racism in the country’s criminal justice system and reports on the recent killings of black men and boys by police. Edited by Angela J. Davis, a long-time civil rights activist, advocate for prison inmates, professor of law at American University’s Washington College of Law, and author of Arbitrary Justice, the book discusses issues such as racial profi...
Matthew Klam: Live at Politics and Prose
July 21, 2017 09:00 - 53 minutesKlam won awards, acclaim, and a spot on The New Yorker’s “Twenty Best Fiction Writers in America under 40” list for Sam the Cat, his nervy, ironic debut collection of seven long stories. Coming sixteen years later, his first novel is a richly evocative study of passion and family as well as a sharply satirical look at today’s mass-consumer society. Unfolding during an artists’ conference at a seaside getaway, the story focuses on Rich and Amy, a cartoonist and student of narrative painting, r...
Alexandra Fuller: Live at Politics and Prose
July 14, 2017 09:00 - 1 hourLearn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Nina George: Live At Politics and Prose
July 07, 2017 07:44 - 1 hourLearn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Don Winslow: Live at Politics and Prose
June 30, 2017 09:00 - 51 minutesAfter eighteen years in the NYPD, Denny Malone is the star of its elite force. He has an outstanding record and seems to have risen above the city’s ever-present corruption. In fact, he’s far from clean. He and his partners made off with millions in drugs and cash after a recent bust—and federal investigators are suspicious. Malone can’t confess without bringing down half the force, and now isn’t the time to do that. A rash of racial incidents is threatening to explode, and every cop is cruci...
Manal Al-Sharif: Live At Politics and Prose
June 23, 2017 09:00 - 54 minutesOne of the Middle East’s most prominent women’s right activists, Manal al-Sharif grew up in a modest family in Mecca. Devout in her youth, she didn’t associate with non-Muslims and destroyed her brother’s cassettes of forbidden music. But by her twenties she was working as a computer security engineer for Aramco. Her professional status didn’t exempt her from restrictive rules on women’s behavior, and she was required to have her brother chaperone her on business trips. Her frustration grew i...
Ali Soufan: Live at Politics and Prose
June 16, 2017 04:00 - 1 hourLearn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Brooke Gladstone: Live at Politics and Prose
June 09, 2017 04:00 - 54 minutesWith the explosion of “fake news” and “alternative facts,” not to mention a president who communicates via “diversion” tweets, “trial balloon” tweets, and “deflection” tweets, even the most basic notion of reality feels under assault in this new media landscape. In a frank and incisive discussion of both traditional and new media in the age of Trump, Gladstone, co-host and managing editor of On the Media, expands on the Peabody Award-winning radio show and podcast’s mission of demystifying th...
Race In America Today Panel 2017: Live at Politics and Prose
June 02, 2017 10:12 - 1 hourLearn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Amy Goldstein: Live at Politics and Prose
May 26, 2017 09:00 - 1 hourWashington Post reporter Amy Goldstein examines the impact of the Great Recession, and subsequent closing of the local GM plant, in Paul Ryan's hometown of Janesville, WI. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
David Grann- Live At Politics and Prose
May 22, 2017 15:54 - 49 minutesLearn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Richard Rothstein with Ta-Nehisi Coates: Live at Politics and Prose
May 19, 2017 04:00 - 1 hourLearn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Cory Doctorow: Live At Politics and Prose
May 12, 2017 09:00 - 53 minutesLearn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Climate Change Teach-In: Live at Politics and Prose
April 28, 2017 09:00 - 1 hourTodd Stern, Dave Levitan, Jamie Henn, and Kristen Gunther discuss the state of Climate Change science and policy then take questions from the audience. Live at Politics & Prose is a co-production of Slate and Politics & Prose Bookstore in Washington, D.C. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Dr. Willie Parker: Live at Politics and Prose
April 22, 2017 09:00 - 1 hourLearn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Helene Cooper: Live At Politics and Prose
April 14, 2017 09:00 - 51 minutesLearn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
John A. Farrell: Live at Politics and Prose
April 07, 2017 09:00 - 59 minutesLearn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Alyssa Mastromonaco: Live at Politics and Prose
March 31, 2017 09:00 - 53 minutesLearn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Adam Alter: Live at Politics and Prose
March 24, 2017 09:00 - 53 minutesLearn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Mohsin Hamid: Live at Politics and Prose
March 17, 2017 09:00 - 1 hourMohsin Hamid discusses his book Exit West and takes questions from the audience. Live at Politics and Prose is a co-production of Slate and Politics and Prose Bookstore in Washington, D.C. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Timothy Snyder: Live at Politics and Prose
March 10, 2017 10:00 - 1 hourTimothy Snyder discusses his book On Tyranny and takes questions from the audience. Live at Politics and Prose is a co-production of Slate and Politics and Prose Bookstore in Washington, D.C. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Immigration Teach-In: Live at Politics and Prose
March 03, 2017 09:00 - 1 hourScott Michelman, Nithya Nathan-Pineau, and Faiza Patel discuss the state of immigration, then take questions from the audience. Live at Politics & Prose is a co-production of Slate and Politics & Prose Bookstore in Washington, D.C. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Roxane Gay and Viet Thanh Nguyen: Live at Politics & Prose
February 17, 2017 09:00 - 1 hourRoxane Gay ("Difficult Women") and Viet Thanh Nguyen ("The Refugees") discuss their respective books and take questions from the audience. Live at Politics & Prose is a co-production of Slate and Politics & Prose Bookstore in Washington, D.C. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Jill Jonnes: Live at Politics & Prose
February 10, 2017 09:00 - 1 hourJill Jonnes discusses her book, Urban Forests, and takes questions from the audience. Live at Politics & Prose is a co-production of Slate and Politics & Prose Bookstore in Washington, D.C. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
April Ryan: Live at Politics & Prose
February 03, 2017 08:00 - 1 hourApril Ryan discusses her book, At Mama's Knee, and takes questions from the audience. Live at Politics & Prose is a co-production of Slate and Politics & Prose Bookstore in Washington, D.C. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Women's Rights Teach-In: Live at Politics & Prose
January 27, 2017 14:45 - 1 hourFatima Goss Graves, Jennifer Klein, and Rebecca Traister discuss the state of women's rights and feminism, then take questions from the audience. Live at Politics & Prose is a co-production of Slate and Politics & Prose Bookstore in Washington, D.C. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Emily Esfahani Smith: Live at Politics & Prose
January 20, 2017 04:00 - 32 minutesEmily Esfahani Smith discusses her book, The Power of Meaning, and takes questions from the audience. Live at Politics & Prose is a co-production of Slate and Politics & Prose Bookstore in Washington, D.C. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Will Schwalbe: Live at Politics & Prose
January 13, 2017 04:00 - 58 minutesWill Schwalbe discusses his book, Books for Living, and takes questions from the audience. Live at Politics & Prose is a co-production of Slate and Politics & Prose Bookstore in Washington, D.C. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices