Detailed Event List
David Nicholson — The Garretts of Columbia: A Black South Carolina Family from Slavery to the Dawn of Integration - with Mary Kay Zuravleff - at Conn Ave
At the heart of David Nicholson's beautifully written and carefully researched book, The Garretts of Columbia: A Black South Carolina Family from Slavery to the Dawn of Integration, are his great-grandparents, Casper George Garrett and his wife, Anna Maria. Papa, as Garrett was known to his family, was a professor at Allen University, a lawyer, and an editor of three newspapers. Dubbed Black South Carolina's "most respected disliked man," he was always ready to attack those he believed disloyal to his race. When his quixotic idealism and acerbic editorials resulted in his dismissal from Allen, his wife, who was called Mama, came into her own as the family bread winner. She was appointed supervisor of rural colored schools, trained teachers, and oversaw the construction of schoolhouses. At 51, this remarkable woman learned to drive, taking to the back roads outside Columbia to supervise classrooms, conduct literacy drives, and instruct rural farm women in the basics of home economics.
Though Papa and Mama came of age in the bleak Jim Crow years after Reconstruction, they believed in the possibility of America. Resolutely supporting their country during the First World War, they sent three of their sons to serve. One son wrote a musical with Langston Hughes during the Harlem Renaissance. Another son became a dentist. A daughter earned a doctorate in French. And the family persevered. But, for all that Papa and Mama did to make Columbia a nurturing place, their sons and daughters joined the Great Migration, scattering north in search of the freedom the South denied them.
The Garretts embraced the hope of America and experienced the melancholy of a family separated by the search for opportunity and belonging. On the basis of decades of research and thousands of family letters--which include Mama's tart-tongued observations of friends and neighbors--The Garretts of Columbia is family history as American history, rich with pivotal events viewed through the lens of the Garretts's lives.
David Nicholson is a former editor and book reviewer for the Washington Post Book World and author of Flying Home: Seven Stories of the Secret City. He attended Haverford College before graduating from the University of the District of Columbia. Nicholson has worked as a reporter in San Francisco; Milwaukee; and Dayton, Ohio. He lives in Vienna, Virginia, with his wife and son.
Nicholson will be in conversation with Mary Kay Zuravleff. Zuravleff is the award-winning author of American Ending, Man Alive, and The Bowl is Already Broken. She is the recipient of the American Academy of Art's Rosenthal Award, the James Jones First Novel Award, and multiple Artist Fellowships from the DC Commission on the Arts. She has taught writing at American University, the Chautauqua Institution, Johns Hopkins and George Mason Universities, and she has written and edited extensively for the Smithsonian. Her essays and short stories have appeared in such venues as American Short Fiction, The Atlantic, Los Angeles Review of Books, This Is What America Looks Like, and Why I Like This Story.
This event is free with first come, first served seating.
Ben Rothenberg — Naomi Osaka: Her Journey to Finding Her Power and Her Voice — at Conn Ave
Naomi Osaka is everywhere, but how did she get there?
Most tennis fans were introduced to Naomi Osaka as they watched her win the 2018 US Open final in an unforgettably controversial and dramatic victory over her idol, Serena Williams. Since then, Osaka has galvanized the tennis world--and gained attention across the culture--not only by winning three more Grand Slams, but by finding her voice.
Her extraordinary talent and unique blend of power and vulnerability have propelled her to the top of her sport and onto the front page of newspapers and magazines worldwide. She became the highest-paid female athlete in history and one of the most discussed, at the cultural crossroads on myriad social issues.
But until now, the story of the Haitian Japanese American Osaka family's journey across the world to follow their tennis dreams--and how their youngest daughter found her power off the court--has remained little known. It is a story unlike any other, and Ben Rothenberg's biography not only shows where Osaka came from but also where she's going as she returns to competitive tennis after a year on maternity leave. Through a riveting exploration of the ways Osaka has changed the game on and off the court, Rothenberg details the incredible impact Osaka has had in the arenas of sports, media, business, social justice, and mental health.
Ben Rothenberg is a sportswriter from Washington, DC. He has covered Naomi Osaka around the world since she emerged onto the WTA Tour in 2014, both in print for The New York Times and on his podcast, No Challenges Remaining. His work has focused on the intersections of social and cultural issues in tennis. He is a senior editor for Racquet magazine, and has appeared frequently as a tennis expert on international networks such as CNN, the BBC, and the Australian Broadcasting Corporation. With an eye for finding stories and dogged determination as a reporter, Rothenberg has become by many metrics the world's leading tennis journalist, including on Twitter, where he has more than 130,000 followers.
This event is free with first come, first served seating.
Kate Brody — Rabbit Hole — at Conn Ave
Ten years ago, Theodora "Teddy" Angstrom's older sister, Angie, went missing. Her case remains unsolved. Now Teddy's father, Mark, has killed himself. Unbeknownst to Mark's family, he had been active in a Reddit community fixated on Angie, and Teddy can't help but fall down the same rabbit hole.
Teddy's investigation quickly gets her in hot water with her gun-nut boyfriend, her long-lost half brother, and her colleagues at the prestigious high school where she teaches English. Further complicating matters is Teddy's growing obsession with Mickey, a charming amateur sleuth who is eerily keen on helping her solve the case.
Bewitched by Mickey, Teddy begins to lose her moral compass. As she struggles to reconcile new information with old memories, her erratic behavior reaches a fever pitch, but she won't stop until she finds Angie--or destroys herself in the process.
A biting critique of the internet's voyeurism, Rabbit Hole is an outrageous and heart-wrenching character study of a mind twisted by grief--and a page-turning mystery that's as addictive as a late-night Reddit binge.
Kate Brody lives in Los Angeles, California. Her work has previously appeared in Lit Hub and The Literary Review, among other publications. She holds an MFA from NYU. Rabbit Hole is her debut novel.
This event is free with first come, first served seating.
Ruha Benjamin — Imagination: A Manifesto — at Conn Ave
A world without prisons? Ridiculous. Schools that foster the genius of every child? Impossible. Work that doesn't strangle the life out of people? Naive. A society where everyone has food, shelter, love? In your dreams. Exactly. Ruha Benjamin, Princeton University professor, insists that imagination isn't a luxury. It is a vital resource and powerful tool for collective liberation.
Imagination: A Manifesto is her proclamation that we have the power to use our imaginations to challenge systems of oppression and to create a world in which everyone can thrive. But obstacles abound. We have inherited destructive ideas that trap us inside a dominant imagination. Consider how racism, sexism, and classism make hierarchies, exploitation, and violence seem natural and inevitable--but all emerged from the human imagination.
The most effective way to disrupt these deadly systems is to do so collectively. Benjamin highlights the educators, artists, activists, and many others who are refuting powerful narratives that justify the status quo, crafting new stories that reflect our interconnection, and offering creative approaches to seemingly intractable problems.
Imagination: A Manifesto offers visionary examples and tactics to push beyond the constraints of what we think, and are told, is possible. This book is for anyone who is ready to take to heart Toni Morrison's instruction: "Dream a little before you think."
Ruha Benjamin is a professor of African American studies and the founder of the Ida B. Wells Just Data Lab at Princeton University. The author of the Stowe Prize-winning Viral Justice, as well as Race After Technology and People's Science, Benjamin lives in Princeton, New Jersey.
This event is free with first come, first served seating.
Laura Pappano — School Moms: Parent Activism, Partisan Politics, and the Battle for Public Education - with Nirvi Shah — at Conn Ave
For well over a century, public schools have been a non-partisan gathering place and vital center of civic life in America--but something has changed. In School Moms, journalist Laura Pappano explores the on-the-ground story of how public schools across the country have become ground zero in a cultural and political war as the far-right have made efforts to seek power over school boards.
Pappano argues that the rise of parent activism is actually the culmination of efforts that began in the 1990s after campaigns to stop sex education largely fizzled. Recent efforts to make public schools more responsive and inclusive, as well as the pandemic, have offered openings the far-right have been waiting for to organize and sway parents, who are frustrated and exhausted by remote learning, objections by teacher's unions, and shifting directives from school leaders. Groups like Moms for Liberty and Parents Defending Education are organizing against revised history curricula they have dubbed as "CRT," banning books, pressing for "Don't Say Gay" laws, and asserting "parental rights" to gain control over the review of classroom materials. On the other side, progressive groups like Support Our Schools and Red, Wine & Blue are mobilizing parents to counter such moves.
Combining on-the-ground reporting with research and expert interviews, School Moms will take a hard look at where these battles are happening, what is at stake, and why it matters for the future of our schools.
Laura Pappano is an award-winning journalist and author who has written about K-12 and higher education for over 30 years. A former education columnist for The Boston Globe, Pappano has written about education for The New York Times, The Hechinger Report, Harvard Education Letter, The Washington Post, USA Today, The Christian Science Monitor, among other publications. She is the author or co-author of three books, The Connection Gap: Why Americans Feel So Alone, Playing with the Boys: Why Separate is Not Equal in Sports, and Inside School Turnarounds.
Pappano will be in conversation with Nirvi Shah. Nirvi Shah is longtime education journalist, currently working as education enterprise editor for USA Today, working with the national education reporting team and Gannett education reporters across the country. She recently spent a year as a Spencer fellow in education reporting at Columbia University. Prior to that, she spent eight years as an editor and reporter for Politico, in the U.S. and Europe, including as founding editor of the Politico Pro education policy team. She also covered K-12 education at school districts across Florida and for the national trade publication Education Week.
This event is free with first come, first served seating.
Ed Zwick — Hits, Flops, and Other Illusions: My Fortysomething Years in Hollywood - with Ann Hornaday — at Conn Ave
"I'll be dropping a few names," Ed Zwick confesses in the introduction to his book. "Over the years I have worked with self-proclaimed masters-of-the-universe, unheralded geniuses, hacks, sociopaths, savants, and saints."
He has encountered these Hollywood types during four decades of directing, producing, and writing projects that have collectively received eighteen Academy Award nominations (seven wins) and sixty-seven Emmy nominations (twenty-two wins). Though there are many factors behind such success, including luck and the contributions of his creative partner Marshall Herskovitz, he's known to have a special talent for bringing out the best in the people he's worked with, especially the actors. In those intense collaborations, he's sought to discover the small pieces of connective tissue, vulnerability, and fellowship that can help an actor realize their character in full.
Talents whom he spotted early include Brad Pitt, Matt Damon, Denzel Washington, Claire Danes, and Jared Leto. Established stars he worked closely with include Leonardo DiCaprio, Anthony Hopkins, Tom Cruise, Julia Roberts, Anne Hathaway, Daniel Craig, Jake Gyllenhaal, Bruce Willis, Demi Moore, and Jennifer Connelly. He also sued Harvey Weinstein over the production of Shakespeare in Love--and won. He shares personal stories about all these people, and more.
Written mostly with love, sometimes with rue, this memoir is also a meditation on working, sprinkled throughout with tips for anyone who has ever imagined writing, directing, or producing for the screen. Fans with an appreciation for the beautiful mysteries--as well as the unsightly, often comic truths--of crafting film and television won't want to miss it.
Ed Zwick is an Academy Award and Emmy Award-winning director, writer, and producer of film and television. A graduate of Harvard and the AFI Conservatory, he lives in Los Angeles with his wife, Liberty Godshall.
Zwick will be in conversation with Ann Hornaday. Hornaday worked at Ms. Magazine as a researcher and editorial assistant before becoming a freelance writer in New York City, where she eventually began to write about movies for the New York Times Arts & Leisure section and other publications. In 1995 she became the movie critic at the Austin American-Statesman in Texas, where she stayed for two years before moving to Baltimore to be the movie critic at the Baltimore Sun. She left the Sun in 2000 and began working at The Washington Post in 2002. She was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in criticism in 2008. Hornaday is the author of “Talking Pictures: How to Watch Movies."
This event is free with first come, first served seating.
Dorothy Hoobler & Thomas Hoobler — Are You Prepared for the Storm of Love Making?: Letters of Love and Lust from the White House — at The Wharf
Our presidents loom so large in history that we often forget they are human. Are You Prepared for the Storm of Love Making? is a collection of handwritten love letters that offers a surprising and intimate portrait of the men who occupied the White House. From George Washington to Barack Obama, these are not the presidents we see in history books. Instead, when they courted the women they wanted to marry, or seduced women outside of their marriage, they often showed a side the public did not see--playful, passionate, tender, consumed by desire.
Some of the letters are incredibly romantic--and surprisingly so.
It took Richard Nixon years to convince Pat Ryan to marry him: "Someday let me see you again? In September? Maybe?"
Others will make you blush.
Staid-looking Woodrow Wilson, about to return home from a trip, warned his wife of ten years: "Do you think you can stand the unnumerable kisses and the passionate embraces you will receive? Are you prepared for the storm of lovemaking with which you will be assailed?" In letters to one of his mistresses, Warren G. Harding referred to his penis as "Jerry"--letters which would later be used to blackmail him.
All the letters show the writer at his most vulnerable. We see letters of sorrow written about the death of a child or during a time of separation while the president was away on the battlefield. This beautiful book is a captivating collection of love stories revealing a human side of the men we still honor today.
Dorothy and Thomas Hoobler have written many award-winning books for adults and young adults. Their young adult mystery set in medieval Japan won an Edgar Award from the Mystery Writers of America. Their ten-book series on American ethnic groups, published by Oxford University Press, received many favorable reviews from such publications as The New York Times and the Miami Herald. The Hooblers' other books for adults include The Monsters, which tells the story of Mary Shelley and the four people who helped inspire her classic novel Frankenstein; and The Crimes of Paris, a collection of famous French crimes that was excerpted in Vanity Fair. Dorothy has a master's degree in American history from New York University.Tom received his master's in education from Xavier University.
This event is free with first come, first served seating.
Jonathan M. Metzl — What We've Become: Living and Dying in a Country of Arms — at Conn Ave
When a naked, mentally ill white man with an AR-15 killed four young adults of color at a nearby Waffle House, Nashville-based physician and gun policy scholar Dr. Jonathan M. Metzl once again advocated for commonsense gun reform. But as he peeled back evidence surrounding the racially charged mass shooting, a shocking question emerged: Did the approach he championed have it all wrong?
Long a leading expert at the forefront of a movement advocating for gun reform as a matter of public health, Dr. Metzl has been on constant media call in the aftermath of fatal shootings. But the 2018 Nashville killings led him on a path toward recognizing the limitations of biomedical frameworks for fully diagnosing or treating the impassioned complexities of American gun politics. Increasingly, as Dr. Metzl came to understand it, public health is a harder sell in a nation that fundamentally disagrees about what it means to be safe, healthy, or free. This brilliant, piercing analysis shows mass shootings as a symptom of our most unresolved national conflicts. What We've Become ultimately sets us on the path of alliance-forging, racial-reckoning, and political power-brokering we must take to put things right.
Jonathan M. Metzl is the Frederick B. Rentschler II Professor of Sociology and Psychiatry and the director of the Department of Medicine, Health, and Society, at Vanderbilt University. The award-winning author of Dying of Whiteness and other books, he hails from Kansas City, Missouri, and lives in Nashville, Tennessee.
This event is free with first come, first served seating.
Hamilton Nolan — The Hammer: Power, Inequality, and the Struggle for the Soul of Labor - with Sara Nelson — at Union Market
Inequality is America's biggest problem. Unions are the single strongest tool that working people have to fix it. Organized labor has been in decline for decades. Yet it sits today at a moment of enormous opportunity. In the wake of the pandemic, a highly visible wave of strikes and new organizing campaigns have driven the popularity of unions to historic highs. The simmering battle inside of the labor movement over how to tap into its revolutionary potential--or allow it to be squandered--will determine the economic and social course of American life for years to come.
In chapters that span the country, Nolan shows readers the actual places where labor and politics meld. He highlights how organized labor can and does wield power effectively: a union that dominates Las Vegas and is trying to scale nationally; a successful decades-long campaign to organize California's child care workers; the human face of a surprising strike of factory workers trying to preserve their pathway to the middle class. Throughout, Nolan follows Sara Nelson, the fiery and charismatic head of the flight attendants' union, as she struggles with how (and whether) to assert herself as a national leader, to try to fix what is broken. The Hammer draws the line from forgotten workplaces in rural West Virginia to Washington's halls of power, and shows how labor solidarity can utterly transform American politics--if it can first transform itself.
A labor journalist for more than a decade, Nolan helped unionize his own industry. The Hammer is a urgent on-the-ground excavation of the past, present, and future of the American labor movement.
Hamilton Nolan is a labor journalist who writes regularly for In These Times magazine and The Guardian. He has written about labor, politics, and class war for The New York Times, the Washington Post, Gawker, Splinter, and other publications. He was the longest-serving writer in Gawker's history, and was a leader in unionizing Gawker Media in 2015. Hamilton is a proud member of the Writers Guild of America, East. He lives in Brooklyn.
Nolan will be in conversation with Sara Nelson. Sara Nelson has been the International President of the Association of Flight Attendants-CWA since 2014. The New York Times called her "America's most powerful flight attendant." As a labor movement leader, she is a central character in the book The Hammer.
This event is free with first come, first served seating.
Jeffrey Rosen — The Pursuit of Happiness: How Classical Writers on Virtue Inspired the Lives of the Founders of America — at Conn Ave
The Declaration of Independence identified "the pursuit of happiness" as one of our unalienable rights, along with life and liberty. Jeffrey Rosen, the president of the National Constitution Center, profiles six of the most influential founders--Benjamin Franklin, George Washington, John Adams, Thomas Jefferson, James Madison, and Alexander Hamilton--to show what pursuing happiness meant in their lives.
By reading the classical Greek and Roman moral philosophers who inspired the Founders, Rosen shows us how they understood the pursuit of happiness as a quest for being good, not feeling good--the pursuit of lifelong virtue, not short-term pleasure. Among those virtues were the habits of industry, temperance, moderation, and sincerity, which the Founders viewed as part of a daily struggle for self-improvement, character development, and calm self-mastery. They believed that political self-government required personal self-government. For all six Founders, the pursuit of virtue was incompatible with enslavement of African Americans, although the Virginians betrayed their own principles.
The Pursuit of Happiness is more than an elucidation of the Declaration's famous phrase; it is a revelatory journey into the minds of the Founders, and a deep, rich, and fresh understanding of the foundation of our democracy.
Jeffrey Rosen is President and CEO of the National Constitution Center, where he hosts We the People, a weekly podcast of constitutional debate. He is also a professor of law at the George Washington University Law School and a contributing editor at The Atlantic. Rosen is a graduate of Harvard College, Oxford University, and Yale Law School. He is the author of seven previous books, including the New York Times bestseller Conversations with RBG: Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg on Life, Love, Liberty, and Law. His essays and commentaries have appeared in The New York Times Magazine; on NPR; in The New Republic, where he was the legal affairs editor; and in The New Yorker, where he has been a staff writer.
This event is free with first come, first served seating.
Crystal Wilkinson — Praisesong for the Kitchen Ghosts: Stories and Recipes from Five Generations of Black Country Cooks — at Union Market
People are always surprised that Black people reside in the hills of Appalachia. Those not surprised that we were there, are surprised that we stayed.
Years ago, when O. Henry Prize-winning writer Crystal Wilkinson was baking a jam cake, she felt her late grandmother's presence. She soon realized that she was not the only cook in her kitchen; there were her ancestors, too, stirring, measuring, and braising alongside her. These are her kitchen ghosts, five generations of Black women who settled in Appalachia and made a life, a legacy, and a cuisine.
An expert cook, Wilkinson shares nearly forty family recipes rooted deep in the past, full of flavor--delicious favorites including Corn Pudding, Chicken and Dumplings, Granny Christine's Jam Cake, and Praisesong Biscuits, brought to vivid life through stunning photography. Together, Praisesong for the Kitchen Ghosts honors the mothers who came before, the land that provided for generations of her family, and the untold heritage of Black Appalachia.
As the keeper of her family's stories and treasured dishes, Wilkinson shares her inheritance in Praisesong for the Kitchen Ghosts. She found their stories in her apron pockets, floating inside the steam of hot mustard greens and tucked into the sweet scent of clove and cinnamon in her kitchen. Part memoir, part cookbook, Praisesong for the Kitchen Ghosts weaves those stories together with recipes, family photos, and a lyrical imagination to present a culinary portrait of a family that has lived and worked the earth of the mountains for over a century.
Crystal Wilkinson, Kentucky's Poet Laureate from 2021 to 2023, is the award-winning author of Perfect Black; The Birds of Opulence; Water Street; and Blackberries, Blackberries. She is the recipient of an NAACP Image Award for Outstanding Poetry, an O. Henry Prize, a USA Artists Fellowship, and an Ernest J. Gaines Prize for Literary Excellence. She has received recognition from the Yaddo Foundation, Hedgebrook, The Hermitage Foundation, and others. Her short stories, poems, and essays have appeared in numerous journals and anthologies. She currently teaches at the University of Kentucky in the creative writing MFA program.
This event is free with first come, first served seating.
Susannah Fox — Rebel Health: A Field Guide to the Patient-Led Revolution in Medical Care - with Dr. Helen Burstin — at Conn Ave
Anyone who has fallen off the conveyer belt of mainstream health care and into the shadowy corners of illness knows what a dark place it is to land. Where is the infrastructure, the information, the guidance? What should you do next? In Rebel Health, Susannah Fox draws on twenty years of tracking the expert networks of patients, survivors, and caregivers who have come of age between the cracks of the health care system to offer a way forward. Covering everything from diabetes to ALS to Moebius Syndrome to chronic disease management, Fox taps into the wisdom of these individuals, learns their ways, and fuels the rebel alliance that is building up our collective capacity for better health.
Rebel Health shows how the next wave of health innovation will come from the front lines of this patient-led revolution. Fox identifies and describes four archetypes of this revolution: seekers, networkers, solvers, and champions. Each chapter includes tips, such as picking a proxy to help you navigate the relevant online communities, or learning how to pitch new ideas to investors and partners or new treatments to the FDA. On a personal level, anyone who wants to navigate the health care maze faster will want to become a health rebel or recruit some to their team. On a systemic level, it is a competitive advantage for businesses, governments, and organizations to understand and leverage the power of connection among patients, survivors, and caregivers.
Proactive, optimistic, and innovative, Rebel Health is a guiding light for anyone who wishes to join the health rebel alliance and become the hero of their own story.
Susannah Fox helps people navigate health and technology. She served as Chief Technology Officer for the US Department of Health and Human Services, where she led an open data and innovation lab. Prior to that, she was the entrepreneur-in-residence at the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation and directed the health portfolio at the Pew Research Center's Internet Project.
Fox will be in conversation with Dr. Helen Burstin. Dr. Helen Burstin is the CEO of the Council of Medical Specialty Societies and an ally to patient-led groups.
This event is free with first come, first served seating.
Roxana Robinson — Leaving - with Marie Arana — at Conn Ave
"I never thought I'd see you here," Sarah says. Then she adds, "But I never thought I'd see you anywhere."
Sarah and Warren's college love story ended in a single moment. Decades later, when a chance meeting brings them together, a passion ignites--threatening the foundations of the lives they've built apart. Since they parted in college, each has married, raised a family, and made a career. When they meet again, Sarah is divorced and living outside New York, while Warren is still married and living in Boston.
Seeing Warren sparks an awakening in Sarah, who feels emotionally alive for the first time in decades. Still, she hesitates to reclaim a chance at love after her painful divorce and years of framing her life around her children and her work. Warren has no such reservations: he wants to leave his marriage but can't predict how his wife and daughter will react. As their affair intensifies, Sarah and Warren must confront the moral responsibilities of their love for their families and each other.
Leaving charts a passage through loyalty and desire as it builds to a shattering conclusion. In her boldest and most powerful work to date, Roxana Robinson demonstrates her "trademark gifts as an intelligent, sensitive analyst of family life" (Wendy Smith, Chicago Tribune) in an engrossing exploration of the vows we make to one another, the tensile relationships between parents and their children, and what we owe to others and ourselves.
Roxana Robinson is the award winning author of six novels and three short story collections. Her fiction has appeared in The New Yorker, Atlantic, Harper's, and other publications. She lives in New York City and Connecticut, spends as much time as she can in Maine, and teaches in the MFA program at Hunter college.
Robinson will be in conversation with Marie Arana. Marie Arana is an author, critic, and inaugural Literary Director of the Library of Congress. Her prizewinning books range from fiction to nonfiction. In 2020, she received an award for her lifetime’s work from the American Academy of Arts & Letters. Her next book, to be published in February 2024, is LatinoLand: A Portrait of America’s Largest and Least Understood Minority.
This event is free with first come, first served seating.
David Finkel — An American Dreamer: Life in a Divided Country — at Conn Ave
Brent Cummings, an Iraq war veteran, has come home feeling he survived one war only to find himself in the midst of another one. The country he loves and defended for twenty-eight years seems to be unraveling in front of his eyes. Raised to believe in a vision of America that values fairness, honesty, and respect for others, Cummings is increasingly engulfed by the fear and anger sweeping through his beloved country as he tries to hold on to hope for America's future.
David Finkel, known for his unique, in-depth reporting, spent fourteen years immersed in Brent Cummings's world to create this intimate, acutely observed, and beautifully written portrait of a man's life, thoughts, and feelings as America becomes ever more divided. Cummings was one of the unforgettable figures in Finkel's The Good Soldiers, a book about which The New York Times stated, "Finkel has made art out of a defining moment in history. You will be able to take this book down from the shelf years from now and say: This is what happened. This is what it felt like."
In An American Dreamer, Finkel chronicles the everyday experiences of people, through moments of hope and despair, illuminating the struggles of many Americans today in a deeply fractured country at a time of crisis.
David Finkel is an editor and writer at The Washington Post. He won the Pulitzer Prize for Explanatory Reporting. A MacArthur Fellowship recipient, he is the author of Thank You for Your Service and The Good Soldiers.
This event is free with first come, first served seating.
Jared Cohen — Life After Power: Seven Presidents and Their Search for Purpose Beyond the White House — at Conn Ave
Former presidents have an unusual place in American life. King George III believed that George Washington's departure after two terms made him "the greatest character of the age." But Alexander Hamilton worried former presidents might "[wander] among the people like ghosts." They were both right.
Life After Power tells the stories of seven former presidents, from the Founding to today. Each changed history. Each offered lessons about how to decide what to do in the next chapter of life.
Thomas Jefferson was the first former president to accomplish great things after the White House, shaping public debates and founding the University of Virginia, an accomplishment he included on his tombstone, unlike his presidency. John Quincy Adams served in Congress and became a leading abolitionist, passing the torch to Abraham Lincoln. Grover Cleveland was the only president in American history to serve a nonconsecutive term. William Howard Taft became Chief Justice of the Supreme Court. Herbert Hoover shaped the modern conservative movement, led relief efforts after World War II, reorganized the executive branch, and reconciled John F. Kennedy and Richard Nixon. Jimmy Carter had the longest post-presidency in American history, advancing humanitarian causes, human rights, and peace. George W. Bush made a clean break from politics, bringing back George Washington's precedent, and reminding the public that the institution of the presidency is bigger than any person.
Jared Cohen explores the untold stories in the final chapters of these presidents' lives, offering a gripping and illuminating account of how they went from President of the United States one day, to ordinary citizens the next. He tells how they handled very human problems of ego, finances, and questions about their legacy and mortality. He shows how these men made history after they left the White House.
Jared Cohen is the president of global affairs and cohead of applied innovation at Goldman Sachs, where he joined as a partner and member of the firm's management committee in 2022. Before joining Goldman Sachs, he was CEO of Jigsaw, which he founded at Alphabet Inc. in 2016. Prior to that, he was Google's first director of Ideas and chief advisor to Google's chief executive officer and executive chairman Eric Schmidt. From 2006 to 2010, he served as a member of the Secretary of State's Policy Planning staff and as a close advisor to both Condoleezza Rice and Hillary Clinton. He is a New York Times bestselling author of five books, most recently Accidental Presidents: Eight Men Who Changed America. He has been named to the " TIME 100" list, Foreign Policy's "Top 100 Global Thinkers," and Fortune's "40 Under 40." He lives in New York City with his wife and three daughters.
This event is free with first come, first served seating.
Marie Arana — LatinoLand: A Portrait of America's Largest and Least Understood Minority — at Conn Ave
This event is in partnership with KAMA DC.
LatinoLand is an exceptional, all-encompassing overview of Hispanic America based on personal interviews, deep research, and Marie Arana's life experience as a Latina. At present, Latinos comprise 20 percent of the US population, a number that is growing. By 2050, census reports project that one in every three Americans will claim Latino heritage.
But Latinos are not a monolith. They do not represent a single group. The largest numbers are Mexicans, Puerto Ricans, Dominicans, Salvadorans, and Cubans. Each has a different cultural and political background. Puerto Ricans, for example, are US citizens, whereas some Mexican Americans never immigrated because the US-Mexico border shifted after the US invasion of 1848, incorporating what is now the entire southwest of the United States. Cubans came in two great waves: those escaping communism in the early years of Castro, many of whom were professionals and wealthy, and those permitted to leave in the Mariel boat lift twenty years later, representing some of the poorest Cubans, including prisoners.
As LatinoLand shows, Latinos were some of the earliest immigrants to what is now the US--some of them arriving in the 1500s. They are racially diverse--a random fusion of White, Black, Indigenous, and Asian. Once overwhelmingly Catholic, they are becoming increasingly Protestant and Evangelical. They range from domestic workers and day laborers to successful artists, corporate CEOs, and US senators. Formerly solidly Democratic, they now vote Republican in growing numbers. They are as varied culturally as any immigrants from Europe or Asia.
Marie Arana draws on her own experience as the daughter of an American mother and Peruvian father who came to the US at age nine, straddling two worlds, as many Latinos do. LatinoLand unabashedly celebrates Latino resilience and character and shows us why we must understand the fastest-growing minority in America.
Marie Arana was born in Lima, Peru. She is the author of the memoir American Chica, a finalist for the National Book Award; two novels, Cellophane and Lima Nights; the prizewinning biography Bolivar; Silver, Sword, and Stone, a narrative history of Latin America; and The Writing Life, a collection from her well-known column for The Washington Post. She is the inaugural Literary Director of the Library of Congress and lives in Washington, DC, and Lima, Peru.
This event is free with first come, first served seating.
Jacob Heilbrunn — America Last: The Right's Century-Long Romance with Foreign Dictators - with David Frum — at The Wharf
Why do Donald Trump, Tucker Carlson, and much of the far Right so explicitly admire the murderous and incompetent Russian dictator Vladimir Putin? Why is Ron DeSantis drawing from Victor Orbán's illiberal politics for his own policies as governor of Florida--a single American state that has more than twice the population of Orbán's entire nation, Hungary?
In America Last, Jacob Heilbrunn, a highly respected observer of the American Right, demonstrates that the infatuation of American conservatives with foreign dictators--though a striking and seemingly inexplicable fact of our current moment--is not a new phenomenon. It dates to the First World War, when some conservatives, enthralled with Kaiser Wilhelm II, openly rooted for him to defeat the forces of democracy. In the 1920s and 1930s, this affinity became even more pronounced as Hitler and Mussolini attracted a variety of American admirers. Throughout the Cold War, the Right evinced a fondness for autocrats such as Francisco Franco and Augusto Pinochet, while some conservatives wrote apologias for the Third Reich and for apartheid South Africa. The habit of mind is not really about foreign policy, however. As Heilbrunn argues, the Right is drawn to what it perceives as the impressive strength of foreign dictators, precisely because it sees them as models of how to fight against liberalism and progressivism domestically.
America Last is a guide for the perplexed, identifying and tracing a persuasion--or what one might call the "illiberal imagination"--that has animated conservative politics for a century now. Since the 1940s, the Right has railed against communist fellow travelers in America. Heilbrunn finally corrects the record, showing that dictator worship is an unignorable tradition within modern American conservatism--and what it means for us today.
Jacob Heilbrunn is the editor of the National Interest and nonresident senior fellow at the Atlantic Council, and has written for the Atlantic, the New York Review of Books, and other outlets. He is the author of They Knew They Were Right: The Rise of the Neocons. He lives in Washington, DC.
Heilbrunn will be in conversation with David Frum. David Frum is a staff writer at The Atlantic. His most recent book is Trumpocalypse (HarperCollins: 2020). From 2001-2002, he served as speechwriter and special assistant to President George W. Bush. In 2009-2012, he owned and operated the website FrumForum.com. He and his wife Danielle Crittenden Frum have three children and live in Washington DC and Wellington Ontario.
This event is free with first come, first served seating.
Carlos Lozada — The Washington Book: How to Read Politics and Politicians - with Mark Leibovich — at Conn Ave
As a long-time book critic and columnist in Washington, Carlos Lozada dissects all manner of texts: commission reports, political reporting, Supreme Court decisions, and congressional inquiries to understand the controversies animating life in the capital. He also reads copious books by politicians and top officials: tell-all accounts by administration insiders, campaign biographies by candidates longing for high office, revisionist memoirs by those leaving those offices behind. With this provocative essay collection, Lozada argues that no matter how carefully political figures sanitize their experiences, positions, and records, no matter how diligently they present themselves in the best and safest and most electable light, they almost always let slip the truth. They show us their faults and blind spots, their ambitions and compromises, their underlying motives and insecurities. Whether they mean to or not, they tell us who they really are.
In his memoirs and speeches, Barack Obama constantly invoked the power and meaning of his life story, Lozada notes, a sign of how the former president capitalized on his personal symbolism, trying to transform it from inspiration on the campaign trail into an all-purpose governing tool. In a soliloquy about his hair in a self-help book published two decades ago, Donald Trump revealed not just his vanity, Lozada explains, but his utter isolation from the world, long before he entered the bubble of the White House. In deft and lacerating prose, Lozada interprets the unresolved tensions of Hillary Clinton's ideological beliefs. He imagines the wonderful memoir George H.W. Bush could have given us but instead left scattered in throughout various books and letters. He explores why Kamala Harris has struggled to carve out a distinctive role as vice president. He explains how Ron DeSantis's pitch to America is just a list of enemies. And he even glimpses what Vladimir Putin fears the most, and why he seeks conflict with the West. He does so all through their own books, and their own words.
Lozada reads these books so you don't have to. The Washington Book is the perfect guide to the state of our politics, and then men and women who dominate the terrain. It explores the construction of personal identity, the delusions of leadership, and that mix of subservience and ambition that can define a life in politics. The more we read the stories of Washington, Lozada contends, the clearer our understanding of the competing visions of our country.
Carlos Lozada is an opinion columnist at the New York Times and co-host of the "Matter of Opinion" podcast. He has won the Pulitzer Prize for criticism and is the author of What Were We Thinking: A Brief Intellectual History of the Trump Era.
Lozada will be in conversation with Mark Leibovich. Mark Leibovich the author of five books, including three New York Times best sellers, and two No. 1 Times best sellers, This Town (2013) and Thank You for Your Servitude (2022). He is the recipient of a National Magazine Award for profile writing. Before joining The Atlantic in 2022, he spent 16 years at The New York Times, based in Washington, serving as the chief national correspondent for The New York Times Magazine. Prior to that, he worked at The Washington Post, where he covered technology and national politics. He is also a political analyst for NBC and MSNBC.
This event is free with first come, first served seating.
Leslie Jamison — Splinters: Another Kind of Love Story - with Kathryn Schulz — at Conn Ave
Leslie Jamison has become one of our most beloved contemporary voices, a scribe of the real, the true, the complex. She has been compared to Joan Didion and Susan Sontag, acclaimed for her powerful thinking, deep feeling, and electric prose. But while Jamison has never shied away from challenging material--scouring her own psyche and digging into our most unanswerable questions across four books-- Splinters enters a new realm.
In her first memoir, Jamison turns her unrivaled powers of perception on some of the most intimate relationships of her life: her consuming love for her young daughter, a ruptured marriage once swollen with hope, and the shaping legacy of her own parents' complicated bond. In examining what it means for a woman to be many things at once--a mother, an artist, a teacher, a lover--Jamison places the magical and the mundane side by side in surprising ways: pumping breastmilk in a shared university office, driving the open highway in the throes of new love, growing a tender second skin of consciousness as she watches her daughter come alive to the world. The result is a work of nonfiction like no other, an almost impossibly deep reckoning with the muchness of life and art, and a book that grieves the departure of one love even as it celebrates the arrival of another.
How do we move forward into joy when we are haunted by loss? How do we claim hope alongside the harm we've caused? A memoir for which the very term tour de force seems to have been coined, Splinters plumbs these and other pressing questions with writing that is revelatory to the last page. Jamison has delivered a book with the linguistic daring and emotional acuity that made The Empathy Exams and The Recovering instant classics, even as she reaches new depths of understanding, piercing the reader to the core. A master of nonfiction, she evinces once again her ability to "stitch together the intellectual and the emotional with the finesse of a crackerjack surgeon" (NPR).
Leslie Jamison is the author of the New York Times bestsellers The Recovering and The Empathy Exams; the collection of essays Make It Scream, Make It Burn, a finalist for the PEN/Diamonstein-Spielvogel Award; and the novel The Gin Closet, a finalist for the LA Times Book Prize. She is a contributing writer for the New York Times Magazine, and her work has appeared in publications including The Atlantic, Harper's, the New York Times Book Review, the Oxford American, and the Virginia Quarterly Review, among many others. She teaches at Columbia University and lives in Brooklyn.
Jamison will be in conversation with Kathryn Schulz. Kathryn Schulz is a staff writer at The New Yorker. She won a National Magazine Award and a Pulitzer Prize in 2015 for “The Really Big One,” an article about seismic risk in the Pacific Northwest. Her latest book, Lost & Found, grew out of “Losing Streak,” which was originally published in The New Yorker and later anthologized in The Best American Essays. Her other essays and reporting have appeared in The Best American Science and Nature Writing, The Best American Travel Writing, and The Best American Food Writing. A native of Ohio, she lives with her family on the Eastern Shore of Maryland.
This event is free with first come, first served seating.
Hala Gorani — But You Don't Look Arab: And Other Tales of Unbelonging — at The Wharf
What is it like to have no clear identity in a world full of labels? How can people find a sense of belonging when they have never felt part of a "tribe?" And how does a blonde-haired, blue-eyed woman who's never lived in the Middle East honor her Arab Muslim ancestry and displaced family--a family forced to scatter when their home country was torn apart by war?
Hala Gorani's path to self-discovery started the moment she could understand that she was "other" wherever she found herself to be. Born of Syrian parents in America and raised mainly in France, she didn't feel at home in Aleppo, Seattle, Paris, or London. She is a citizen of everywhere and nowhere. And like many journalists who've covered wars and conflicts, she felt most at home on the ground reporting and in front of the camera.
As a journalist, Gorani has traveled to some of the most dangerous places in the world, covering the Arab Spring in Cairo and the Syrian civil war, reporting on suicide bombers in Beirut and the chemical attacks in Damascus, watching the growth of ISIS and the war in Iraq--sometimes escaping with her life by a hair. But through it all, she came to understand that finding herself meant not only looking inward, but tracing a long family history of uprooted ancestors. From the courts of Ottoman Empire sultans through the stories of the citizens from her home country and other places torn apart by unrest, But You Don't Look Arab combines Gorani's family history with rigorous reporting, explaining--and most importantly, humanizing--the constant upheavals in the Middle East over the last century.
Hala Gorani is an international correspondent for NBC News. She is one of the best-known international news anchors on television, with over twenty years’ experience as a journalist on CNN, three Emmy Awards, reportage from every country in the Middle East, and interviews with world figures like the Dalai Lama, Tony Blair, Mala Yousafzai, and Rafik Hariri to cultural icons like David Sedaris, Robert De Niro, and Naomi Campbell. She now lives in London with her husband and a cuddly cavalier spaniel named Louis.
This event is free with first come, first served seating.
Dr. Edda L. Fields-Black — COMBEE: Harriet Tubman, the Combahee River Raid, and Black Freedom during the Civil War - with Dr. Paul Gardullo — at Conn Ave
(This book cannot be returned.)
Most Americans know of Harriet Tubman's legendary life: escaping enslavement in 1849, she led more than 60 others out of bondage via the Underground Railroad, gave instructions on getting to freedom to scores more, and went on to live a lifetime fighting for change. Yet the many biographies, children's books, and films about Tubman omit a crucial chapter: during the Civil War, hired by the Union Army, she ventured into the heart of slave territory--Beaufort, South Carolina--to live, work, and gather intelligence for a daring raid up the Combahee River to attack the major plantations of Rice Country, the breadbasket of the Confederacy.
Edda L. Fields-Black--herself a descendent of one of the participants in the raid--shows how Tubman commanded a ring of spies, scouts, and pilots and participated in military expeditions behind Confederate lines. On June 2, 1863, Tubman and her crew piloted two regiments of Black US Army soldiers, the Second South Carolina Volunteers, and their white commanders up coastal South Carolina's Combahee River in three gunboats. In a matter of hours, they torched eight rice plantations and liberated 730 people, people whose Lowcountry Creole language and culture Tubman could not even understand. Black men who had liberated themselves from bondage on South Carolina's Sea Island cotton plantations after the Battle of Port Royal in November 1861 enlisted in the Second South Carolina Volunteers and risked their lives in the effort.
Using previous unexamined documents, including Tubman's US Civil War Pension File, bills of sale, wills, marriage settlements, and estate papers from planters' families, Fields-Black brings to life intergenerational, extended enslaved families, neighbors, praise-house members, and sweethearts forced to work in South Carolina's deadly tidal rice swamps, sold, and separated during the antebellum period. When Tubman and the gunboats arrived and blew their steam whistles, many of those people clambered aboard, sailed to freedom, and were eventually reunited with their families. The able-bodied Black men freed in the Combahee River Raid enlisted in the Second South Carolina Volunteers and fought behind Confederate lines for the freedom of others still enslaved not just in South Carolina but Georgia and Florida.
After the war, many returned to the same rice plantations from which they had escaped, purchased land, married, and buried each other. These formerly enslaved peoples on the Sea Island indigo and cotton plantations, together with those in the semi-urban port cities of Charleston, Beaufort, and Savannah, and on rice plantations in the coastal plains, created the distinctly American Gullah Geechee dialect, culture, and identity--perhaps the most significant legacy of Harriet Tubman's Combahee River Raid.
Dr. Edda L. Fields-Black teaches history at Carnegie Mellon University and has written extensively about the history of West African rice farmers, including in such works as Deep Roots: Rice Farmers in West Africa and the African Diaspora. Fields-Black is a direct descendant of Africans enslaved on rice plantations in Colleton County, SC and Black soldiers who fought in the Civil War, including her great-great-great grandfather, who fought in the Combahee River Raid.
Dr. Fields-Black will be in conversation with Dr. Paul Gardullo. Dr. Paul Gardullo is a historian and a curator at the Smithsonian National Museum of African American History and Culture in Washington, D.C. He directs the NMAAHC’s Center for the Study of Global Slavery, which hosts or co-convenes three international collaborative initiatives, the Slave Wrecks Project and the Global Curatorial Project. The Center has also recently joined the Slave Voyages consortium. Since 2007, Paul has worked at the NMAAHC and was part of the core team focused on building the museum’s foundational collections and conceiving and crafting its inaugural exhibitions. He curated the inaugural exhibition “The Power of Place” and was the co curator and co-editor of the exhibition "The Scurlock Studio and Black Washington: Picturing the Promise." He is the project director for a new exhibition entitled “Make Good the Promises: Reconstruction and its Legacies” that will open with the Museum’s 5th anniversary and is co-editor of the companion volume that accompanies the exhibition.
This event is free with first come, first served seating.
Raymond Arsenault — John Lewis: In Search of the Beloved Community — at Conn Ave
For six decades John Robert Lewis (1940-2020) was a towering figure in the U.S. struggle for civil rights. As an activist and progressive congressman, he was renowned for his unshakable integrity, indomitable courage, and determination to get into "good trouble."
In this first book-length biography of Lewis, Raymond Arsenault traces Lewis's upbringing in rural Alabama, his activism as a Freedom Rider and leader of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, his championing of voting rights and anti-poverty initiatives, and his decades of service as the "conscience of Congress."
Both in the streets and in Congress, Lewis promoted a philosophy of nonviolence to bring about change. He helped the Reverend Martin Luther King Jr. and other civil rights leaders plan the 1963 March on Washington, where he spoke at the Lincoln Memorial. Lewis's activism led to repeated arrests and beatings, most notably when he suffered a skull fracture in Selma, Alabama, during the 1965 police attack later known as Bloody Sunday. He was instrumental in the passage of the Voting Rights Act of 1965, and in Congress he advocated for racial and economic justice, immigration reform, LGBTQ rights, and national health care.
Arsenault recounts Lewis's lifetime of work toward one overarching goal: realizing the "beloved community," an ideal society based in equity and inclusion. Lewis never wavered in this pursuit, and even in death his influence endures, inspiring mobilization and resistance in the fight for social justice.
Raymond Arsenault is the John Hope Franklin Professor of Southern History Emeritus at the University of South Florida. He is the author of several award-winning books on civil rights history, including Freedom Riders: 1961 and the Struggle for Racial Justice; The Sound of Freedom: Marian Anderson, the Lincoln Memorial, and the Concert That Awakened America and Arthur Ashe: A Life.
This event is free with first come, first served seating.
Joy-Ann Reid — Medgar and Myrlie: Medgar Evers and the Love Story That Awakened America — at Conn Ave
Myrlie Louise Beasley met Medgar Evers on her first day of college. They fell in love at first sight, married just one year later, and Myrlie left school to focus on their growing family.
Medgar became the field secretary for the Mississippi branch of the NAACP, charged with beating back the most intractable and violent resistance to black voting rights in the country. Myrlie served as Medgar's secretary and confidant, working hand in hand with him as they struggled against public accommodations and school segregation, lynching, violence, and sheer despair within their state's "black belt." They fought to desegregate the intractable University of Mississippi, organized picket lines and boycotts, despite repeated terroristic threats, including the 1962 firebombing of their home, where they lived with their three young children.
On June 12, 1963, Medgar Evers became the highest profile victim of Klan-related assassination of a black civil rights leader at that time; gunned down in the couple's driveway in Jackson. In the wake of his tragic death, Myrlie carried on their civil rights legacy; writing a book about Medgar's fight, trying to win a congressional seat, and becoming a leader of the NAACP in her own right.
In this groundbreaking and thrilling account of two heroes of the civil rights movement, Joy-Ann Reid uses Medgar and Myrlie's relationship as a lens through which to explore the on-the-ground work that went into winning basic rights for Black Americans, and the repercussions that still resonate today.
Joy-Ann Reid is the host of MSNBC's The ReidOut. Her books include the New York Times bestseller The Man Who Sold America: Trump and the Unraveling of the American Story. Reid previously hosted the weekend MSNBC show AM Joy. The former managing editor of The Grio, Reid has had columns appearing in The New York Times, The Guardian, The Miami Herald, New York, and The Daily Beast. She lives in Maryland and Brooklyn.
This event is free with first come, first served seating.
Sloane Crosley — Grief Is for People — at Conn Ave
Grief Is for People is a deeply moving and surprisingly suspenseful portrait of friendship, and a book about loss packed with verve for life. Sloane Crosley is one of our most renowned observers of contemporary behavior, and now the pathos that has been ever present in her trademark wit is on full display. After the pain and confusion of losing her closest friend to suicide, Crosley looks for answers in friends, philosophy, and art, hoping for a framework more useful than the unavoidable stages of grief.
For most of her adult life, Sloane and Russell worked together and played together as they navigated the corridors of office life, the literary world, and the dramatic cultural shifts in New York City. One day, while Russell is still alive, Sloane's apartment is broken into. Along with her most prized possessions, the thief makes off with her sense of security, leaving a mystery in its place.
When Russell dies exactly one month later, his suicide propels her on a wild quest to right the unrightable, to explore what constitutes family and possession as the city itself faces the staggering toll brought on by the pandemic.
Crosley's search for truth is frank, darkly funny, and gilded with a resounding empathy. Upending the "grief memoir," Grief Is for People is the category-defying story of the struggle to hold on to the past without being consumed by it. A modern elegy, it rises precisely to console and challenge our notions of mourning during these grief-stricken times.
Sloane Crosley is the author of the novels Cult Classic and The Clasp and three essay collections: Look Alive Out There and the New York Times-bestsellers I Was Told There'd Be Cake and How Did You Get This Number.
This event is free with first come, first served seating.
Barbara McQuade — Attack From Within: How Disinformation is Sabotaging America - with Kimberly Atkins Stohr — at Conn Ave
American society is more polarized than ever before. We are strategically being pushed apart by disinformation--the deliberate spreading of lies disguised as truth--and it comes at us from all sides: opportunists on the far right, Russian misinformed social media influencers, among others. It's endangering our democracy and causing havoc in our electoral system, schools, hospitals, workplaces, and in our Capitol. Advances in technology including rapid developments in artificial intelligence threaten to make the problems even worse by amplifying false claims and manufacturing credibility.
In Attack from Within, legal scholar and analyst Barbara McQuade, shows us how to identify the ways disinformation is seeping into all facets of our society and how we can fight against it. The book includes:
- The authoritarian playbook a brief history of disinformation from Mussolini and Hitler to Bolsonaro and Trump, chronicles the ways in which authoritarians have used disinformation to seize and retain power.
- Disinformation tactics--like demonizing the other, seducing with nostalgia, silencing critics, muzzling the media, condemning the courts; stoking violence--and reasons why they work.
- An explanation of why America is particularly vulnerable to disinformation and how it exploits our First Amendment Freedoms, sparks threats and violence, and destabilizes social structures.
- Real, accessible solutions for countering disinformation and maintaining the rule of law such as making domestic terrorism a federal crime, increasing media literacy in schools, criminalizing doxxing, and much more.
Disinformation is designed to evoke a strong emotional response to push us toward more extreme views, unable to find common ground with others. The false claims that led to the breathtaking attack on our Capitol in 2020 may have been only a dress rehearsal. Attack from Within shows us how to prevent it from happening again, thus preserving our country's hard-won democracy.
Barbara McQuade is a professor from practice at the University of Michigan Law School, her alma mater, where she teaches courses in criminal law, criminal procedure, national security, and data privacy. She is also a legal expert for NBC News and MSNBC, and a co-host of the podcast #SistersInLaw. From 2010 to 2017, McQuade served as U.S Attorney for the Eastern District of Michigan. Ms. McQuade was appointed by President Barack Obama, and was the first woman to serve in her position. Earlier in her career, she worked as a sports writer and copy editor, a judicial law clerk, an associate in private practice, and an assistant U.S. attorney. She and her husband, Dan Hurley, have four children and live in Ann Arbor.
McQuade will be in conversation with Kimberly Atkins Stohr. Kimberly Atkins Stohr is a senior opinion writer and columnist for Boston Globe Opinion. She is also an MSNBC contributor, co-host of the Politicon podcast #SistersInLaw, and guest host on WBUR’s On Point. Previously, Kimberly was the first Washington, DC-based news correspondent for WBUR. She has also served as the Boston Herald's Washington bureau chief, guest host of C-SPAN's morning call-in show's Washington Journal, and a Supreme Court reporter for Massachusetts Lawyers Weekly and its sister publications. She has appeared as a political commentator on a host of national and international television and radio networks, including CNN, Fox News, NBC News, PBS, NPR, Sky News (UK), and CBC News (Canada).
This event is free with first come, first served seating.
Byron Tau — Means of Control: How the Hidden Alliance of Tech and Government Is Creating a New American Surveillance State — at The Wharf
"That evening, I was given a glimpse inside a hidden world. . . . An entirely new kind of surveillance program--one designed to track everyone."
For the past five years--ever since a chance encounter at a dinner party--journalist Byron Tau has been piecing together a secret story: how the whole of the internet and every digital device in the world became a mechanism of intelligence, surveillance, and monitoring.
Of course, our modern world is awash in surveillance. Most of us are dimly aware of this: Ever get the sense that an ad is "following" you around the internet? But the true potential of our phones, computers, homes, credit cards, and even the tires underneath our cars to reveal our habits and behavior would astonish most citizens. All of this surveillance has produced an extraordinary amount of valuable data about every one of us. That data is for sale--and the biggest customer is the U.S. government.
In the years after 9/11, the U.S. government, working with scores of anonymous companies, many scattered across bland Northern Virginia suburbs, built a foreign and domestic surveillance apparatus of breathtaking scope--one that can peer into the lives of nearly everyone on the planet. This cottage industry of data brokers and government bureaucrats has one directive--"get everything you can"--and the result is a surreal world in which defense contractors have marketing subsidiaries and marketing companies have defense contractor subsidiaries. And the public knows virtually nothing about it.
Sobering and revelatory, Means of Control is the defining story of our dangerous grand bargain--ubiquitous cheap technology, but at what price?
Byron Tau is an investigative and enterprise journalist who specializes in law, courts, and national security. He reports for and teaches at the Allbritton Journalism Institute, a journalism nonprofit launched in 2023 that trains and mentors early-career reporters. He previously worked at The Wall Street Journal and Politico. A native of Holliston, Massachusetts, Tau has degrees from McGill University in Montreal and Georgetown University in Washington, D.C.
This event is free with first come, first served seating.
Deborah Jackson-Taffa — Whiskey Tender — at Union Market
Deborah Jackson Taffa was raised to believe that some sacrifices were necessary to achieve a better life. Her grandparents--citizens of the Quechan Nation and Laguna Pueblo tribe--were sent to Indian boarding schools run by white missionaries, while her parents were encouraged to take part in governmental job training off the reservation. Assimilation meant relocation, but as Taffa matured into adulthood, she began to question the promise handed down by her elders and by American society: that if she gave up her culture, her land, and her traditions, she would not only be accepted, but would be able to achieve the "American Dream."
Whiskey Tender traces how a mixed tribe native girl--born on the California Yuma reservation and raised in Navajo territory in New Mexico--comes to her own interpretation of identity, despite her parent's desires for her to transcend the class and "Indian" status of her birth through education, and despite the Quechan tribe's particular traditions and beliefs regarding oral and recorded histories. Taffa's childhood memories unspool into meditations on tribal identity, the rampant criminalization of Native men, governmental assimilation policies, the Red Power movement, and the negotiation between belonging and resisting systemic oppression. Pan-Indian, as well as specific tribal histories and myths, blend with stories of a 1970s and 1980s childhood spent on and off the reservation.
Taffa offers a sharp and thought-provoking historical analysis laced with humor and heart. As she reflects on her past and present--the promise of assimilation and the many betrayals her family has suffered, both personal and historical; trauma passed down through generations--she reminds us of how the cultural narratives of her ancestors have been excluded from the central mythologies and structures of the "melting pot" of America, revealing all that is sacrificed for the promise of acceptance.
Deborah Jackson Taffa is a citizen of the Quechan (Yuma) Nation and Laguna Pueblo. She earned her MFA at the Iowa Writers Workshop, and is the Director of the MFA in Creative Writing Program at the Institute of American Indian Arts (IAIA) in Santa Fe, New Mexico. Her writing has appeared in The Rumpus, Boston Review, Los Angeles Review of Books, A Public Space, Salon, the Huffington Post, Prairie Schooner, The Best Travel Writing, and other outlets.
This event is free with first come, first served seating.
Tali Sharot & Cass R. Sunstein — Look Again: The Power of Noticing What Was Always There — at Conn Ave
Have you ever noticed that what is thrilling on Monday tends to become boring on Friday? Even exciting relationships, stimulating jobs, and breathtaking works of art lose their sparkle after a while. People stop noticing what is most wonderful in their own lives. They also stop noticing what is terrible. They get used to dirty air. They stay in abusive relationships. People grow to accept authoritarianism and take foolish risks. They become unconcerned by their own misconduct, blind to inequality, and are more liable to believe misinformation than ever before.
But what if we could find a way to see everything anew? What if you could regain sensitivity, not only to the great things in your life, but also to the terrible things you stopped noticing and so don't try to change?
Now, neuroscience professor Tali Sharot and Harvard law professor (and presidential advisor) Cass R. Sunstein investigate why we stop noticing both the great and not-so-great things around us and how to "dishabituate" at the office, in the bedroom, at the store, on social media, and in the voting booth. This groundbreaking work, based on decades of research in the psychological and biological sciences, illuminates how we can reignite the sparks of joy, innovate, and recognize where improvements urgently need to be made. The key to this disruption--to seeing, feeling, and noticing again--is change. By temporarily changing your environment, changing the rules, changing the people you interact with--or even just stepping back and imagining change--you regain sensitivity, allowing you to more clearly identify the bad and more deeply appreciate the good.
Tali Sharot is a professor of cognitive neuroscience at University College London and MIT. She is the founder and director of the Affective Brain Lab. She has written for outlets including The New York Times, Time, The Washington Post, has been a repeated guest on CNN, NBC, MSNBC, a presenter on the BBC, and served as an advisor for global companies and government projects. Her work has won her prestigious fellowships and prizes from the Wellcome Trust, American Psychological Society, British Psychological Society, and others. Her popular TED talks have accumulated more than a dozen million views. Before becoming a neuroscientist, Sharot worked in the financial industry. She is the author of award-winning books: The Optimism Bias and The Influential Mind. She lives in Boston and London with her husband and children.
Cass R. Sunstein is the nation's most-cited legal scholar who, for the past fifteen years, has been at the forefront of behavioral economics. From 2009 to 2012, he served as the administrator of the White House Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs. Since that time, he has served in the US government in multiple capacities and worked with the United Nations and the World Health Organization, where he chaired the Technical Advisory Group on Behavioral Insights and Sciences for Health during the COVID-19 pandemic. He is the Robert Walmsley University Professor at Harvard Law School. His book Nudge, coauthored with Richard Thaler, was a national bestseller. In 2018, he was the recipient of the Holberg Prize from the government of Norway, sometimes described as equivalent of the Nobel Prize for law and the humanities. He lives in Boston and Washington, DC, with his wife, children, and labrador retrievers.
This event is free with first come, first served seating.
Taymullah Abdur-Rahman — American Imam: From Pop Stardom to Prison Abolition — at Conn Ave
By the time he was twelve, Taymullah Abdur-Rahman (born Tyrone Sutton) was a rising pop star, recruited as part of the R&B group Perfect Gentlemen, with a top-ten hit, national teen magazine covers, and an appearance on The Oprah Winfrey Show. However, after his music career peaked, Abdur-Rahman found himself back home, with little to show for his success. He quickly became a teen father struggling to survive in Roxbury, MA. Seeing Islam as a way out of his hard-scrabble environment, he happily converted. Soon he was working in a maximum-security prison as a Muslim chaplain, where he became zealously focused on saving souls instead of understanding the outside forces that bring men to prison.
Later, in his work as the first paid Muslim chaplain at Harvard, Abdur-Rahman began to seek counsel outside of Islam, engaging with Jewish and Christian mentors who opened his eyes to the gifts of interreligious dialogue and helped lead him to what he was truly seeking: enlightenment. With this new framework, he returned to working with prisoners and clearly saw the cyclical effects of systemic racism that keep Black and brown people locked up and without support in America today. A sweeping narrative, American Imam voices the contemporary concerns of Black Muslim Americans in the shadow of El Hajj Malik El Shabazz, in the aftermath of 9/11, and in light of the fights for social justice and prison abolition. Abdur-Rahman's story sounds an indelible rallying cry for understanding across race, religion, and cultural divides.
Taymullah Abdur-Rahman (Tyrone Sutton) is a Black Muslim thought leader, social entrepreneur, educator, and prison abolitionist. He holds a certification in Islamic studies from Al Baseerah International Institute and a master's in Global Interreligious Leadership from Andover Newton Theological School. He spent a decade as a prison chaplain and was the first paid Muslim chaplain at Harvard University. Currently, he is a doctoral candidate for Transformational Leadership at Boston University's School of Theology and a senior educator in Islamic and Interreligious Studies at Hebrew College. He is creator and host of the American Muslim Daily podcast and mobile app, and founder of Spentem, a prison abolition and direct sales company for youth. He lives in Massachusetts.
This event is free with first come, first served seating.
Gretchen Sisson — Relinquished: The Politics of Adoption and the Privilege of American Motherhood - with Nicole Chung — at Conn Ave
Adoption has always been viewed as a beloved institution for building families, as well as a mutually agreeable common ground in the abortion debate, but little attention has been paid to the lives of mothers who relinquish infants for private adoption. Relinquished reveals adoption to be a path of constrained choice for those for whom abortion is inaccessible, or for whom parenthood is untenable. The stories of relinquishing mothers are stories about our country's refusal to care for families at the most basic level, and to instead embrace an individual, private solution to a large-scale, social problem.
With the recent decision in Dobbs v. Jackson Women's Health Organization revoking abortion protections, we are in a political moment in which adoption is, increasingly, being revealed as an institution devoted to separating families and policing parenthood under the guise of feel-good family-building. Rooted in a long-term study, Relinquished is an analysis of hundreds of in-depth interviews with American mothers who placed their children for domestic adoption. The voices of these women are powerful and heartrending; they deserve to be heard.
Gretchen Sisson, Ph.D., is a qualitative sociologist studying abortion and adoption at Advancing New Standards in Reproductive Health (ANSIRH) in the Department of Obstetrics, Gynecology, and Reproductive Sciences at University of California, San Francisco. Her research was cited in the Supreme Court's dissent in Dobbs v. Jackson Women's Health Organization and has been covered in The Washington Post, The Nation, All Things Considered and Consider This, New York Magazine, VOX, and other outlets.
Sisson will be in conversation with Nicole Chung. Nicole Chung is the author of A Living Remedy and All You Can Ever Know. A Living Remedy was named a New York Times Book Review Editors’ Choice/Staff Pick and a Best Book of 2023 by Time, Harper’s Bazaar, ELLE, USA Today, Esquire, and Booklist, among others. Chung's 2018 debut All You Can Ever Know was a national bestseller, a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award, a semifinalist for the PEN Open Book Award, and an Indies Choice Honor Book. Her writing has appeared in The New York Times Magazine, The Atlantic, Time, GQ, Esquire, The Guardian, and many other publications.
This event is free with first come, first served seating.
Katie Rogers — American Woman: The Transformation of the Modern First Lady, from Hillary Clinton to Jill Biden - with Maureen Dowd — at Conn Ave
Since the Clinton era, shifts in media, politics, and pop culture have all redefined expectations of First Ladies, even as the boundaries set upon them have often remained anachronistic. With sharp insights and dozens of firsthand interviews with major players in the Biden, Obama, Trump, Bush, and Clinton orbits, including Jill Biden and Hillary Clinton, New York Times White House correspondent Katie Rogers traces the evolution of the role of the twenty-first-century First Lady from a ceremonial figurehead to a powerful political operator, which culminates in the tenure of First Lady Jill Biden.
Dr. Jill Biden began her journey toward public life in 1975 as a twenty-three-year-old who caught the eye of a widowed Senator Joe Biden. Recovering from the heartbreak of her failed first marriage, she found a man who was still grieving. She knitted his life together after unspeakable tragedy and stood by his side through three presidential campaigns.
In some ways, her legacy as First Lady was set before she ever entered the White House: She is the first presidential spouse in history to work in a paid role outside the White House, a decision that blazes the path for future first spouses. But as a prime guardian of one of the most insular operations in modern politics, she is also a central part of her husband's presidential legacy.
Through deep reporting and newly discovered correspondence, American Woman is the first book to paint a full picture of Jill Biden while exploring how she helps answer the evolving question of what the role of the modern First Lady should be.
Katie Rogers is a White House correspondent for The New York Times, where she has worked since 2014. She has covered two presidential administrations.
Rogers will be in conversation with Maureen Dowd. Dowd, winner of the 1999 Pulitzer Prize for distinguished commentary and author of three New York Times best sellers, became an Op-Ed columnist in 1995. In August 2014, she also became a writer for The Times Magazine. Born in Washington, Ms. Dowd began her journalism career in 1974 as an editorial assistant for The Washington Star, where she later became a sports columnist, metropolitan reporter and feature writer. In 1983, she joined The New York Times as a metropolitan correspondent and then moved to The Times’s Washington bureau in 1986 to cover politics. In the run-up to the 2004 presidential election, G. P. Putnam published her first book, Bushworld. After Bushworld, Dowd switched from presidential politics to sexual politics in another best seller, Are Men Necessary? When Sexes Collide. Her third book, The Year of Voting Dangerously: The Derangement of American Politics, was released in 2016. In addition to The New York Times, Ms. Dowd has written for GQ, Vanity Fair, Rolling Stone, The New Republic, Mademoiselle, Sports Illustrated and others.
This event is free with first come, first served seating.
Steve Coll — The Achilles Trap: Saddam Hussein, the C.I.A., and the Origins of America's Invasion of Iraq — at Conn Ave
When the United States invaded Iraq in 2003, its message was clear: Iraq, under the control of strongman Saddam Hussein, possessed weapons of mass destruction that, if left unchecked, posed grave danger to the world. But when no WMDs were found, the United States and its allies were forced to examine the political and intelligence failures that had led to the invasion and the occupation, and the civil war that followed. One integral question has remained unsolved: Why had Saddam seemingly sacrificed his long reign in power by giving the false impression that he had hidden stocks of dangerous weapons?
The Achilles Trap masterfully untangles the people, ploys of power, and geopolitics that led to America's disastrous war with Iraq and, for the first time, details America's fundamental miscalculations during its decades-long relationship with Saddam Hussein. Beginning with Saddam's rise to power in 1979 and the birth of Iraq's secret nuclear weapons program, Steve Coll traces Saddam's motives by way of his inner circle. He brings to life the diplomats, scientists, family members, and generals who had no choice but to defer to their leader--a leader directly responsible for the deaths of hundreds of thousands of Iraqis, as well as the torture or imprisonment of hundreds of thousands more. This was a man whose reasoning was impossible to reduce to a simple explanation, and the CIA and successive presidential administrations failed to grasp critical nuances of his paranoia, resentments, and inconsistencies--even when the stakes were incredibly high.
Calling on unpublished and underreported sources, interviews with surviving participants, and Saddam's own transcripts and audio files, Coll pulls together an incredibly comprehensive portrait of a man who was convinced the world was out to get him and acted accordingly. A work of great historical significance, The Achilles Trap is the definitive account of how corruptions of power, lies of diplomacy, and vanity--on both sides--led to avoidable errors of statecraft, ones that would enact immeasurable human suffering and forever change the political landscape as we know it.
Steve Coll is the author of the Pulitzer Prize-winning Ghost Wars and a professor and dean emeritus of the Graduate School of Journalism at Columbia University, and from 2007 to 2013 was president of the New America Foundation, a public policy institute in Washington, D.C. He is a staff writer for The New Yorker and previously worked for twenty years at The Washington Post, where he received a Pulitzer Prize for explanatory journalism in 1990. He is the author of nine books, including On the Grand Trunk Road, The Bin Ladens, Private Empire, and Directorate S.
This event is free with first come, first served seating.
Xochitl Gonzalez — Anita de Monte Laughs Last — at Conn Ave
Anita de Monte, a rising star in the art world, is found dead in New York City; her tragic death is the talk of the town. Until it isn't. By 1998 Anita's name has been all but forgotten--certainly by the time Raquel, a third-year art history student is preparing her final thesis. On College Hill, surrounded by progeny of film producers, C-Suite executives, and international art-dealers, most of whom float through life knowing that their futures are secured, Raquel feels herself an outsider. Students of color, like Raquel, are the minority there, and the pressure to work twice as hard for the same opportunities is no secret.
But when Raquel becomes romantically involved with a well-connected older art student, she finds herself unexpectedly rising up the social ranks. As she attempts to straddle both worlds, she stumbles upon Anita's story, raising questions about the dynamics of her own relationship, which eerily mirrors that of the forgotten artist.
Moving back and forth through time and told from the perspectives of both women, Anita de Monte Laughs Last, is a propulsive, witty examination of power, love, and art, daring to ask who gets to be remembered and who is left behind in the rarefied world of the elite.
Xochitl Gonzalez is the New York Times bestselling author of Olga Dies Dreaming. Named a Best of 2022 by The New York Times, TIME, Kirkus, Washington Post, and NPR, Olga Dies Dreaming was the winner of the Brooklyn Public Library Book Prize in Fiction and the New York City Book Award. Gonzalez is a 2021 MFA graduate from the Iowa Writers' Workshop. Her nonfiction work has been published in Elle Decor, Allure, Vogue, Real Simple, and The Cut. Her commentary writing for The Atlantic was recognized as a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize. A native Brooklynite and proud public school graduate, Gonzalez holds a BA from Brown University and lives in her hometown of Brooklyn with her dog, Hectah Lavoe.
This event is free with first come, first served seating.
Peter Pomerantsev — How to Win and Information War: The Propagandist Who Outwitted Hitler — at Conn Ave
In the summer of 1941, Hitler ruled Europe from the Atlantic to the Black Sea. Britain was struggling to combat his powerful propaganda machine, crowing victory and smearing his enemies as liars and manipulators over his frequent radio speeches, blasted out on loudspeakers and into homes. British claims that Hitler was dangerous had little impact against this wave of disinformation.
Except for the broadcasts of someone called Der Chef, a German who questioned Nazi doctrine. He had access to high-ranking German military secrets and spoke of internal rebellion. His listeners included German soldiers and citizens, as well as politicians in Washington DC who were debating getting into the war. And--most importantly--Der Chef was a fiction. He was a character created by the British propagandist Thomas Sefton Delmer, a unique weapon in the war.
Then, as author Peter Pomerantsev seeks to tell Delmer's story, he is called into a wartime propaganda effort of his own: the US response to the invasion of Ukraine. In flashes forward to the present day, Pomerantsev weaves in what he's learning from Delmer as he seeks to fight against Vladimir Putin's tyranny and lies. This book is the story of Delmer and his modern investigator, as they each embark on their own quest to manipulate the passions of supporters and enemies, and to turn the tide of an information war, an extraordinary history that is informing the present before our eyes.
Peter Pomerantsev is a senior fellow at Johns Hopkins University, where he co-directs the Arena Initiative. He is the author of Nothing is True and Everything is Possible: The Surreal Heart of the New Russia, which won the 2016 Royal Society of Literature Ondaatje Prize, and of This is Not Propaganda: Adventures in the War Against Reality.
This event is free with first come, first served seating.
Dana R. Fisher — Saving Ourselves: From Climate Shocks to Climate Action - with Dr. Mustafa Santiago Ali — at Conn Ave
We've known for decades that climate change is an existential crisis. For just as long, we've seen the complete failure of our institutions to rise to the challenge. Governments have struggled to meet even modest goals. Fossil fuel interests maintain a stranglehold on political and economic power. Even though we have seen growing concern from everyday people, civil society has succeeded only in pressuring decision makers to adopt watered-down policies. All the while, the climate crisis worsens. Is there any hope of achieving the systemic change we need?
Dana R. Fisher argues that there is a realistic path forward for climate action--but only through mass mobilization that responds to the growing severity and frequency of disastrous events. She assesses the current state of affairs and shows why public policy and private-sector efforts have been ineffective. Spurred by this lack of progress, climate activism has become increasingly confrontational. Fisher examines the radical flank of the climate movement: its emergence and growth, its use of direct action, and how it might evolve as the climate crisis worsens. She considers when and how activism is most successful, identifying the importance of creating community, capitalizing on shocking moments, and cultivating resilience. Clear-eyed yet optimistic, Saving Ourselves offers timely insights on how social movements can take power back from deeply entrenched interests and open windows of opportunity for transformative climate action.
Dana R. Fisher is the director of the Center for Environment, Community, and Equity and a professor in the School of International Service at American University. Her books include Activism Inc.: How the Outsourcing of Grassroots Campaigns Is Strangling Progressive Politics in America (2006) and American Resistance: From the Women's March to the Blue Wave (Columbia, 2019).
Fisher will be in conversation with Dr. Mustafa Santiago Ali. Dr. Mustafa Santiago Ali is a Thought-Leader, Strategist, Policymaker and Activist committed to the fight for environmental justice and economic equity. Mustafa Santiago Ali is internationally renowned as a Keynote Speaker, Trainer, Leader, Community Liaison and Facilitator specializing in Social Justice issues focused on revitalizing our most vulnerable communities. Throughout his career, Mustafa Santiago Ali has worked to elevate environmental justice issues to strengthen environmental justice policies, programs and initiatives. Mustafa Santiago Ali worked at the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) and in March 2017, Mustafa Santiago Ali resigned to join the Hip Hop Caucus (HHC) as the Senior Vice President of Climate, Environmental Justice & Community Revitalization. Mustafa has been featured or cited in over 300 news publications and has been a guest lecturer at over 100 colleges and universities. He currently serves as a commissioner, advisor, or board member on the Roddenberry Foundation, National Children’s Campaign, Climate Power, TREE, One Million of Us, The Weather Channel (Pattrn), Green Sports Alliance, DC Environmental Film Festival, The NAACP Image Awards & The American Academy of Arts and Sciences (AAAS).
This event is free with first come, first served seating.
Joanne Leedom-Ackerman — The Far Side of the Desert — at Conn Ave
Sisters Samantha and Monte Waters are vacationing together in Santiago de Compostela, Spain, enjoying a festival and planning to meet with their brother, Cal--but the idyllic plans are short-lived. When terrorists' attacks rock the city around them, Monte, a U.S. foreign service officer, and Samantha, an international television correspondent, are separated, and one of them is whisked away in the frenzy.
The family mobilizes, using all their contacts to try to find their missing sister, but to no avail. She has vanished. As time presses on, the outlook darkens. Can she be found, or is she a lost cause? And, even if she returns, will the damage to her and those around her be irreparable?
Moving from Spain to Washington to Morocco to Gibraltar to the Sahara Desert, The Far Side of the Desert is a family drama and political thriller that explores links of terrorism, crime, and financial manipulation, revealing the grace that ultimately foils destruction.
Joanne Leedom-Ackerman is a novelist, short story writer, and journalist whose works of fiction include Burning Distance, The Dark Path to the River, and No Marble Angels. Her recent nonfiction book, PEN Journeys: Memoir of Literature on the Line, drew inspiration from her job as a vice president of the worldwide writers and human rights organization PEN International. She is also on the boards of the American Writers Museum, the International Center for Journalists, Words Without Borders, and Refugees International. She is a member of the Council on Foreign Relations and the Texas Institute of Letters. The Far Side of the Desert is her latest novel.
This event is free with first come, first served seating.
Maxwell L. Stearns — Parliamentary America: The Least Radical Means of Radically Repairing Our Broken Democracy — at Conn Ave
Americans face increasingly stark choices each presidential election and a growing sense that our government can't solve the nation's most urgent challenges. Our eighteenth-century system is ill suited to our twenty-first-century world. Information-age technology has undermined our capacity to face common problems together and turned our democracy upside down, with gerrymanders letting representatives choose voters rather than voters choosing them. In Parliamentary America, Maxwell L. Stearns argues that the solution to these complex problems is a parliamentary democracy.
Stearns considers such leading alternatives as ranked choice voting, the national popular vote, and congressional term limits, showing why these can't solve our constitutional crisis. Instead, three amendments--expanding the House of Representatives, having House party coalitions choose the president, and letting the House end a failing presidency based on no confidence--will produce a robust multiparty democracy. These amendments hold an essential advantage over other proposals: by leaving every member of the House and Senate as incumbents in their districts or states, the amendments provide a pressure-release valve against reforms threatening that status.
Stearns takes readers on a world tour--England, France, Germany, Israel, Taiwan, Brazil, and Venezuela--showing what works in government, what doesn't, and how to make the best features our own. Genuine party competition and governing coalitions, commonplace across the globe, may seem like a fantasy in the United States. But we can make them a reality. This rare book offers an optimistic vision, explaining in accessible terms how to transform our troubled democracy into a thriving parliamentary America.
Maxwell L. Stearns is the Venable, Baetjer & Howard Professor of Law at the University of Maryland Carey School of Law. He has authored dozens of articles and several books on the Constitution, the Supreme Court, and the economic analysis of law.
This event is free with first come, first served seating.
James L. Swanson — The Deerfield Massacre: A Surprise Attack, a Forced March, and the Fight for Survival in Early America — at Conn Ave
Once it was one of the most famous events in early American history. Today, it has been nearly forgotten.
In an obscure, two-hundred-year-old museum in a little village in western Massachusetts, there lies what once was the most revered but now totally forgotten relic from the history of early New England--the massive, tomahawk-scarred door that came to symbolize the notorious Deerfield Massacre. This impregnable barricade--known to early Americans as "The Old Indian Door"--constructed from double-thick planks of Massachusetts oak and studded with hand-wrought iron nails to repel the flailing tomahawk blades of several attacking native tribes, is the sole surviving artifact from the most dramatic moment in colonial American history: Leap Year, February 29, 1704, a cold, snowy night when hundreds of native Americans and their French allies swept down upon an isolated frontier outpost and ruthlessly slaughtered its inhabitants.
The sacking of Deerfield led to one of the greatest sagas of adventure, survival, sacrifice, family, honor, and faith ever told in North America. 112 survivors, including their fearless minister, the Reverand John Williams, were captured and led on a 300-mile forced march north, into enemy territory in Canada. Any captive who faltered or became too weak to continue the journey--including Williams's own wife and one of his children--fell under the knife or tomahawk.
Survivors of the march willed themselves to live and endured captivity. Ransomed by the King of England's royal governor of Massachusetts, the captives later returned home to Deerfield, rebuilt their town and, for the rest of their lives, told the incredible tale. The memoir of Rev. Williams, The Redeemed Captive, became the first bestselling book in American history and published a few years after his liberation, it remains a literary classic. The old Indian door is a touchstone that conjures up one of the most dramatic and inspiring stories of colonial America--and now, finally, this legendary event is brought to vivid life by popular historian James Swanson
James L. Swanson is the author of the New York Times bestseller Manhunt: The 12-Day Chase for Lincoln's Killer. He is an attorney who has written about history, the Constitution, and popular culture, for a variety of publications, including The Wall Street Journal, American Heritage, Smithsonian, and the Los Angeles Times. He serves on the advisory council of the Ford's Theatre Abraham Lincoln Bicentennial Campaign and is a member of the advisory committee of the Abraham Lincoln Bicentennial Commission.
This event is free with first come, first served seating.
Kara Alaimo — Over the Influece: Why Social Media is Toxic for Women and Girls And How We Can Take it Back — at Conn Ave
Many women and girls are trying to unplug, from low-tech weekends to Instagram hiatuses and screen time alerts. But disconnecting from the influence of social media is way more complicated than deleting or restricting access to an app.
In Over the Influence, Kara Alaimo demonstrates how social media affects every aspect of women's lives -- from our relationships and our parenting to our physical and mental wellbeing. Over the Influence is a book about what it means to live in the world social media has wrought - whether you're constantly connected or have deleted your accounts forever. Alaimo shows why you're likely to get fewer followers if you're a woman. She explains how fake news is crafted to prey on women's vulnerabilities. And she reveals why so much of the content we find in our feeds is specifically designed to hold us back.
But we can change this. Alaimo offers up brilliant advice for how to get over the influence -- how to handle our daughters' use of social media, use apps to find the romantic partners we're looking for and bolster our careers, and protect ourselves from sextortionists, catfishers and trolls. Over the Influence calls on women to recognize and call out the subtle (and not-so-subtle) sexism, misogyny and misinformation we find online and use our platforms to empower ourselves and other women.
Kara Alaimo, Ph.D. is a communication professor at Fairleigh Dickinson University. She writes frequently for CNN Opinion about the social impact of social media and issues affecting women. A former communicator at the United Nations and in the Obama administration, she lives in New Jersey with her family
This event is free with first come, first served seating.
Amy Lin — Here After - with Nicole Chung — at Conn Ave
"When he dies, I fall out of time."
Amy Lin never expected to find a love like the one she shares with her husband, Kurtis, a gifted young architect who pulls her toward joy, adventure, and greater self-acceptance. But on a sweltering August morning, only a few months shy of the newlyweds' move to Vancouver, thirty-two-year-old Kurtis heads out to run a half-marathon with Amy's family. It's the last time she sees her husband alive.
Ten days after this seismic loss, Amy is in the hospital, navigating her own shocking medical crisis and making life-or-death decisions about her treatment.
What follows is a rich and unflinchingly honest portrayal of her life with Kurtis, the vortex created by his death, and the ongoing struggle Amy faces as she attempts to understand her own experience in the context of commonly held "truths" about what the grieving process looks like.
Here After is a singular love and loss story, a meditation on the ways in which Kurtis' death shatters any set ideas Amy ever held about grief, strength, and memory.
Amy Lin is a writer and educator who lives in Calgary, Alberta, Canada. A recipient of residencies from Yaddo and Casa Comala, her work has been published in Ploughshares. Here After is her debut memoir.
Lin will be in conversation with Nicole Chung. Nicole Chung is the author of A Living Remedy and All You Can Ever Know. A Living Remedy was named a New York Times Book Review Editors’ Choice/Staff Pick and a Best Book of 2023 by Time, Harper’s Bazaar, ELLE, USA Today, Esquire, and Booklist, among others. Chung's 2018 debut All You Can Ever Know was a national bestseller, a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award, a semifinalist for the PEN Open Book Award, and an Indies Choice Honor Book. Her writing has appeared in The New York Times Magazine, The Atlantic, Time, GQ, Esquire, The Guardian, and many other publications.
This event is free with first come, first served seating.
Sasha Issenberg — The Lie Detectives: In Search of a Playbook for Winning Elections in the Disinformation Age — at Conn Ave
A decade after The Victory Lab: The Secret Science of Winning Campaigns, which Politico called " Moneyball for politics," journalist Sasha Issenberg returns to the cutting edge of political innovation to reveal how campaigners are navigating the era's most pressing new challenge: how to deal with disinformation.
The Lie Detectives is a lively and deep secret history of Democratic politics in the Trump years, told through a cast of strategists and tacticians on the front lines. There's Jiore Craig, a globetrotting young digital expert who invented the job of counter-disinformation operative for American campaigns despite never having worked on one, and Cheri Bustos, a congresswoman from a Trump-supporting district who struggled to convince her colleagues that not every lie targeting them online amounted to an electoral problem. There's Silicon Valley investor Reid Hoffman, whose emergence as one of the American left's biggest donors has forced his adviser Dmitri Mehlhorn into the role of moral compass for a movement still wrestling with whether it should counter fake news by producing its own, and David Goldstein and Jehmu Greene, who are confronting "the Big Lie" in the vernacular of online conspiracy theories, with gifs, memes, and ugly graphics of their own.
The Lie Detectives presents a vivid snapshot of a political class trying to come to terms with an exploding social media landscape, and using every weapon in its arsenal to counter the biggest threat it has ever faced to its way of doing business and winning power.
Sasha Issenberg is a journalist and the author of four previous books, including The Victory Lab: The Secret Science of Winning Campaigns and, most recently, The Engagement: America’s Quarter-Century Struggle Over Same-Sex Marriage. He teaches in the UCLA Department of Political Science and is a correspondent for Monocle. His work has also appeared in New York, The New York Times Magazine, Bloomberg Businessweek and Politico Magazine.
This event is free with first come, first served seating.
Admiral James Stavridis & Elliot Ackerman — 2054 — at Conn Ave
It is twenty years after the catastrophic war between the United States and China that brought down the old American political order. A new party has emerged in the US, one that's held power for over a decade. Efforts to cement its grip have resulted in mounting violent resistance. The American president has control of the media, but he is beginning to lose control of the streets. Many fear he'll stop at nothing to remain in the White House. Suddenly, he collapses in the middle of an address to the nation. After an initial flurry of misinformation, the administration reluctantly announces his death. A cover-up ensues, conspiracy theories abound, and the country descends into a new type of civil war.
A handful of elite actors from the worlds of computer science, intelligence, and business have a fairly good idea what happened. All signs point to a profound breakthrough in AI, of which the remote assassination of an American president is hardly the most game-changing ramification. The trail leads to an outpost in the Amazon rainforest, the last known whereabouts of the tech visionary who predicted this breakthrough. As some of the world's great powers, old and new, state and nonstate alike, struggle to outmaneuver one another in this new Great Game of scientific discovery, the outcome becomes entangled with the fate of American democracy.
Combining a deep understanding of AI, biotech, and the possibility of a coming Singularity, along with their signature geopolitical sophistication, Elliot Ackerman and Admiral James Stavridis have once again written a visionary work. 2054 is a novel that reads like a thriller even as it demands that we consider the trajectory of our society and its potentially calamitous destination.
Admiral Jim Stavridis, USN (Ret.), spent more than thirty years in the US Navy, rising to the rank of four-star admiral. He was Supreme Allied Commander at NATO and previously commanded US Southern Command, overseeing military operations through Latin America. He holds a PhD from the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy at Tufts University, where he recently served five years as dean. He received fifty medals in the course of his military career, including twenty-eight from foreign nations. He has published twelve other books, including 2034, with Elliot Ackerman, and is chief international analyst for NBC News and a weekly columnist for Bloomberg Opinion. He is currently vice chair, global affairs, and managing director of the Carlyle and the chair of the board of The Rockefeller Foundation.
Elliot Ackerman is the author of the novels Halcyon, Red Dress in Black and White, Waiting for Eden, Dark at the Crossing, and Green on Blue, and the memoirs The Fifth Act and Places and Names. His books have been nominated for the National Book Award and the Dayton Literary Peace Prize. He is both a former White House Fellow and Marine, and served five tours of duty in Iraq and Afghanistan, where he received the Silver Star, the Bronze Star for Valor, and the Purple Heart. He is currently a contributing writer at The Atlantic.
This event is free with first come, first served seating.
Maurice Vellekoop — I'm So Glad We Had This Time Together — at Union Market
Meet little Maurice Vellekoop, the youngest of four children raised by Dutch immigrants in the 1970s in a blue-collar suburb of Toronto. Despite their working-class milieu, the Vellekoops are devoted to art, music, and film, and they instill a deep reverence for the arts in young Maurice--except for literature. He'd much rather watch Cher and Carol Burnett on TV than read a book. He also loves playing with his girlfriends' Barbie dolls and helping his Mum in her hair salon, which she runs out of the basement of their house. In short, he is really, really gay. Which is a huge problem, because the family is part of the Christian Reformed Church, a strict Calvinist sect. They go to church twice on Sunday, and they send their kids to a private Christian school, catechism classes, and the Calvinist Cadet Corps. Needless to say, the church is intolerant of homosexuality. Though she loves her son deeply, Maurice's mother, Ann, cannot accept him, setting the course for a long estrangement.
Vellekoop struggles through all of this until he graduates from high school and is accepted into the Ontario College of Art in the early 1980s. Here he finds a welcoming community of bohemians, including a brilliant, flamboyantly gay professor who encourages him to come out. But just as he's dipping his toes into the waters of gay sex and love, a series of romantic disasters, followed by a violent attack, sets him back severely. And then the shadow of the AIDS era descends. Maurice reacts by retreating to the safety of childhood obsessions, and seeks to satisfy his emotional needs with film- and theatre-going, music, boozy self-medication, and prolific art-making. When these tactics inevitably fail, Vellekoop at last embarks on a journey towards his heart's true desire. In psychotherapy, the spiderweb of family, faith, guilt, sexuality, mental health, the intergenerational fallout of World War II, King Ludwig II of Bavaria, French Formula Hairspray, and much more at last begins to untangle. But it's going to be a long, messy, and occasionally hilarious process.
I'm So Glad We Had This Time Together is an enthralling portrait of what it means to be true to yourself, to learn to forgive, and to be an artist.
Maurice Vellekoop was born in 1964 in a suburb of Toronto. A prolific artist and illustrator, he has worked non-stop for the last three decades. In addition to publications, his corporate clients include Swissair, Abercrombie & Fitch, Air Canada, Smart Car, LVMH, and Bush Irish Whiskey. He lives on Toronto Island with his partner Gordon Bowness.
This event is free with first come, first served seating.
Nam Le — 36 Ways of Writing a Vietnamese Poem — at Conn Ave
In his first international release since the award-winning, best-selling The Boat, Nam Le delivers a shot across the bow with a book-length poem that honors every convention of diasporic literature--in a virtuosic array of forms and registers--before shattering the form itself. In line with the works of Claudia Rankine, Cathy Park Hong and Theresa Hak Kyung Cha, this book is an urgent, unsettling reckoning with identity--and the violence of identity. For Le, a Vietnamese refugee in the West, this means the assumed violence of racism, oppression and historical trauma. But it also means the violence of that assumption. Of being always assumed to be outside one's home, country, culture or language. And the complex violence--for the diasporic writer who wants to address any of this--of language itself. Making use of multiple tones, moods, masks and camouflages, Le's poetic debut moves with unpredictable and destabilizing energy between the personal and political. As self-indicting as it is scathing, hilarious as it is desperately moving, this is a singular, breakthrough book.
Nam Le’s poetry has been published in Poetry, The American Poetry Review, The Paris Review, Bomb, Conjunctions, Boston Review, Lana Turner and The Monthly. He has received major awards in America, Europe and Australia, including the PEN/Malamud Award, the Anisfield-Wolf Book Award, the Dylan Thomas Prize, the Australian Prime Minister’s Literary Award and the Melbourne Prize for Literature. His short story collection The Boat has been republished as a modern classic and is widely translated, anthologized and taught. He lives in Melbourne, Australia.
This event is free with first come, first served seating.
Colum McCann & Diane Foley — American Mother — at The Wharf
In late 2021, Diane Foley sat at a table across from her son's killer, Alexanda Kotey, a member of the ISIS group known as "The Beatles" who plead guilty to the kidnapping, torture, and murder of her son seven years before. Kotey was about to go serve life imprisonment and this was Diane's chance to talk to the man who had been involved with brutally taking her son's last breath. What would she say to his killer? What would he reveal to her? Might she even be able to summon forgiveness for him?
So begins American Mother-- which reads alternately like a thriller, a biography, a mystery, a memoir, and a literary examination of grace.
Diane looks back on the early days when Jim was a child and his journey to journalism, and the killing fields of the world where he reports with indefatigable determination and insight on the plight of those caught up in the agonies of war. She guides us through her family history and the difficulties they faced when Jim was captured. And she also charts the tenacity it takes to turn her grief into grace as she seeks to give voice to those who are still being kidnapped and wrongfully detained around the world.
Few journeys are more worthy than this and, in this astonishing book, we are all invited to celebrate the lives of those who are never, in the end, gone.
Colum McCann is the author of seven novels, three collections of stories, and two works of non-fiction. Born and raised in Dublin, Ireland, he has been the recipient of many international honors, including the U.S National Book Award, the International Dublin Literary Prize, a Chevalier des Arts et Lettres from the French government, election to the Irish Arts Academy, several European awards, the 2010 Best Foreign Novel Award in China, and an Oscar nomination. In 2017, he was elected to the American Academy of Arts. His work has been published in over 40 languages. He is the President and co-founder of the non-profit global story exchange organization Narrative 4. He is the Thomas Hunter Writer in Residence at Hunter College in New York, where he lives with his wife, Allison, and their family. His most recent novel, Apeirogon, became an immediate New York Times best-seller and won several major international awards.
Diane Foley founded the James W. Foley Legacy Foundation to advocate for freedom for innocent Americans held hostage or wrongfully detained abroad and for journalist safety. Foley has raised awareness about international hostage-taking through her government advocacy, the documentary Jim: the James Foley Story, and opinion pieces in The New York Times, The Washington Post and USA Today. She lives in New Hampshire with her husband, Dr. John W. Foley, and is the mother of four other children and seven grandchildren.
This event is free with first come, first served seating.
Whim n' Rhythm
This event is not ticketed. Seating is available on a first come, first served basis.
In 1981, seven Yale students came together to form the university's first and only all-senior all-treble a cappella group. Today, Whim 'n Rhythm is a nonprofit organization composed of twelve of the best senior soprano-alto singers at Yale. Since its founding, the members of Whim 'n Rhythm have recorded professional studio albums and traveled to every continent to share their talent and love of singing with audiences around the world.
Gemini Wahhaj — The Children of This Madness - with Javed Jahangir and Sonal Kohli — at Union Market
As the US war in Iraq plays out a world away, and Beena struggles to belong to Houston’s tony Bengali American community-many of whom serve the same corporate masters she sees destroying Iraq-recently widowed engineering professor Nasir Uddin journeys to America not only to see Beena and her new husband but the many former students who make up the immigrant community Beena has come to view with ambivalence. With subtlety, grace, and love, Wahhaj dramatizes this mingling of generations and cultures, and the search for an ever-elusive home that define the Bengali American experience.
Gemini Wahhaj is a Bangladeshi American writer living in the US. She wrote her debut novel The Children of This Madness as a new immigrant in the US, while she was a graduate student in the creative writing program at the University of Houston and war raged in Iraq. She is grateful to publish the novel in December of this year, in the 20 year anniversary of the Iraq war, about Bengalis living in Texas, and their complicated history with both Iraq and the US.
Wahhaj will be in conversation with Javed Jahangir and Sonal Kohli. Javed Jahangir’s fiction has been published in LUMINA Literary Journal (Sarah Lawrence College), HIMAL Magazine, Smokelong Journal, LOST Magazine, Bengal Lights Journal, Six Seasons Review, Daily Star, Bangladesh, and others. He was on the 2011 panel of judges for the RISCA (Rhode Island State Council Arts) Fiction Fellowship award. He was part of Jenna Blum’s Master Class at Grub Street. He has contributed to, and been editor-in-chief for The Grub Street Writers’ 10 year Anthology, and has been a reader for the Harvard Review. His novel, Ghost Alley, was published by Bengal Foundation Publishing, and debuted at the Hay Festival in 2014. Ghost Alley was reviewed in Wasafiri Journal. He is currently working on a second novel, and a collection of short stories.
Sonal Kohli grew up in Delhi and now lives in the Washington, D.C. area. She holds an MA in Creative Writing from the University of East Anglia, UK, and a BA in Economics from Shri Ram College of Commerce, Delhi University. She has received fellowships from the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts and Sangam House. The House Next to the Factory, her critically acclaimed book of linked stories, was featured on BBC Radio 4, was long listed for the Tata Literature Live! First Book Award, and was a Book of the Year for The Hindu, Hindustan Times, The Wire and other publications.
This event is free with first come, first served seating.
Aggie Blum Thompson — Such a Lovely Family — at Conn Ave
The cherry blossoms are in full bloom in Washington, D.C., and the Calhouns are in the midst of hosting their annual party to celebrate the best of the spring season. With a house full of friends, neighbors, and their beloved three adult children, the Calhouns are expecting another picture-perfect event. But a brutal murder in the middle of the celebration transforms the yearly gathering into a homicide scene, and all the guests into suspects.
Behind their façade of perfection, the Calhoun family has been keeping some very dark secrets. Parents who use money and emotional manipulation to control their children. Two sons, one the black sheep who is desperate to outrun mistakes he's made, and the other a new father, willing to risk everything to protect his child. And a daughter: an Instagram influencer who refuses to face the truth about the man she married.
As the investigation heats up, family tensions build, and alliances shift. Long-buried resentments surface, forcing the Calhouns to face their darkest secrets before it's too late.
Before turning to fiction, Aggie Blum Thompson covered real-life crime as a newspaper reporter for a number of papers, including The Boston Globe and The Washington Post. Aggie is a member of Sisters in Crime, Mystery Writers of America, and International Thriller Writers, and serves as the program director for the Montgomery County chapter of the Maryland Writers Association. She lives with her husband and two children in the suburbs of Washington DC.
This event is free with first come, first served seating.
Téa Obreht — The Morningside — at Conn Ave
After being expelled from their ancestral home in a not-so-distant future, Silvia and her mother finally settle at the Morningside, a crumbling luxury tower in a place called Island City where Silvia's aunt Ena serves as the superintendent. Silvia feels unmoored in her new life because her mother has been so diligently secretive about their family's past, and because the once-vibrant city where she lives is now half-underwater. Silvia knows almost nothing about the place where she was born and spent her early years, nor does she fully understand why she and her mother had to leave. But in Ena there is an opening: a person willing to give the young girl glimpses into the folktales of her demolished homeland, a place of natural beauty and communal spirit that is lacking in Silvia's lonely and impoverished reality.
Enchanted by Ena's stories, Silvia begins seeing the world with magical possibilities and becomes obsessed with the mysterious older woman who lives in the penthouse of the Morningside. Bezi Duras is an enigma to everyone in the building: She has her own elevator entrance and leaves only to go out at night and walk her three massive hounds, often not returning until the early morning. Silvia's mission to unravel the truth about this woman's life, and her own haunted past, may end up costing her everything.
Startling, inventive, and profoundly moving, The Morningside is a novel about the stories we tell--and the stories we refuse to tell--to make sense of where we came from and who we hope we might become.
Téa Obreht is the internationally bestselling author of The Tiger's Wife, which won the 2011 Orange Prize for Fiction and was a finalist for the National Book Award. Her second novel, Inland, was an instant bestseller, won the Southwest Book Award, and was a finalist for the Dylan Thomas Prize. Her work has appeared in The Best American Short Stories, The New Yorker, The Atlantic, Harper's, and Zoetrope: All-Story, among many other publications. Originally from the former Yugoslavia, Obreht now resides in Wyoming.
This event is free with first come, first served seating.
Leah Hunt-Hendrix & Astra Taylor — Solidarity: The Past, Present, and Future of a World-Chaning Idea – at Union Market
Solidarity is often invoked, but it is rarely analyzed and poorly understood. Here, two leading activists and thinkers survey the past, present, and future of the concept across borders of nation, identity, and class to ask: how can we build solidarity in an era of staggering inequality, polarization, violence, and ecological catastrophe? Offering a lively and lucid history of the idea--from Ancient Rome through the first European and American socialists and labor organizers, to twenty-first century social movements like Occupy Wall Street and Black Lives Matter--Hunt-Hendrix and Taylor trace the philosophical debates and political struggles that have shaped the modern world.
Looking forward, they argue that a clear understanding of how solidarity is built and sustained, and an awareness of how it has been suppressed, is essential to warding off the many crises of our present: right-wing backlash, irreversible climate damage, widespread alienation, loneliness, and despair. Hunt-Hendrix and Taylor insist that solidarity is both a principle and a practice, one that must be cultivated and institutionalized, so that care for the common good becomes the central aim of politics and social life.
Leah Hunt-Hendrix was born and raised in New York City. She has a PhD in Religion, Ethics, and Politics from Princeton University where she wrote her dissertation on the Ethics of Solidarity. Leah has founded multiple organizations that have impacted the American political landscape. In 2012, she co-founded Solidaire, a national network of philanthropists dedicated to funding progressive movements, and in 2017, she co-founded Way to Win, a network with a similar structure, this time dedicated to electoral strategy. Both organizations are grounded in building solidarity between major donors and grassroots organizing.
Astra Taylor is cofounder of the Debt Collective, a union of debtors. She is the director of numerous documentaries and the author of The Age of Insecurity: Coming Together as Things Fall Apart, Democracy May Not Exist But We'll Miss It When It's Gone, and The People's Platform (winner of an American Book Award), among other works. Her writing has appeared in periodicals including The New Yorker, The New York Times, n+1, and The Baffler. She is an advisor to Lux Magazine and is on the editorial board of Hammer & Hope. She was the 2023 CBC Massey Lecturer.
This event is free with first come, first served seating.
Michael Kimmage — Collisions: The Origins of War in Ukraine and the New Global Instability — at Union Market
In Collisions, Michael Kimmage, a historian and former State Department official who focused on the Russia-Ukraine conflict, offers a wide-angle, historically informed account of the origins of the current Russia-Ukraine war. Tracing the development of Ukraine and Russia's fractious relationship back to the end of the Cold War, Kimmage takes readers through the central events that led to Vladimir Putin seizing a large portion of Ukraine--the Crimea--in 2014 and, eight years later, initiating arguably the most intensive military conflict of the entire post-World War II era.
From the halls of power in Washington, Kyiv, and Moscow to the battlefields of Ukraine, Kimmage chronicles Putin's ascendency to the Russian presidency, delves into multiple American presidencies and their dealings with Russia and Europe, and recounts Europe's efforts to bring Ukraine closer to the European Union. He tells the story of how Ukraine went from an embattled country on the edge of Europe to a formidable military power capable of pushing back the Russian military. Just as importantly, Kimmage captures how the current war has transformed multiple centers of power--from China to the United States--and dramatically altered the path of globalization itself. He makes the case that the war in Ukraine has shifted the direction of major macro-trends in world politics, contributing to the fragmentation of international politics, higher inflation, greater food insecurity, and the general collapse of arms control. These intersecting dangers amount to a new age of global instability,
born in war and in the collision between Russia and the United States that has brought the world to the brink of a new Cold War.
An authoritative interpretation of possibly the most important geopolitical event of the post-Cold War era, Collisions is essential reading for anyone interested in the origins of this epochal conflict and its ripple effects across the globe.
Michael Kimmage is Professor of History at the Catholic University of America and a Non-resident Senior Associate at the Center for Strategic and International Studies. From 2014 to 2016, he served on the Secretary's Policy Planning Staff at the U.S. Department of State, where he handled the Ukraine/Russia portfolio. He is the author of The Conservative Turn: Lionel Trilling, Whittaker Chambers, and the Lessons of Anti-Communism and The Abandonment of the West: The History of an Idea in American Foreign Policy. He writes regularly for Foreign Affairs, the New Republic, and other publications.
This event is free with first come, first served seating.
Tricia Rose — Metaracism: How Systemic Racism Devastates Black Lives — and How We Break Free — at Conn Ave
In recent years, condemnations of racism in America have echoed from the streets to corporate boardrooms. At the same time, politicians and commentators fiercely debate racism's very existence. And so, our conversations about racial inequalities remain muddled.
In Metaracism, pioneering scholar Tricia Rose cuts through the noise with a bracing and invaluable new account of what systemic racism actually is, how it works, and how we can fight back. She reveals how--from housing to education to criminal justice--an array of policies and practices connect and interact to produce an even more devastating "metaracism" far worse than the sum of its parts. While these systemic connections can be difficult to see--and are often portrayed as "color-blind"--again and again they function to disproportionately contain, exploit, and punish Black people.
By helping us to comprehend systemic racism's inner workings and destructive impacts, Metaracism shows us also how to break free--and how to create a more just America for us all.
Tricia Rose is Chancellor's Professor of Africana Studies and the director of the Center for the Study of Race and Ethnicity in America at Brown University. The author of three books, including The Hip Hop Wars, she has received fellowships from the Ford and Rockefeller Foundations, and her research has been funded by the Mellon and Robert Wood Johnson Foundations.
This event is free with first come, first served seating.
Saleha Mohsin — Paper Soldiers: How the Weaponization of the Dollar Changed the World Order - with Margaret Talev — at Conn Ave
In 1995, Treasury Secretary Robert Rubin re-defined the next thirty years of currency policy with the mantra, "A strong dollar is in America's interest." That mantra held, ushering in exceptional prosperity and cheap foreign goods, but the strong dollar policy also played a role in the devastating hollowing out of America's manufacturing sector. Meanwhile, abroad, the United States increasingly turned to the dollar as a weapon of war. In Paper Soldiers, Saleha Mohsin reveals how the Treasury Department has shaped U.S. policy at home and overseas by wielding the American dollar as a weapon--and what that means in a new age of crisis.
For decades, America has preferred its currency superpower-strong, the basis of a "strong dollar" policy that attracted foreign investors and pleased consumers. Drawing on Mohsin's unparalleled access to current and former Treasury officials like Robert Rubin, Steven Mnuchin, and Janet Yellen, Paper Soldiers traces that policy's intended and unintended consequences, including the rise of populist sentiment and trade war with China--culminating in an unprecedented attack on the dollar's pristine status during the Trump presidency--and connects the dollar's weaponization from 9/11 to the deployment of crippling financial sanctions against Russia. Ultimately, Mohsin argues that, untethered from many of the economic assumptions of the last generation, the power and influence of the American dollar is now at stake.
With first-hand reporting and fresh analysis that illustrates the vast, often unappreciated power that the Treasury Department wields at home and abroad, Paper Soldiers tells the inside story of how we really got here--and the future not only of the almighty dollar, but the nation's teetering role as a democratic superpower.
Saleha Mohsin is senior Washington correspondent for Bloomberg News covering policy, politics, and power in Washington, D.C. An Ohio native, Mohsin previously lived in Oslo, Norway and in London.
Mohsin will be in conversation with journalist Margaret Talev, senior contributor at Axios and director of Syracuse University’s Institute for Democracy, Journalism & Citizenship in Washington, DC. She appears regularly on CNN, Sirius XM and NPR and is a professor of practice at the Newhouse School of Public Communications and an adjunct lecturer at Harvard’s Kennedy School. She is a past president of the White House Correspondents’ Association and the Washington Press Club Foundation, a member of the Council on Foreign Relations, and serves on the Board of Visitors for the Merrill College of Journalism at the University of Maryland in College Park, her alma mater. She was previously Axios’ managing editor for politics and senior White House correspondent for Bloomberg News. She has covered Florida and California politics, Congress, and Presidents Joe Biden, Donald Trump and Barack Obama, as well as Hillary Clinton’s 2016 campaign and Obama’s 2008 and 2012 campaigns.
Jessica Pryce — Broken: Transforming Child Protective Services—Notes of a Former Caseworker — at Conn Ave
Dr. Jessica Pryce knows the child welfare system firsthand and, in this long overdue book, breaks it down from the inside out, sharing her professional journey and offering the crucial perspectives of caseworkers and Black women impacted by the system. It is a groundbreaking and eye-opening confrontation of the inherent and systemic racism deeply entrenched within the child welfare system.
Pryce started her social work career with an internship where she was committed to helping keep children safe. In the book, she walks alongside her close friends and even her family as they navigate the system, while sharing her own reckoning with the requirements of her job and her role in the systemic harm. Through poignant narratives and introspection, readers witness the harrowing effects of a well-intentioned workforce that has lost its way, demonstrating how separations are often not in a child's best interests.
With a renewed commitment to strengthening families in her role as activist, Pryce invites the child welfare workforce to embark on a journey of self-reflection and radical growth. At once a framework for transforming child protective services and an intimate, stunning first-hand account of the system as it currently operates, Broken takes everyday scenarios as its focus rather than extreme child welfare cases, challenging readers to critically examine their own mindsets and biases in order to reimagine how we help families in need.
Jessica Pryce is on Faculty at Florida State University's College of Social Work. For the past fifteen years, she has worked in child welfare from multiple angles, including direct casework, research, teaching, training, and policy development. She has trained over 150 child welfare organizations where she empowers professionals to reimagine their role and their work. She currently lives in Florida where she partners with child welfare leaders who are working on system-wide culture shifts and organizational change. Pryce holds an MSW from Florida State University and a PhD from Howard University.
This event is free with first come, first served seating.
Debbie Hines — Get Off My Neck: Black Lives, White Justice, and a Former Prosecutor's Quest for Reform — at Conn Ave
In Get Off My Neck, Debbie Hines draws on her unique perspective as a trial lawyer, former Baltimore prosecutor, and assistant attorney general for the State of Maryland to argue that US prosecutors, as the most powerful players in the criminal justice system, systematically target and criminalize Black people. Hines describes her disillusionment as a young Black woman who initially entered the profession with the goal of helping victims of crimes, only to discover herself aiding and abetting a system that prizes plea bargaining, speedy conviction, and excessive punishment above all else. In this book, she offers concrete, specific, and hopeful solutions for just how we can come together in a common purpose for criminal justice and racial justice reform.
Get Off My Neck explains that the racial inequities in the prosecutorial system are built into our country's DNA. What's more, they are the direct result of a history that has conditioned Americans to perceive the Black body as insignificant at best and dangerous at worst. Unlike other books that discuss the prosecutor's office and change from inside the office, Hines offers a proactive approach to fixing our broken prosecutorial system through a broad-based alliance of reform-minded prosecutors, activists, allies, communities, and racial justice organizations--all working together to end the racist treatment of Black people.
Told intimately through personal, family, and client narratives, Get Off My Neck is not only a deeply sobering account of our criminal justice system and its devastating impact on Black children, youth, and adults but also a practical and inspiring roadmap for how we can start doing better right now.
This event is free with first come. first served seating.
Lauren Oyler — No Judgement — at Conn Ave
In her writing for Harper's, the London Review of Books, The New Yorker, and elsewhere, Lauren Oyler has emerged as one of the most trenchant and influential critics of her generation, a talent whose judgments on works of literature--whether celebratory or scarily harsh--have become notorious. But what is the significance of being a critic and consumer of media in today's fraught environment? How do we understand ourselves, and each other, as space between the individual and the world seems to get smaller and smaller, and our opinions on books and movies seem to represent something essential about our souls? And to put it bluntly, why should you care what she--or anyone--thinks?
In this, her first collection of essays, Oyler writes with about topics like the role of gossip in our exponentially communicative society, the rise and proliferation of autofiction, why we're all so "vulnerable" these days, and her own anxiety. In her singular prose--sharp yet addictive, expansive yet personal--she encapsulates the world we live and think in with precision and care, delivering a work of cultural criticism as only she can.
Bringing to mind the works of such iconic writers as Susan Sontag, Pauline Kael, and Terry Castle, No Judgment is a testament to Lauren Oyler's inimitable wit and her quest to understand how we shape the world through culture. It is a sparkling nonfiction debut from one of today's most inventive thinkers.
Lauren Oyler’s essays on books and culture appear regularly in The New Yorker, the New York Times Magazine, the New York Times Book Review, the London Review of Books, Harper’s, the Guardian, New York magazine’s The Cut, Bookforum, the Baffler, the New Republic, and other publications. From 2015 to 2017, she was an editor at Broadly, the now-defunct women’s site at Vice. Before that, she was a freelance copy editor in Berlin. She co-wrote two books with Alyssa Mastromonaco and has ghostwritten other works as well. Her first novel, Fake Accounts, was a national bestseller and is currently being adapted into a television series. She lives in Berlin.
This event is free with first come, first served seating.
Keith O'Brien — Charlie Hustle: The Rise and Fall of Pete Rose, and the Last Glory Days of Baseball — at Union Market
Pete Rose is a legend. A baseball god. He compiled more hits than anyone in the history of baseball, a record he set decades ago, which still stands. At the same time, he was a working-class white guy from Cincinnati who made it; less talented than tough, and rough around the edges. He was everything that America wanted and needed him to be, the American dream personified, until he wasn't
In the 1980s Pete Rose came to be at the center of the biggest scandal in baseball history. Baseball no longer needed Pete Rose, and he was magnificently, publicly cast out for betting on baseball and lying about it. The revelations that followed ruined Pete, changed life in Cincinnati, and forever altered the game.
Charlie Hustle tells the full story of one of America's most epic tragedies, the rise and fall of Pete Rose, one of the greatest baseball players of all time. Drawing on first-hand interviews with Pete himself, his associates, as well we on investigators, FBI and court records, archives, a mountain of press coverage, Keith O'Brien chronicles how Pete fell so far from being America's "great white hope." It is Rose as we've never seen before.
This is no ordinary sport biography, but cultural history at its finest. What O'Brien shows is that while Pete Rose didn't change, America and baseball did. This is the story of that change.
Keith O'Brien is the New York Times bestselling author of Paradise Falls, Fly Girls, and Outside Shot, a finalist for the PEN/ESPN Award for Literary Sportswriting, and an award-winning journalist. O'Brien has written for The New York Times, The Washington Post, and Politico, and his stories have also appeared on National Public Radio and This American Life. He lives in New Hampshire.
This event is free with first come, first served seating.
Lauren Wesley Wilson — What Do You Need?: How Women of Color Can Take Ownership of Their Careers to Accelerate Their Path to Success — at Conn Ave
What do you need? This question, as simple as it is powerful, is not often asked of women of color. But the answer to this question could be the difference between dreaming of a successful life and actually living one.
As founder and CEO of ColorComm Corporation, Lauren Wesley Wilson has been on the forefront of empowering women to become leaders and changemakers in business. At age 25, Lauren founded ColorComm, which began as an informal networking luncheon series and has since evolved into a multimillion-dollar communications company.
Like any successful venture, your career needs a strategic plan; and that starts by determining where you want to go and what you need to get there. A fundamental piece of developing that vision is the crucial question that ColorComm has long-asked its community: What do you need?
In her groundbreaking book, Lauren reveals the unwritten rules that women of color need to know in order to succeed in the workplace. Drawing from her own career experiences, Lauren shares the playbook you'll need to advance to the C-Suite.
Whether you are a woman of color seeking to thrive in the workplace or an ally committed to creating an inclusive environment where everyone can excel, What Do You Need? is your indispensable road map to understanding, supporting, and empowering women of color in their careers.
What Do You Need? is a reminder that by understanding each other's needs we can build bridges that lead us toward a more equitable and inclusive society, all while enjoying the journey up the ladder to success.
Told through stories from her own career and those of her friends and connections--including Whoopi Goldberg, Gayle King, Ann Curry, Michelle Lee--as well as through tools, resources, and practical strategies, Lauren uncovers the secrets of how women of color can reach executive leadership positions.
Topics include:
- tackling imposter syndrome
- building a network
- establishing your value
- insights for recognizing the red flags when a job is a dead end
- and much more
Lauren Wesley Wilson is one of the nation's leading thought leaders on media relations, diversity and inclusion, and crisis communications. She is the founder and CEO of ColorComm Corporation. Prior to ColorComm, Lauren worked as a communications strategist at a prestigious crisis communications firm in Washington, D.C., where she oversaw media strategy and crisis communications for international governments and stakeholder engagement for consumer brands. Lauren has been featured in The Washington Post, Forbes, People, as well as on MSNBC and CNBC, and more. She has been recognized by PR Week's 50 Most Powerful in PR, Ad Age's Women to Watch , New York Women in Communications, and many others. Lauren previously served on the Glass Lions Jury at Cannes Lions International Festival of Creativity in Cannes, France. Lauren graduated from Spelman College with a bachelor's degree in political science and from Georgetown University with a master's degree in communications. Lauren resides in New York City.
This event is free with first come, first served seating.
Phyllis E. Greenberger — Sex Cells: The Fight to Overcome Bias and Discrimination in Women's Healthcare — at Conn Ave
Phyllis Greenberger has been working in the field of biological sex differences for more than 30 years, and she continues to be struck by the lack of understanding about this topic, even among medical professionals. After all, it's a fundamental aspect of human life: males and females are different biologically. What's more, those differences impact everything we must know about the diagnosis and treatment of disease--or they should impact everything we must know about the diagnosis and treatment of disease. The idea that our biological sex impacts our health seems like such a simple concept. Unfortunately, it has proven to be anything but. Greenberger's battle cry has been: Women/females need to be treated equitably in relationship to men/males. They are equal, but they are not the same.
It has been challenging to get individual researchers and practitioners to accept this, as well as research and medical institutions, and manufacturers of medications and devices. The journey towards equal treatment and the understanding of sex and gender differences in prevention, diagnosis and treatment is still unfolding. This book is the story of that journey--why it was, and still is, so important to do research specific to women/females .
Sex Cells gives readers access to the wide world of sex-specific medical issues as they play out in the research labs and doctor's offices, and how women pay the price, with a close look at the impact that has on minority populations. The story is told by the woman who is recognized as the driving force for change over the past 25 years--Phyllis Greenberger--and her allies in government, NGOs, academia, medical research, the US government, and public health advocacy. The array of experts who have contributed to the book offer an insiders' up-close view of the battle to have female cells, lab animals and humans brought into medical research, so that women can receive treatment that is appropriate and effective for a wide range of conditions.
Told with humor, ferocity and passion, Sex Cells appeals to anyone interested in health, women's rights, and public health policy.
Phyllis E. Greenberger, MSW, is Senior Vice President of Science & Health Policy for HealthyWomen. She is the former President and CEO of the Society for Women's Health Research (SWHR), a national nonprofit organization widely recognized as the thought leader in women's health research, for 26 years. In 2016 Phyllis was given the Trailblazer award by the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services Office of Women's Health. Women's Day magazine awarded Greenberger the 2006 "Red Dress Award" in recognition of her work in leading the way in the fight against heart disease in women, and in 2010 named her one of 50 "Women Who Are Changing the World." She also received the "Award for Research Excellence" by the National Association for Women's Health, "Journal of Women's Health & Gender-Based Medicine's Achievement Award," "Champion of Women's Health" by Ladies' Home Journal, the "Washington Woman of Genius" by Trinity College in Washington, DC, and received an award for public advocacy from the Clinical Research Forum. She was named the 2013 'Woman of the Year' by the National Association of Professional Women.
This event is free with first come, first served seating.
Lily Meyer — Short War - with Vanessa Bee — at Conn Ave
When sixteen-year-old Gabriel Lazris--an American in Santiago, Chile--meets Caro Ravest, something clicks. Caro, who is Chilean, is charming, curious, and deeply herself. Gabriel dreams of their future together. But everybody's saying there's going to be a coup--and no one says it louder than Gabriel's dad, a Nixon-loving newspaper editor who Gabriel suspects is working with the C.I.A. Gabriel's father is adamant that the moment political unrest erupts, their family is going home. To Gabriel, though, Chile is home.
Decades later, Gabriel's American-raised adult daughter Nina heads to Buenos Aires in a last-ditch effort to save her dissertation. Quickly, though, she gets sidetracked: first by a sexy professor, then by a controversial book called Guerra Eterna. A document of war and an underground classic, Guerra Eterna transforms Nina's sense of her family and identity, pushing her to confront the moral weight of being an American citizen in a hemisphere long dominated by U.S. power. But not until Short War's coda do we get true insight into the divergent fortunes of Gabriel Lazris and Caro Ravest.
Shaped by the geopolitical forces that brought far-right dictators like Pinochet to power, their fates reverberate through generations, evoking thorny questions about power, privilege, and how to live with the guilt of the past.
Lily Meyer is a writer, translator, and critic. Her translations include Claudia Ulloa Donoso's story collections Little Bird and Ice for Martians. Short War is her first novel.
Meyer will be in conversation with Vanessa Bee. Vanessa A. Bee is a consumer protection lawyer interested in inequality and corporate power, a memoir author, and an essayist. Born in Cameroon, she grew up in France, England, and the United States. Her nonfiction writing has appeared in, among others, The Cut, Harper’s Bazaar, The New Republic, The Nation, Guernica, and n+1, where she received a “Notable Essays” mention in The Best American Essays 2022. She is also a former editor of Current Affairs. She lives in Washington, DC.