Detailed Event List
Alexandra Petri — Alexandra Petri's US History: Important American Documents (I Made Up) - with Robert Samuels — at Conn Ave
From the Spanish conquistadors to the Salem witch trials, from Paul Revere's ride to the exclamation mark in Oklahoma!, Alexandra Petri's U.S. History presents a deranged timeline in which John and Abigail Adams try sexting, the March sisters from Little Women are sixty feet tall, Nicola Tesla's friends stage an intervention when he falls in love with a pigeon, and Susan Sontag goes to summer camp. A witty, absurdist satire of the last 500 years, Petri's "historical fan fiction" shows why she has been hailed as "genius,"* a "national treasure,"** and "one of the funniest writers alive."***
Alexandra Petri is a humorist and columnist for the Washington Post and author of Nothing Is Wrong and Here Is Why, a Thurber Prize finalist. Her satire has also appeared in McSweeney's and the New Yorker's Daily Shouts and Murmurs. She lives in Washington, DC.
Petri will be in conversation with Robert Samuels. Samuels is a journalist and staff writer at The New Yorker. His reporting has taken him to 41 states and three countries, chronicling how political discussions in the nation’s capital affect the lives of everyday Americans. Before joining the New Yorker, he worked for more than a decade as an award-winning enterprise reporter at The Washington Post and their go-to figure skating analyst.
In 2022, he co-wrote His Name is George Floyd: One Man's Life and the Struggle for Racial Justice with his friend and colleague, Washington Post White House Bureau Chief Toluse Olorunnipa. The book was regularly cited as one of the year's best non-fiction books and was a finalist for the GoodReads Reader's Choice Award, the Audie, the Los Angeles Times Book Prize, the J. Anthony Lukas Prize as well as the National Book Award.
Samuels grew up in the Bronx and graduated with special recognition from the Medill School of Journalism at Northwestern, where is the only student to have served both as editor in chief of the school newspaper and the black student magazine.