James Verini — The Theater: Courage and Survival in the Defining Atrocity of the Ukraine War - with William B. Taylor Jr. - and special guest Kateryna Smagliy

Melissa Murray — The U.S. Constitution: A Comprehensive and Annotated Guide for the Modern Reader - with Eric Holder

From the #1 New York Times bestselling author of The Trump Indictments comes a beautiful, accessible guide on how to read the US Constitution. Think of this as the US Constitution explained by America’s favorite law professor, Melissa Murray. On her podcast, Strict Scrutiny, Murray and her cohosts, Kate Shaw and Leah Litman, provide in-depth, accessible, and irreverent analysis of the Supreme Court and its cases, culture, and personalities. On that podcast, on MSNOW—where she is a frequent contributor—in opinion pieces, and when providing commentary as she did in a recent New York Times piece on Justice Brown Jackson, Murray spends an awful lot of time demystifying laws for everyone else. In this book, she tackles one of the founding American documents: the Constitution. Each amendment will be annotated with some historical context provided, as well as examples of how it is relevant to our present day. More necessary than ever, as we look to the Supreme Court and their interpretation of the Constitution as the last institution upholding our democracy, this book is an indispensable read for every thinking American. Melissa Murray is the Frederick I. and Grace Stokes Professor of Law at New York University’s School of Law. She is the coauthor of the #1 New York Times bestseller The Trump Indictments: The Historic Charging Documents with Commentary, cohost of a top-ranked podcast, Strict Scrutiny—which is about the Supreme Court and the legal culture that surrounds it—and a regular commentator on MSNBC. Her writing appears regularly in major national publications, including The New York Times, The Washington Post, Los Angeles Times, The Atlantic, Mother Jones, and The Nation. She is frequently called upon by national media outlets such as NPR and PBS to offer expert—yet accessible—commentary on the Supreme Court’s decisions and other pressing legal matters of national importance. Her academic publications have appeared (or are forthcoming) in the California Law Review, Columbia Law Review, Harvard Law Review, Michigan Law Review, Pennsylvania Law Review, Virginia Law Review, and Yale Law Journal, among others. Murray is a graduate of the University of Virginia, where she was a Jefferson Scholar and an Echols Scholar, and Yale Law School, where she was notes development editor of the Yale Law Journal. While in law school, she earned special recognition as an NAACP-LDF/Shearman & Sterling Scholar and was a semifinalist of Morris Tyler Moot Court. Following law school, Murray clerked for Sonia Sotomayor, then of the US Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit, and Stefan Underhill of the US District Court for the District of Connecticut. Prior to joining the NYU faculty, Murray was on the faculty of the University of California, Berkeley, School of Law, where she was the recipient of the Rutter Award for Teaching Distinction. From March 2016 to June 2017, she served as interim dean of Berkeley Law. Murray is a member of the New York bar. She lives in New York City with her family. Murray is in conversation with Eric Holder, a civil rights leader who is chairman of the National Democratic Redistricting Committee. He served as the eighty-second attorney general of the United States under President Barack Obama, the first African American to hold that office. Now a senior counsel at Covington & Burling, he lives in Washington, D.C., with his wife, Dr. Sharon Malone, and they have three children. He is the author of Our Unfinished March: The Violent Past and Imperiled Future of the Vote-A History, a Crisis, a Plan. PURCHASE: https://politics-prose.com/book/9781668221938?ic_referral=DHM3OZdakUPbXDraAfDRRfFf8jEMNaX68BT6EGw6rSwwM_xXIT0An_3JdEzSjUkOsYP1p2l5GegYtR7G_cef6RcY9dbRYIBBpr-8WPB4dIkzAfV_pA6rQnCyiO1L4yaPojTX1Ug

Liaquat Ahamed — 1873: The Rothschilds, the First Great Depression, and the Making of the Modern World - with Steven R. Weisman

From the author of the Pulitzer Prize–winning Lords of Finance, a magnificent and timely reckoning with the first truly global financial calamity and the famous banking family at the center of the whirlwind Over the course of the 1850s and 1860s, during the first era of globalization, the world experienced an unprecedented economic boom. Fueling this expansion was an explosion in the global bond market, at the hub of which stood one family—the Rothschilds, arguably the wealthiest banking family in history. While the giant sums of capital provided through the bond market built the railroads, the century’s most transformative investments, the money raised also unleashed a frenzy of speculation, massive overinvestment, and wasteful borrowing by governments. With excessive euphoria leading to disappointed expectations, in the early 1870s the bubble burst. Stock markets from Vienna to New York crashed, and dozens of railroads and many governments defaulted. Financial officials responded by blundering into a precipitous remaking of the global currency system—exacerbating the ensuing economic collapse and setting the stage for decades of a punitive deflation that sparked waves of anti-globalist populism. As Liaquat Ahamed shows us in this enthralling history, the crisis of 1873 was, among other things, a death blow to Reconstruction in the United States and the proximate cause of the Ottoman Empire’s slow death spiral. Ironically, though the Rothschilds had presciently kept a low profile during the bubble, when the deluge came, they were viciously scapegoated as part of a wider hatred directed at “Jewish finance,” a strain of antisemitism that would come to full evil flower during the twentieth century. 1873 [https://politics-prose.com/book/9781594204173] is a bird’s-eye reckoning with the full dimension of the crisis, from its buildup to its long aftermath. The Rothschilds and a cast of other witnesses give us the human perspective. And we have a brilliant financial historian’s grasp of the larger forces at play, resulting in a global narrative with thrilling explanatory power. Liaquat Ahamed graduated with degrees in economics from Cambridge and Harvard, worked at the World Bank in Washington, D.C., and had a twenty-five career as a professional investment manager based in London and New York before turning to writing. His first book, Lords of Finance: The Bankers Who Broke the World, about the lead up to the 1929 Great Depression, won the Pulitzer Prize for History, the Council on Foreign Relations Arthur Ross Gold Medal, and the Financial Times Best Business Book of the Year Award. He is a trustee of the Putnam Funds, an adviser to the Rock Creek Group, and the Chair of the Sun Valley Writers’ Conference. He lives in Los Angeles and Washington, D.C. with his wife Meena. Ahamed is in conversation with Steven R. Weisman, senior editorial adviser at the Peterson Institute for International Economics, the leading economic policy think tank in Washington. Before joining PIIE in 2008, he was a correspondent, editor, and member of the editorial board at the New York Times. His last position at the Times was chief international economics correspondent. He is the author/editor of four books, including The Great Tax Wars: Lincoln to Wilson—How the Income Tax Transformed America (Simon and Schuster, 2002), which received the Hillman Prize for the book that most advances the cause of social justice. PURCHASE: https://politics-prose.com/book/9781594204173?ic_referral=i5ivFai3RMkD4Q1pYIGloioCo4VALPCevGyLDiv0gQAwM0EXYNpHX1BrCdiCDes77gr3SRxlTXTGlPCwBQRsNqp9Di5TEbMVhR15xWj_GYJ7tPEc8nNVwk7HK6xzXGlTeYbcxs0

Caroline Bock — The Other Beautiful People - with Laura Scalzo

In the entertainment world, the spotlight shines on the beautiful— but behind the scenes are those who make the magic happen. Amy Greene is one of them. As head of marketing and public relations at the Cinema Channel, a beloved yet struggling cable network devoted to classic and independent films based in midtown Manhattan, Amy is at the height of her career— but her life is anything but steadfast. Torn between her charismatic boss, Owen Orski, and her husband Jack, Amy’s world schisms with 9/11, the death of her father, and the secrets she’ s kept locked away. The Other Beautiful People [https://politics-prose.com/book/9781646037292] is a dazzling cinematic novel about love, loss, and the search for meaning— in work, family, and the spaces in between. It’ s a story that will captivate your heart and stay with you long after the final scene. The Other Beautiful People is a workplace love story unlike any other. Caroline Bock is the author of THE OTHER BEAUTIFUL PEOPLE, a workplace love story, inspired by her two-decade career at AMC, Bravo, IFC, and IFC Films. She is also the author of the young adult novels LIE and Before My Eyes as well as the award-winning short story collection Carry Her Home. A graduate of Syracuse University, where she studied creative writing with Raymond Carver, she also holds an MFA in Fiction from the City College of New York. She is the co-president/prose editor at the Washington Writers’ Publishing House. Bock is in conversation with Laura Scalzo, author of two novels, The Speed of Light in Air, Water, and Glass (2018), praised as “lyrical and insightful,” and American Arcadia (2023),“a gorgeous riff of a New York City novel.” Her shorter work has appeared in various literary magazines including Had, Ellipsis Zine, Reflex Fiction, and the Grace & Gravity Series. She was a 2023 Chautauqua Writer-in-Residence and is a 2024, 2025 recipient of a DC Arts Grant. She is a graduate of Syracuse University. Find out more about her at laurascalzo.com [https://laurascalzo.com/]. PURCHASE: https://politics-prose.com/book/9781646037292?ic_referral=_Xajhhj0XuBmDrLr7OQtWWFwYGGXc2zc1TCoKadwg2cwM-3bUIAD_b6KiB1AJXSEV30f3Nhm12YelJwQ3YDo7olChC33W6v2dEuO25dZIFao9L-yCeEBcL7WV69-uQ4SSm5waXQ

Yeganeh Torbati & Bozorgmehr Sharafedin — Stolen Revolution: Betrayal and Hope in Modern Iran - with David Sanger

A moving, harrowing, and compulsively readable portrait of the lives of Iranians across five decades, tracing the promise of the 1979 revolution, its betrayal by forces of autocracy, and a people’s undying spirit of resistance  In 1979, a revolution in Iran swept aside a monarchy, fueled by the Iranian people’s dreams of social justice and political freedom. But in the years that followed, the movement’s leader, Ayatollah Khomeini, and his acolytes instead built a system that served their narrow faction and worsened beyond imagination the brutality and corruption that had existed under the previous government. In Stolen Revolution, [https://politics-prose.com/book/9780385550314?ic_referral=lvhyKrowiY1hWt2Ju-XZu7LKMtzbddbUWWiyNTe8seUwMxYHjMIL5qluFm9MDXJddIoDTdLExc5vF3aC5Dc9p4tTKtNAM5lKkn9jbuGV816kAFnkSAPJGzJkLZagQrhvHL4WC3U] award-winning journalists Yeganeh Torbati and Bozorgmehr Sharafedin tell the entwined stories of six Iranians who, together, have lived the arc of modern Iranian history in all its bitter twists and enduring hopes. We meet Mehdi Karroubi, a devotee of Khomeini, who rose to the heights of power before being cast out of the inner circle. Hila Sedighi, a young activist, gave voice through her poetry to her peers’ hopes and shattered dreams. Amir Moghadam, an ambitious government bureaucrat, witnessed corruption and graft on a scale that impelled him to take enormous risks to expose the truth. Said Rahmani returned to Iran to spark a start-up boom in his native country and encountered a ruthless security state. And Rozhin Yousefzadeh and Kosar Eftekhari, both born in the 1990s, joined a mass movement that confronted a ferocious state apparatus: the Woman, Life, Freedom protests. Each paid an enormous price. In this vivid and unforgettable narrative, Stolen Revolution centers ordinary Iranians and their destiny, even as it provides a gutting understanding of life in a modern authoritarian state. Yeganeh Torbati is the Iran correspondent for The New York Times. She has also worked at The Washington Post, ProPublica, Reuters, and The Baltimore Sun, and has covered national security, immigration, and business. She was part of a Reuters team that received the Gerald Loeb Award, the Overseas Press Club Award, and the European Press Prize. Torbati was born in Oklahoma to Iranian immigrants. Bozorgmehr Sharafedin began his journalism career in Iran, rising to editor-in-chief of the most popular youth political magazine in the country. In 2008, he left Iran for the BBC in London. He joined Reuters in 2015, where he shared a National Press Club Award. He moved to Washington DC in 2024 and works as the Head of Digital at Persian-language Iran International. Torbati & Sharafedin are in conversation with David Sanger, the White House and national security correspondent for The New York Times and the bestselling author of The Inheritance, Confront and Conceal, and The Perfect Weapon. He has been a member of three teams that won the Pulitzer Prize, including in 2017 for international reporting about Russia's effort to manipulate the presidential election. A contributor to CNN, he also teaches national security policy at Harvard's Kennedy School of Government. Sanger's new book, New Cold Wars: China's Rise, Russia's Invasion, and America's Struggle to Defend the West [https://politics-prose.com/book/9780593443590], is out now. PURCHASE: https://politics-prose.com/book/9780385550314?ic_referral=AGmGaepqpsHvNPOtlpoc4zBNR5O1Ud02_rjK3sawT9cwM3q_W8Sg1IpSq_v7txRgrh4xp2DWwqNWviJD_ucwMKK-j8KFyh940Cz5M-G853tLWtQUP1aJAMuGHBd0j7TRkIuMD1g

James Verini — The Theater: Courage and Survival in the Defining Atrocity of the Ukraine War - with William B. Taylor Jr. - and special guest Kateryna Smagliy

In the tradition of John Hersey’s Hiroshima, a terse and piercing look at a critical episode in the Ukraine War, from the award-winning author of They Will Have to Die Now. In March of 2022, three weeks after invading Ukraine, Russian forces bombed the shelter housed in the Donetsk Regional Academic Drama Theater, in the city of Mariupol. The bombing stands, to this day, as the single worst act of mass civilian killing of the war. This book tells the story of the group of ordinary Ukrainians—workers, teachers, actors—who built that shelter, giving succor to thousands of their countrypeople, before it was destroyed. Their audacity and humor and humanity in the midst the siege of Mariupol, against impossible odds, will leave readers inspired, amused, and devastated. Their story is the story of a young republic and its struggle to survive. James Verini writes for The New Yorker, The New York Times Magazine, and National Geographic, among other publications. His journalism has received a National Magazine Award and a George Polk Award. He is the author of They Will Have to Die Now, about the battle that brought down ISIS. Verini is in in conversation with Ambassador William B. Taylor Jr., a distinguished American diplomat and former U.S. Army officer, known for his work in foreign policy, specifically in Ukraine, the Middle East, and former Soviet states. He served as U.S. Ambassador to Ukraine (2006–2009) and later as Chargé d'Affaires in Kyiv (2019–2020) Verini and Taylor Jr. are introduced by Kateryna Smagliy, Ph.D., who has been serving as a Counselor for Political Affairs and Public Diplomacy at the Embassy of Ukraine in the USA since February 2022. Prior to her arrival to Washington DC, Kateryna served at Political Directorate of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of Ukraine and led the International Cooperation Department at the Diplomatic Academy of Ukraine.  Smagliy is a Fulbright scholar and a graduate of The McCain Institute Next Generation Leaders program. PURCHASE: https://politics-prose.com/book/9781668062203?ic_referral=46AIO-TRCtAGBGqQxNV8EEc-n59OEwIfbCtmk67lGLQwM2sSGf-XI7hnjxT7Z-XLp0pMne3rVGicogUkJiLA_AJKMfoFeCPhX_N-PVvllWWoNZk6ar4cGcIDS1urT6QUys4yywI