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Politics and Prose is a beloved and award-winning staple for book lovers around the nation's capital and the world. So Many Books, So Little Time.

Upcoming Events

Oct23

ReadingWashington, DC

Lindsay Owens — Gouged: The End of a Fair Price–and What That Means for Your Wallet - with Greg Rosalsky — at The Wharf

7:00 PM • Friday, October 23, 2026Politics & Prose · Politics and Prose at the WharfFree

A searing exposé of the new tools of corporate profiteering and a field guide to the deceptive tactics companies are using to cheat consumers out of their money—and how we can get ahead of them—from a leading voice in economic policy and executive director of a corporate watchdog think tankEverywhere you turn, Americans are getting ripped off: Online ticket sellers hide behind exorbitant extra fees. Landlords use software to band together and organize artificial rent hikes. Ride-sharing apps spike the fare when it rains. And car companies install software that reports your driving behavior to insurance companies so that they can hike your premiums. Surveillance pricing, algorithmic price fixing, and other high-tech forms of price gouging are the latest frontiers in corporate profiteering—and they’re gutting the American economy and your wallet.In Gouged, economic expert and veteran consumer advocate Lindsay Owens takes us inside the corporate boardrooms where pricing decisions are made, uncovering the tricks, traps, and grifts corporations use to jack up the price you pay at checkout. From data collection to drone surveillance, modern technology provides companies a staggering arsenal of sophisticated tools to squeeze as much money out of consumers as possible, resulting in record profits. Drawing on original reporting, shareholder meeting transcripts, and rigorous economic analysis, Owens takes aim at Big Tech behemoths, airlines, health insurance companies, and others to pull back the curtain on how price going is coming for almost every line item in your household budget, from doctor visits to rent, groceries to diapers, and even your summer vacation.Gouged arms us with the essential knowledge we need to first recognize, then sidestep the traps that corporations try to conceal from us. In a world where price gouging has become ubiquitous, Gouged is necessary reading for anyone looking to stay an informed consumer, save money rather than surrender it to greedy CEOs, and stand up for fair prices in America.Lindsay Owens is president and CEO of the Groundwork Collaborative, a leading economic think tank and corporate watchdog in Washington, D.C. A nationally recognized public policy expert, she is widely sought after for media commentary, congressional testimony, and innovative investigative research on corporate malfeasance, financial markets, consumer protection, and affordability. She regularly advises government officials, candidates for elected office, and members of Congress and has served as a senior advisor to lawmakers including Senator Elizabeth Warren. Her writing has appeared in The New York Times, The Washington Post, and Rolling Stone, and she frequently contributes to CNN, CNBC, CBS, Bloomberg, the Wall Street Journal, Planet Money, and Marketplace. Owens holds a PhD in sociology from Stanford University and a bachelor’s degree from the University of Pennsylvania.Owens will be in conversation with Greg Rosalsky, who, since 2018 has been a writer and reporter at NPR's Planet Money. Before joining NPR, he spent more than five years at Freakonomics Radio, where he produced 60 episodes that were downloaded nearly 100 million times. Rosalsky has also written freelance articles for a number of publications, including The Behavioral Scientist and Pacific Standard. This event is free with first come, first serve seating.To request accommodations for this event or to inquire about accessibility please email events@politics-prose.com ideally one week in advance of the event date. We will make an effort to accommodate all requests up until the time of the event.

Oct30

Author EventWashington, DC

Jim Emison — Murder on the Hatchie: The NAACP's First Martyr - with Aderson Francois — at the Wharf

7:00 PM • Friday, October 30, 2026Politics & Prose · Politics and Prose at the WharfFree

The forgotten lynching that launched America's fight for Black voting rights--and the federal cover-up that followed.Murder on the Hatchie uncovers one of the earliest and most consequential crimes in America's long struggle for Black voting rights: the 1940 lynching of Elbert Williams in Brownsville, Tennessee. A founding member of the local NAACP, Williams was murdered for attempting to register Black voters, decades before the more famous murders of Emmett Till and Medgar Evers.Through rigorous research and gripping narrative, retired trial attorney Jim Emison reconstructs the events surrounding Williams's lynching and the federal government's failure to prosecute his killers. Drawing on FBI files, Department of Justice correspondence, and eyewitness accounts, Emison reconstructs how white officials conspired to silence a community, implicating local law enforcement, federal agents, and even national NAACP leadership.Emison repositions Brownsville as a pivotal site in civil rights history and exposes how voter suppression, racial terror, and government complicity shaped the American democracy we inherit today. With a foreword by Margaret A. Burnham, Murder on the Hatchie challenges liberal assumptions about justice and the embedded character of Jim Crow. For readers of Blood Done Sign My Name and By Hands Now Known, this is both a gripping true-crime investigation and a vital work of historical restoration.Jim Emison, after forty-three years as a Tennessee trial attorney, devoted his retirement to investigating the 1940 murder of NAACP leader Elbert Williams. Emison’s work has been featured by the Associated Press, NPR, and Nashville Public Television, and led to a renewed Department of Justice review under the Emmett Till Act. Emison is the cofounder of Tennesseans for Historical Justice and a board member of the Tennessee Historical Society. Murder on the Hatchie: The NAACP’s First Martyr is his first book.Emison will be in conversation with Aderson Francois, a Professor of Law at Georgetown where he directs the Civil Rights Section of the Institute for Public Representation (IPR) and the Voting Rights Institute. His scholarly interests include voting rights, education law, and the history of slavery and Reconstruction. He has testified before Congress on civil rights issues and drafted numerous briefs to the US Supreme Court. Prior to joining the Georgetown faculty, Francois directed the Civil Rights Clinic at Howard University School of Law, where he also taught Constitutional Law, Federal Civil Rights, and Supreme Court Jurisprudence.This event is free with first come, first serve seating.To request accommodations for this event or to inquire about accessibility please email events@politics-prose.com ideally one week in advance of the event date. We will make an effort to accommodate all requests up until the time of the event.

Nov6

Author EventWashington, DC

Elisabeth Braw — Undersea War: The Battle to Control the Cables and Pipelines That Connect Our World - with Amy Mackinnon — at the Wharf

7:00 PM • Friday, November 6, 2026Politics & Prose · Politics and Prose at the WharfFree

How sabotage and disorder threaten the fragile network of undersea cables and pipelines that makes modern life possible—and how it may already be drawing the world into an all-out underwater warThe world depends on a tangle of underwater tubes on the ocean floor. Every day undersea cables transmit ninety-nine percent of the world’s data, while intercontinental pipelines convey two-thirds of the world’s oil and gas. These do their jobs so reliably that few would guess that “the cloud” is actually underwater, or that the stability of the global economy relies on pipelines on the seafloor. But as award-winning security expert Elisabeth Braw reveals, an invisible battle over those cables and pipelines is already ramping up.Undersea War tells the history of the underwater infrastructure that supports everyday life. After decades of apparent harmony, in 2022 two pipelines in the Baltic Sea mysteriously exploded. Within months, the cutting of Taiwan’s Matsu Islands’ data links to the world and the subsequent destruction of additional Baltic pipelines and cables signaled that peace in the ocean depths was over. Superpowers are now racing to protect themselves as the seabed itself becomes a battlefield.Blending engrossing historical narrative with acute strategic analysis, Undersea War shows that the next battle for global supremacy may unfold on the ocean floor.Elisabeth Braw is a senior fellow with the Atlantic Council’s Transatlantic Security Initiative in the Scowcroft Center for Strategy and Security. A columnist with Foreign Policy and Politico Europe, she also writes regularly for the Financial Times and The Times (London). She is the author of the award-winning Goodbye, Globalization.Braw will be in conversation with Amy Mackinnon, who covers the US relationship with Europe, including transatlantic diplomacy, evolving ties with NATO and the EU, the US role in the ongoing war in Ukraine and tensions with Russia for the Financial Times. Amy previously worked at POLITICO and Foreign Policy magazine, where she covered the waterfront of US intelligence and national security. She began her journalism career in Moscow and is the recipient of the Alfred I. duPont-Columbia award for her reporting on homophobic vigilantes in Russia. Originally from Scotland, she is a graduate of the Craig Newmark School of Journalism at CUNY and the University of Glasgow.This event is free with first come, first serve seating.To request accommodations for this event or to inquire about accessibility please email events@politics-prose.com ideally one week in advance of the event date. We will make an effort to accommodate all requests up until the time of the event.

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