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Politics & Prose · Politics and Prose at the Wharf

Kyle Harper — The Last Animal: Human History and the Fate of Life on Earth from the Ice Age to the Sixth Extinction — at the Wharf

7:00 PM • Wednesday, October 21, 2026Politics & Prose · Politics and Prose at the WharfFree

From the acclaimed author of The Fate of Rome and Plagues upon the Earth, a monumental history of the world that lays bare the devastating human toll on animal lifeHumans are a force of nature like no other animal on the planet. For thousands of years, we have radically altered the destiny of other species. Today, we do so at such an accelerating rate that it is widely proposed that we live on the brink of a Sixth Extinction, comparable to the most destructive moments in the fossil record. The Last Animal provides the first historical account of humanity's impact on animal biodiversity, taking readers from the megafaunal extinctions of the Ice Age to the planetwide perils of the present.In a masterful blend of global history with the latest discoveries in ecology, evolution, and Earth system science, Kyle Harper casts the Sixth Extinction in a new light. He meticulously documents the long history of human-driven biodiversity loss, insisting that both species extinctions and ecosystem simplification are essential to measuring humanity's impact, which is more profound than recognized. The Last Animal reenvisions the human story by highlighting a wondrous range of extinct creatures and the webs of life they inhabited. Set against a backdrop of migrations and empires, wars and revolutions, and the inexorable march of technological progress, Harper's epic narrative demonstrates how our ability to manipulate nature is a fundamental yet increasingly dangerous element of our success.Putting the grand sweep of world history into geological perspective, Harper argues that the long view is essential to confronting the urgent challenges we face. A startling account of how much biodiversity has already been lost, The Last Animal is also a poignant call to protect what remains.Kyle Harper is the G. T. and Libby Blankenship Chair in the History of Liberty at the University of Oklahoma and Fractal Faculty at the Santa Fe Institute. His previous works include Plagues upon the Earth and The Fate of Rome (both Princeton).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.

Oct16

PastAuthor EventWashington, DC

Brian Dooley — Defiant — at the Wharf

7:00 PM • Friday, October 16, 2026Politics & Prose · Politics and Prose at the WharfFree

Eleven stories of people across Europe who became unlikely Human Rights Defenders.Across Europe, rising repression is reshaping daily life. Local people helping others are targeted and criminalized for exposing corruption, helping refugees and acting out of kindness.In today’s climate of increasing fear and intimidation, some refuse to look away.Award-winning activist Brian Dooley presents eleven true stories of people who chose courage over safety: a former violinist in Ukraine driving an ambulance at the eastern front of the war on Ukraine; a family in eastern Poland secretly sheltering migrants hunted in the border forest; and a Turkish scientist risking prison to expose toxic contamination threatening children’s health. In the Czech Republic, a woman transforming how sexual violence is understood and prosecuted, while volunteers in Italy treat and assist refugees arriving along the Balkan route. Communities in Bosnia and Northern Ireland resist environmentally destructive mining projects. Polish activists expose homophobia, and anonymous Baltic volunteers counter Russian propaganda, while in England, a lawyer spends decades challenging wrongful terrorism convictions.None of these people set out to become activists. They were musicians, scientists, and neighbors who saw injustice and acted to stop it.Drawing on decades of frontline reporting, Dooley details how imagination, persistence, and moral clarity can defy repression and change people’s lives.Defiant reminds us that the defense of human rights begins not with institutions, but with what ordinary people can achieve when they choose to stand up for one another.Brian Dooley is a longtime human rights activist specializing in supporting Human Rights Defenders working amid revolutions, armed conflict, and severe repression. He is an Honorary Professor of Practice at Queen’s University Belfast, a Visiting Scholar at University College London, and a Senior Advisor at Human Rights First. From 2020 to 2023, Dooley served as Senior Advisor to the United Nations Special Rapporteur on Human Rights Defenders. In 2025, he received the University of Oslo Human Rights Award. He is the author of several books on civil rights and the Northern Ireland conflict. His latest book, DEFIANT: Profiles of Resistance, will be published by Humanitas Media in October 2026.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.

Oct14

PastAuthor EventWashington, DC

Natalia Emanuel and Emma Harrington — In Person: How Working Together Fuels Creativity, Productivity, and Growth — At The Wharf

7:00 PM • Wednesday, October 14, 2026Politics & Prose · Politics and Prose at the WharfFree

Finally, the science-backed guide to making the most of in-person work—whether it’s one day in the office or fiveFor the first time in history, millions of workers can do their jobs from anywhere—and the result is the most contentious workplace debate in generations. Employees fight to protect their freedom. CEOs issue return-to-office mandates by gut instinct. Everyone argues, but no one has the data. Until now.Harvard-trained economists Natalia Emanuel and Emma Harrington are leading researchers on remote and in-person work. They've spent years tracking millions of work hours across industries, analyzing Fortune 500 companies, startups, tech companies, and call centers. Their findings? Remote work is good for crossing tasks off a to-do list, but it erodes the quality of our work, stifles creativity, and hurts mental health. When we're together, our brain-to-brain synchrony increases 10x, accelerating creativity, mentorship, and innovation. That’s why Pixar animators, Nobel Prize winners, and Silicon Valley founders have come up with their best ideas face-to-face with one another.Working side-by-side can be a powerful force to supercharge company performance. But many office policies miss this mark, focusing on butts in seats, instead of brains in sync. Emanuel and Harrington offer solutions on how to craft the right policy. Backed with the latest research on the science of work, In Person offers tactical steps to make the most of in-office time, covering:How to calculate the right number of on-site days for your specific organizationThe playbook for preserving employee flexibility without losing the power of being togetherWhy some RTO mandates fail spectacularly–and how to succeedAfter years of confusion, animosity, and conflicting mandates, In Person finally delivers the answers in a clear, evidence-based roadmap for making smarter decisions with your most valuable resource: your people.About the AuthorsEmma Harrington and Natalia Emanuel received their PhDs in economics at Harvard, and both completed postdocs at Princeton. Natalia is a research economist at the NY Federal Reserve Bank, and Emma a professor of economics at the University of Virginia. Their work has been published in top journals including Science, the Quarterly Journal of Economics, and American Economic Journals. Their research has been featured in the BBC, The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, The Economist, The Atlantic’s Good On Paper podcast, and NPR’s PlanetMoney, among others.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.

Oct9

PastAuthor EventWashington, DC

JS Tan & Clarissa Redwine — Against Tech Oligarchy: Worker Resistance in the World's Most Powerful Industry - with Dave Karpf — at the Wharf

7:00 PM • Friday, October 9, 2026Politics & Prose · Politics and Prose at the WharfFree

As tech bosses fall in line with fascism, tech workers are fighting back. This is the rousing inside story of their movement—and how it spawned the right-wing, anti-worker backlash now reshaping the industry.After Donald Trump’s election in 2016, the tech industry sprang into action to oppose his right-wing agenda, with workers staging walkouts against ICE contracts and CEOs joining mass mobilizations against the so-called Muslim ban. But it wasn’t long before the tech bosses started to fall in line with the new administration. Using the autonomy afforded to them by the industry’s progressive and mission-driven culture, tens of thousands of tech workers began speaking out against their own executives. This burgeoning resistance included organizing against military contracts, walkouts to protest sexism, agitation about tech’s role in the climate crisis, and even a wave of union drives. By the early 2020s, tech workers had sparked an exciting movement that seemed to hold the potential to check the industry’s rapid growth and reactionary drift.But as their struggle grew, so did the employers’ backlash. A new class consciousness took root among the billionaire owners. Hellbent on stamping out any and all dissent, tech executives embraced Trumpism, fired organizers, and began lashing out against the “woke” ideology they blamed for turning their once loyal employees against them.Against Tech Oligarchy provides a gripping account of this inspiring movement’s development and offers a balance sheet of its successes and failures that will prove crucial for anyone looking to challenge right-wing billionaires anywhere.JS Tan is getting his PhD at MIT and formerly worked in tech. His work has been featured in The New York Times, MIT Technology Review, Dissent, Jacobin, Foreign Policy, The Baffler, and The Guardian, among other outlets.Clarissa Redwine helped organize the Kickstarter union and cofounded the tech organizing conference Circuit Breakers. Her organizing work has been featured in The New York Times, the BBC, The Guardian, The Verge, TechCrunch, and elsewhere.Moderating this event will be Dave Karpf, an Associate Professor in the School of Media and Public Affairs at George Washington University and author of The MoveOn Effect: The Unexpected Transformation of American Political Advocacy. His research explores the internet’s impact on political associations — both in the formation of novel organizational structures seen in MoveOn and DailyKos, and also tracing implications for more traditional advocacy organizations. 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.

Oct7

PastAuthor EventWashington, DC

Bryant Simon — For Customers Only: Public Bathrooms and the Making of American Inequality - with Benjamin Talton — at the Wharf

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

Public toilets determine who gets everyday dignity, freedom of movement, and civic belonging—and who doesn’t.Americans have nowhere to go. Nationwide, countless public spaces lack one crucial thing: bathrooms, never mind ones that are safe and functional. Yet in the past, political leaders celebrated the opening of public bathrooms with boisterous press conferences and showy ribbon-cutting ceremonies.For Customers Only is the first book to tell the larger history of public bathrooms in the United States, a fascinating story characterized by persistent discrimination, squeamishness about unknown bodies, and disinvestment in public amenities. Acclaimed writer and historian Bryant Simon argues that restrooms aren’t only an architectural feature, but an emblem of control and inequality. In the late nineteenth century, cities vied for the newest and biggest comfort stations to meet the demands of their bustling economies and accommodate a broad and growing public. They built restrooms with gold-domed entrances and ornamented stall doors to inspire cleanliness and order.But officials soon grew anxious about who might take advantage of this privacy: gay men, the unhoused, and eventually drug users. And as the civil rights movement challenged segregation, officials in the north and south closed public toilets rather than integrate them. By the end of the twentieth century, only people with means could use private bathrooms while out and about—provided they made a purchase at a business. Today, as the fights over trans rights reveal, bathroom access remains a flash point across the country. Meanwhile, some municipalities are again calling for widely available public toilets, but as a tool for economic revitalization, not a public necessity.The political and cultural history of a squirm-inducing subject, For Customers Only reveals the real and symbolic power of the most ordinary of things. Bathrooms, Simon shows, have always reflected our fragmented national values. Whether these spaces will ever become more accessible and inclusive is ultimately up to us.Bryant Simon is the Laura H. Carnell Professor of History and the academic chair of the honors program at Temple University. He is the author most recently of The Hamlet Fire: The Tragic Story of Cheap Food, Cheap Government, and Cheap Lives, as well as Everything but the Coffee: Learning about America from Starbucks. He is a regular guest on the History Channel and a contributor to outlets like the New York Daily News, Washington Post, and Philadelphia Inquirer. Simon splits his time between Philadelphia and the Jersey Shore. Simon will be in conversation with Benjamin Talton, the executive director of the Moorland-Spingarn Research Center and Professor in the Department of History at Howard University. He is the author of The Politics of Social Change in Ghana: The Konkomba Struggle for Political Equality and In This Land of Plenty: Mickey Leland and Africa in American Politics, which won the 2020 Wesley-Logan Prize from the American Historical Association. He is the coeditor of Black Subjects in Africa and Its Diasporas: Race and Gender in Research and Writing.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.

Oct2

PastAuthor EventWashington, DC

Kevin Davies — Curved Air: A Biography of Sickle Cell Anemia and the Quest to Cure the First Molecular Disease - with Swee Lay Thein and LaRae Morning — at the Wharf

7:00 PM • Friday, October 2, 2026Politics & Prose · Politics and Prose at the WharfFree

How sickle cell anemia led the quest to edit the human genome while patients endured decades of racial discrimination and medical neglect.In December 1904, Walter Clement Noel, a dental student from Grenada, was admitted to a Chicago hospital with fever, jaundiced eyes, and ulcers covering his legs. When doctors examined his blood under a microscope, they were puzzled by his sickle-shaped cells. His case became enshrined in the annals of medicine as the first report of sickle cell anemia, a fatal disease that starves the body's organs of oxygen, causing excruciating pain.In Curved Air, Kevin Davies chronicles the story of sickle cell anemia from its ancient origins in Sub-Saharan Africa to its central role in the development of human genome editing, revealing how one of the world's most famous genetic diseases became its most neglected. Sickle cell anemia was the first disease to be attributed to a molecular anomaly and the first to be diagnosed prenatally with DNA testing. Yet for decades, patients, many of whom are Black, were denied lifesaving care by health providers quick to dismiss them as drug seekers. It was only after a group of researchers in the US and Europe partnered with biotech companies, physicians, and their patients that hope arrived in the form of a revolutionary gene-editing therapy: CRISPR.A story of failure and breakthroughs, heartbreak and hope, Curved Air is a celebration of the scientists, physicians, and patients who are finally catching a glimpse of the cure they've waited generations to see.Kevin Davies is the Executive Editor of the CRISPR Journal and the founding editor of Nature Genetics. A recipient of the Guggenheim Fellowship, he is the author or coauthor of Editing Humanity, Cracking the Genome, The $1,000 Genome, and DNA.Davies will be in conversation with Swee Lay Thein and LaRae Morning. Swee Lay Thein, MD, DSc, is a physician-scientist with more than 30 years of experience in clinical and translational hematology research. Since 2015, she has served as Senior Investigator and Chief of the Sickle Cell Branch at the National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute at the NIH. Dr. Thein trained in medicine and hematology in the UK and previously served as Professor of Molecular Hematology and director of the Red Cell Centre at King’s College London and King’s College Hospital. Her many honors include the 2024 Shaw Prize in Life Sciences & Medicine, election as a Fellow of the Royal Society in 2025, and the 2026 Breakthrough Prize in Life Sciences.LaRae Morning is a lawyer and public defender who was born with sickle cell anemia. She became Patient 14 in a groundbreaking CRISPR gene-editing clinical study, receiving what she considers an official chance at life on December 20, 2021. She earned her BS in Medical Studies from Arizona State University with plans to become a hematologist, but eventually pivoted from medicine to law. She later attended American University Washington College of Law, where she discovered her passion for advocacy and public defense.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.

Sep28

PastAuthor EventWashington, DC

Behind the Issue with The Atlantic: Featuring Anne Applebaum in conversation with Scott Stossel

7:00 PM • Monday, September 28, 2026Politics & Prose · Politics and Prose at the WharfFree

Politics and Prose has partnered with The Atlantic for an evening of discussion surrounding the magazine’s October issue. Atlantic staff writer Anne Applebaum will discuss her cover article, “Empire of Grift.” She will discuss her research into the current state of American foreign policy and her approach to writing the article. Anne Applebaum is a staff writer at The Atlantic. She is also a senior fellow at the Stravros Niarchos Foundation Agora Institute at Johns Hopkins University and the School of Advanced International Studies. Her books include Red Famine: Stalin’s War on Ukraine; Iron Curtain: The Crushing of Eastern Europe 1944–1956; and Gulag: A History, which won the 2004 Pulitzer Prize for General Nonfiction. Her most recent books include the New York Times best sellers Twilight of Democracy and Autocracy, Inc.: The Dictators Who Want to Run the World. She was a Washington Post columnist for 15 years and a member of the editorial board. She has also been the deputy editor of The Spectator and a columnist for several British newspapers. Her writing has appeared in The New York Review of Books, The New Republic, The Wall Street Journal, Foreign Affairs, and Foreign Policy, among many other publications.Anne will be in conversation with Scott Stossel, the national editor of The Atlantic magazine and the author of the New York Times bestseller My Age of Anxiety: Fear, Hope, Dread, and the Search for Peace of Mind and the award-winning Sarge: The Life and Times of Sargent Shriver. Scott Stossel has been associated with the magazine since 1992.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.