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- 📚 Live workshops with fascinating history you didn’t learn in school
- 🎤 Exclusive conversations with our featured authors
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- 📱 Daily behind-the-scenes content in our members-only Instagram
- 📽️ A Special event with legendary filmmaker Ken Burns
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Books this season
Meet the authors
Kamala Harris
Kamala D. Harris served as the forty-ninth vice president of the United States from 2021 to 2025—the first woman in American history to hold the office. She began her career in the Alameda County district attorney’s office before being elected district attorney of San Francisco, where her Back on Track program became a national model for reducing recidivism. As California’s attorney general, Harris prosecuted transnational gangs, big banks that defrauded homeowners, and for-profit colleges that targeted students and veterans. She defended the Affordable Care Act, fought for marriage equality, and pioneered the nation’s first open-data initiative in the criminal justice system. In the United States Senate, Harris fought for civil, immigrant, and voting rights, and gained national recognition for her incisive questioning in committee hearings. As vice president, she led efforts to strengthen global alliances and address child poverty, gun violence, student debt, maternal health, economic opportunity, and reproductive rights—casting more tiebreaking votes than any vice president in history, including for pandemic relief and the largest climate investment ever. Throughout her career, she has always fought for the only client she has ever had: the people.
Andrew Ross Sorkin
Andrew Ross Sorkin is an award-winning journalist for The New York Times and a co-anchor of Squawk Box, CNBC’s signature morning program. He is also the founder and editor-at-large of DealBook, an online daily financial report published by The Times that he started in 2001.
Sorkin is the author of Too Big to Fail: How Wall Street and Washington Fought to Save the Financial System — and Themselves, which chronicled the events of the 2008 financial crisis. The book spent more than six months on The New York Times Best Seller list in hardcover and paperback. The book was adapted as a movie for HBO Films in 2011. Sorkin was a co-producer of the film, which was nominated for 11 Emmy Awards.
Sorkin is one of the preeminent interviewers in the nation, known for his incisive, nuanced long-form conversations with the biggest newsmakers in the world, from Elon Musk to Lebron James to Kim Kardashian and Hillary Clinton. Just this year, he won the Emmy award for "Outstanding Live Interview."
Mr. Sorkin began writing for The Times in 1995 under unusual circumstances: he hadn't yet graduated from high school.
SPECIAL EVENT: The American Revolution with Ken Burns
Join us for watch parties of Ken Burns' brand-new PBS series, and an insightful conversation with the filmmaker this fall!
This season's workshops
Books as Mirrors, Windows, and Sliding Glass Doors
with Amber O’Neal Johnston
About the workshop
Share the transformative power of children’s literature to shape identity, honor diversity, and deepen understanding. Drawing from the richness of Black American culture, you’ll leave with inspiration and tools to choose inclusive stories, facilitate engaging discussions, and build a bookshelf that celebrates both individuality and our shared humanity.
About the host
Amber O’Neal Johnston is an author and speaker who champions the use of books and lessons that reflect the lived experiences of children and introduce them to lives and cultures beyond their own. She is the author of A Place to Belong and Soul School.
How to Do Something When Nothing Can Be Done
with Dr. Casey Burgat
About the workshop
Get off your phone and end the cycle of doomscrolling with practical advice on how to make a difference for democracy in your communities.
About the host
Dr. Casey Burgat is a former congressional staffer turned political science professor at George Washington University's Graduate School of Political Management. Respected across the aisle, Casey is an expert on federal politics, particularly the workings of Congress. Casey is also the author of the recently published book We Hold These Truths.
Democracy's Defense: How Nations Build Immunity to Authoritarian Infection
with Jermaine Fowler
About the workshop
Pathogens like misinformation and authoritarian creep can be combatted with the immune cells of the free press, civic literacy, and more. Using powerful storytelling and real world examples, you’ll leave this workshop better understanding how to inoculate yourself against an erosion of democracy.
About the host
Jermaine Fowler is a public historian, bestselling author, and keynote speaker who shares the untold stories of history, challenges dominant perspectives, and ventures beyond the textbooks to find stories that are recognizably human.
Mother Emanuel: Two Centuries of Race, Resistance, and Forgiveness in One Charleston Church
with Kevin Sack
About the workshop
Few people knew of Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church in Charleston — Mother Emanuel — before the night of June 17, 2015, when a twenty-one-year-old white supremacist walked into Bible study and slaughtered nine people. Although the shooter had targeted Mother Emanuel — the first A.M.E. church in the South — to agitate racial strife, he did not anticipate the aftermath: an outpouring of forgiveness from the victims’ families and a reckoning with the divisions of caste that have afflicted Charleston and the South since the earliest days of European settlement.
About the host
Kevin Sack is a Pulitzer Prize winning journalist who spent 30 years on the staff of The New York Times, where he was known for producing long-form narrative and investigative projects on topics as varied as kidney transplantation, police militarization, refugee assimilation, and climate change. He also served as bureau chief in Atlanta and Albany, covered health care for the national desk, and reported extensively on race and domestic and presidential politics.
White Christian Nationalism: How Religious Ideology Shapes Our Politics
with Dr. Jemar Tisby and Sharon McMahon
About the workshop
White Christian nationalism isn’t new, but its impact on US politics has grown more visible and more urgent to understand. In this workshop, we’ll unpack what it is, how it developed, and the ways it’s influencing everything from voting rights to public education. Together, we’ll explore how this ideology challenges the ideals of a pluralistic democracy and why it matters.
About the hosts
Dr. Jemar Tisby is a public historian, bestselling author of The Color of Compromise, podcast host, and public speaker. He received his PhD in History at the University of Mississippi studying race, religion, and social movements in the twentieth century, and his writing has been featured in The Washington Post, The Atlantic, and The New York Times, among others.
Sharon McMahon is the #1 New York Times-bestselling author of The Small and the Mighty, the editor-in-chief of The Preamble, a top podcast host, viral social media star, philanthropist, and longtime government and law teacher.
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