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learn how to express your feelings about various things with this video conversation
Best-selling author Susan Coll invites us into the chaotic world of bookstore events in her latest novel. Coll is also an events consultant at the local bookstore Politics and Prose, which inspired her to explore the local literary community.
"Shelley Selected Poems and Prose" showcases the profound and lyrical works of Percy Bysshe Shelley, one of the foremost figures of the Romantic movement. This collection invites listeners to explore the depth of Shelley's thoughts on nature, beauty, and the human experience, reflecting his passionate advocacy for social justice and personal freedom. The timeless themes of love, rebellion, and the quest for truth resonate powerfully today, reminding us of the enduring relevance of art and literature in challenging societal norms. Shelley's exquisite language and innovative ideas continue to inspire and provoke thought, making this audiobook a must-listen for anyone seeking to connect with the essence of human emotion and creativity.
Byl to další šok pro Západ a jeho spojence na Blízkém východě. Húthíjští rebelové v několika střetech rozdrtili jednotky mezinárodně uznávané jemenské vlády a ovládli úžinu Báb al-Mandab, vedle Hormuzské úžiny další klíčovou námořní cestu, kudy proudí podstatná část globálního obchodu, včetně transportu ropy. Proč Spojené státy tentokrát zůstávají stranou? Kdo jsou vlastně Húthíové, kteří se takto pasovali do role aktéra světové politiky? A co od nich lze čekat dál? Host: Nabeel Khoury - bývalý americký diplomat na Blízkém východě a analytik Arabského centra ve Washingtonu Článek a další informace najdete na webu Seznam Zprávy Sledujte nás na sociálních sítích X, Instagram, Threads nebo Bluesky. Náměty a připomínky nám můžete psát na e-mail zaminutusest@sz.cz
Ranní brífink Tomáše Lysoňka: Železniční dopravce Leo Express letos na jaře s velkou slávou nasadil do provozu tři desítky let staré španělské soupravy Talgo. Kvůli velkému množství poruch je ale po pár týdnech stáhl a místo nich nasadil soupravy složené z klasických starších vagonů. Před týdnem se jedno Talgo vrátilo do provozu, ale teď podle informací Hospodářských novin už opět nejezdí. Proč se tyto vlaky potýkají s tolika problémy a jak to může dopadnout na byznys dopravce, nejen o tom mluví v Ranním brífinku reportér Hospodářských novin Jan T. Beránek.
Ranní brífink Tomáše Lysoňka: Železniční dopravce Leo Express letos na jaře s velkou slávou nasadil do provozu tři desítky let staré španělské soupravy Talgo. Kvůli velkému množství poruch je ale po pár týdnech stáhl a místo nich nasadil soupravy složené z klasických starších vagonů. Před týdnem se jedno Talgo vrátilo do provozu, ale teď podle informací Hospodářských novin už opět nejezdí. Proč se tyto vlaky potýkají s tolika problémy a jak to může dopadnout na byznys dopravce, nejen o tom mluví v Ranním brífinku reportér Hospodářských novin Jan T. Beránek.
Vládneme, nerušit #77: O aktuálním politickém dění v Česku s Kristýnou Jelínkovou, Františkem Trojanem a Filipem ZelenkouZačátek školního roku se zatím nese ve znamení konfliktů mezi ministrem školství Robertem Plagou a předsedou vlády Andrejem Babišem. Veřejné neshody se vážou k návrhu rozpočtu, který podle Plagy v kapitole školství není dostatečné vysoký, premiér mu ale přes média vzkazuje, ať si nestěžuje. Ministr obrany Jaromír Zůna má zase svým způsobem opačný problém: jeho rezort dostal oproti letošnímu roku o 36 miliard navíc, to se ale zase nelíbí předákům hnutí SPD, za které Zůna sedí ve vládě. Oba politici se tak dostávají pod tlak a začíná se spekulovat o jejich konci. Jak je to pravděpodobné? A kdo by je mohl nahradit? O tom si povídají Kristýna Jelínková, František Trojan a Filip Zelenka v 77. dílu podcastu Vládneme, nerušit.
Chelsea welcomes back Prose & Glow founder Julia Washington to recap “Little House on the Prairie” star Alison Arngrim's memoir “Confessions of a Prairie Bitch.” They dive into Alison's truly wild tales from the set of TV's most wholesome show, the warning co-star Melissa Gilbert gave her about another cast member, how Alison embraced being one of TV's most iconic mean girls, and the childhood traumas that led to her advocacy work. Plus: A divorce by fax, a child stunt gone wrong, and a magician jump scare. A content warning: This episode contains discussions of sensitive topics, including child sexual abuse, physical abuse, and substance use. Take care while listening and find helpful resources here. Contact us or send us your voice notes: hello@glamoroustrash.com Sign up for Chelsea's screenplay course: Write Your Screenplay the Behind the Bangs Way Follow Chelsea: Instagram @chelseadevantez Join the cookie community: Become a member of the Patreon Thank you to our sponsors: Shopify - Start your free trial at shopify.com/glamorous. Leesa Mattresses - Go to Leesa.com for 25% off select mattresses PLUS get an extra $50 off with promo code GLAMOROUS. Quince - Go to quince.com/glamorous for free shipping on your order and 365-day returns. Thrive Causemetics - Get 20% off your first order at thrivecausemetics.com/glamorous. Show Notes: Dringo! Card Glamorous Trash Candle Link Where to find our guest: Julia Washington Prose & Glow Julia's Book Club (Patreon) Instagram *** Glamorous Trash is all about going high and low at the same time— Glam and Trash. We recap and book club celebrity memoirs, deconstruct pop culture, and sometimes, we cry! If you've ever referenced Mariah Carey in therapy... then this is the podcast for you. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices
Florida doesn't just discourage frivolous pro se filings. It has found a way to make some litigants pay with something far more valuable than money. Host Jack Russo examines Florida's unusually aggressive approach to filing abuse, where vexatious litigant restrictions, prefiling orders, and other procedural barriers are only the beginning. For prisoners who repeatedly pursue frivolous claims, the consequences can include forfeiture of gain-time, potentially turning abusive litigation into more time behind bars. Jack explores the logic behind Florida's sanction-forward system, the expansion of its vexatious litigant laws, and a distinctly modern complication: what happens when an AI-generated hallucination becomes the filing that crosses the line? When unreliable information enters the courthouse carrying consequences measured in liberty, who ultimately bears the risk? Jack Russo MBA/JD/LLM NITA Master Trial Advocate Certified Appellate Specialist
V německém Sasku-Anhaltsku drtivě vyhrála zemské volby AfD. V Izraeli ministr sdílel AI video koncentračního tábora pro Palestince. Můžeme mluvit o nástupu fašismu?
(Skutky 21:17-36) Můžeme být jednotní, i když věříme věcem jinak? I když děláme věci jinak? Jak se můžeme shodnout nebo spolupracovat? Článek Proč se křesťané pořád hádají? se nejdříve objevil na KOSTEL Jinak.
Chris Smalls told his story of becoming the co-founder of the Amazon Labor Union. He was interviewed by Journalist & Author Karen Attiah at the Politics and Prose bookstore in Washington, D.C. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Breht discusses the importance of reading, writing, meditating and spending time alone in nature as essential to a well lived life; as well as mental-emotional protection from the techno-oligarchic assault on our minds, attention spans, and ability to think critically. Learn more about the show at: https://revleftradio.com/
New York has no statewide vexatious-litigant blacklist, yet it processes millions of cases while confronting everything from panicked tenants to determined serial filers. How does the system keep its doors open without letting abuse consume the courts? Host Jack Russo examines New York's distinctly flexible answer: Part 130 sanctions, judge-crafted filing injunctions, and electronic gatekeeping rather than California-style statutory barriers. But the deeper twist is philosophical. New York increasingly treats mass self-representation not simply as misconduct to punish, but as an access-to-justice problem, even expanding representation for tenants facing eviction. On the criminal side, that open-door instinct becomes even more pronounced when liberty is at stake. The question for Jack: can judicial discretion and better access to counsel control abuse without creating a system that is itself too easy to exploit? Jack Russo MBA/JD/LLM NITA Master Trial Advocate Certified Appellate Specialist
In federal court, filing without a lawyer does not mean filing without consequences. But those consequences change dramatically depending on which courthouse door you enter. Host Jack Russo examines the sharp divide between civil cases, where Rule 11 can expose pro se litigants to fines and crushing attorney fees, and criminal or post-conviction proceedings, where courts rely instead on procedural barriers and "soft sanctions." The contrast comes into focus through a 2026 Ghislaine Maxwell ruling, where a federal judge confronted filings he characterized as frivolous and fictitious, yet imposed no monetary sanction. Jack explores the constitutional logic behind this two-track system and the increasingly powerful tools courts use when access to justice becomes abuse of process. How far can judges go before protecting the courthouse starts restricting the right to be heard? Jack Russo Managing Partner Jrusso@computerlaw.com www.computerlaw.com https://www.linkedin.com/in/jackrusso "Every Entrepreneur Imagines a Better World"®️
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Hello Rebels and welcome to fireside chat number forty-seven between Rachael Herron and I. To find out more about Rachael, you can listen to her show “How Do You Write” or visit her website. * If you like dark humor, learning through examples and want to create perfect prose, then you'll love my guide to crafting sensational sentences. Read The Anatomy of Prose today and start creating kick-ass stories.
On this episode of Antioch MFA's LitCit, host Gabriela Revilla Lugo of the MFA in Dramatic Writing (Screenwriting) program sits down with writer, editor, and translator Mike Fu. Mike Fu is a Tokyo-based writer, editor, and translator. His Chinese-English translation of Stories of the Sahara by Sanmao (Bloomsbury, 2020) was named a Favorite Book of the Year by the Paris Review and shortlisted for the 2021 National Translation Award in Prose. Fu's debut novel, Masquerade, was published by Tin House in 2024. He has taught at Temple University Japan, Parsons School of Design, and the City University of New York, and received his PhD in cultural studies from Waseda University. He is a writer and editor for The Japan Times. This episode was produced by Hylee Kim and mastered by Max Pearl and Odin Rasco.
Aragon 2026. nam je doneo predivno trkanje u sve tri kategorije, preticanje za pamćenje - dva, kao i još kompleksniju brobu za titulu šampiona sveta.OMV, ZVANIČNI PARTNER LAP 76 ⛽️Preuzmite OMV MyStation mobilnu aplikaciju, podržite Lap 76 - https://www.omv.co.rs/sr-rs/mystationPretvorite poene u trenutke radosti - svaka kupovina na OMV stanicama vam donosi poene, koje možete pretvoriti u trenutke radosti u prodavnici OMV-a.Pri kupovini goriva, preporučujemo MaxxMotion, za koji ostvarujete i popust!
In this episode, we talk about Two cases, two very different kinds of trainwreck. First, Thomas Kosowski wants to fire his lawyers and represent himself as Florida prosecutors formally move to seek the death penalty — striking his own penalty-phase motions and fixating on a truck chain-of-custody issue that likely doesn't move the needle. We walk through the hearing, the pro se logistics, and the bigger question of whether courts should allow self-representation in a capital case. Then, Ohio Judge John Ickes has been removed after major misconduct findings, including presiding over cases involving his detective stepson — we get into the reversals, the courtroom chaos, and why the discipline system let it go on so long. This podcast was made possible by www.labrottiecreations.com Check out their merchandise and specifically their fun pop pet art custom pieces made from photos of your very own pets. Use the promo code CRIMEXS for 20% off a fun, brightly colored, happy piece of art of your own pet at their site. Music in this episode was licensed for True Crime XS. Our theme song is No Scars from slip.fm You can reach us at our website truecrimexs.com and you can leave us a voice message at 252-365-5593. Find us most anywhere with @truecrimexs Thanks for listening. Please like and subscribe if you want to hear more and you can come over to patreon.com/truecrimexs and check out what we've got going on there if you'd like to donate to fund future True Crime XS road trip investigations and FOIA requests. We also have some merchandise up at Teepublic http://tee.pub/lic/mZUXW1MOYxM Sources: www.namus.gov www.thecharleyproject.com www.newspapers.com Findlaw.com Various News Sources Mentioned by Name Ad Information: New Era Caps: https://zen.ai/dWeCYLHxxANOaZ6NcKocEw Liquid IV: Link: https://zen.ai/45lYmDnWl1Z3cR66LBX5mA Zencastr: Link: https://zen.ai/SFkD99OGWGNz_plc2c_Yaw
DC/Politics & Prose is the only tour stop where it is a photo-line only format. The other 3 events will be a sit-down conversation (~30 minutes) followed by a short audience Q&A, and then they'll roll into the photo line. "Think Like a Dog", GR Mom's new book Honest Dog pre-order (comes with zola face stickers and a paw print) https://honestdogbooks.com/think Tour Dates and tickets: http://linktr.ee/thegoldenratio4 Amazon https://amzn.to/3QtgALJ Links to everywhere else https://www.simonandschuster.com/books/Think-Like-a-Dog/Jen-Golbeck/9781668060735 Request on if you don't have it in your budget: https://forms.gle/B6sRQxsUm8pkBLcu5 Donate a book: https://honestdogbooks.com/think ---- gas loyalty number / place to call with weird dreams https://gascollective.free.nf/ 646-286-3458 Thank you for voice mails!
Chris Smalls told his story of becoming the co-founder of the Amazon Labor Union. He was interviewed by Journalist & Author Karen Attiah at the Politics and Prose bookstore in Washington, D.C. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
There's one simple change that will make your fantasy prose 10x more immersive and engaging for readers. This change follows something I call The Anchor Principle.Today, I'll show you how I applied this principle to edit a scene for one of my writing students. Then I'll show you the same passage in his final published book, so that you can see how he implemented this simple change to massively improve his prose. Once you learn how to use this Anchor Principle I'm about to show you, it's going to make your writing so much stronger moving forward.Want me to personally help you write a great fantasy novel? Join my 12-Week Fantasy Writing Bootcamp.Read Michael Johnson's book, Children of Ziwei. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
Lords: Rebecca Martin Topics: Running a home server: Easier than you might think and very useful to do The best place to find poetry is on vacation Winston reading every sign in Target Zampiceni's Marketplace, by Margaret Szumonski https://toots.ravenoak.dev/@rebecca/116899616527167036 Hot dog research thursdays and bad dracula nights Microtopics: Tomato season: the tomatoes look pretty good. Mozart in the Park. Actors: they're not fussy like cellists. Ancient Greek plays where they stab each other. 10 hours of Star Trek engine noises. An illicit hacker breaking into your Jellyfin server and watching your Star Trek. Listen to Data putter around. A recurring thing with a database that you have to keep debugging. Building a normal computer out of normal parts. Everybody being each other's encrypted off-site backup. Opening books and closing them, then opening them again and closing them again. The one about the horny grocery store. Having a difficult time finding delicious food in Massachusetts. The kind of food they feed you on a weaving retreat. Sitting in a Starbucks, staring at the internet and rotting. Walking into an indie music store and perusing the local music section. Getting mad on vacation because you miss your cats. Nothing Beats Doing Nothing. Buying grape juice from vineyards and making wine at home. All the little guys that help you make wine and cheese. Wrapping your wine fermentation vats in blankets so all the bacteria are more comfortable. Folks who assume you know about wine because you're from California. An advertisement exhorting you to go where you already are. Abag & Iclei?? What does that mean? Puzzling out the vanity plates. Growing up watching only PBS and then falling for every ad as an adult because you have no ad literacy. Seeing a targeted ad and feeling like you failed as a person because you want to buy the thing. How Instagram ruined hash tags. Getting off-topic but it's okay because it's a different topic. Prose poems and deconstructed sandwiches. Absolutely! No parking! For Buca di Beppo! Having notes on this sign. Seeing a sign and thinking "hmm, someone must've parked for Buca di Beppo here." Your tight five on East Coast Fallouts ruined the Fallout TV series. The grocer cutting open the pomegranates so you can touch them. Muscles building like coconuts, lifting whole regimes of bananas. Why are husbands so wrong about Zampiceni's Marketplace? Moammar Gaddafi's obsession with Condoleezza Rice. Getting curious what Danny Devito was doing in the 1970s. The invention of No-Fault Divorce. Be sure to marry someone you can go to the grocery store with. (Especially the sexy grocery store.) Saving the horny onions for your next appearance. What to do with all the write-in topics now that we don't have a write-in segment. Who to turn to for pizza research now that the Pizza Research Institute has shut down. A pizza that's more like a heaping roasted salad. Inventing the peanut butter and pickle hot dog once a week. Putting peanut butter on noodles. Food wizards. As much star anise as you could possibly ever use. Learning to cook in a no-onion environment. Fermenty Black Beans. Medium to high-effort hot dogs. Dracula just trying to be a good dad. Quitting Bad Dracula Day for good. Lucy pulling the football away. (The football is good Dracula movies.) A movie where karate guys do kick-ass moves while children are being trafficked. Michelle Yeoh as Cop Lady. Fast forward 200 years and it's 1972 and there's a funk soundtrack. Hosting your own patreon, and other ideas that will definitely work. Being on the Fediverse to post and on Bluesky to cry. What Gene Siskel thinks of the Blacula sequel.
Sara and Durs review Don Juan Velociraptor on the debut episode of Who Prose There! It's the year 2117. A distant future with TV dinners, magazines, and a human/velociraptor hybrid sex dinosaur. The future is fucking weird. #whoprosethere #donjuan #donjuanvelociraptor #bookreview #comedy #podcast
Kazatel: Marcus DennyUdálost: Nedělní shromážděníDatum: 9.8.2026Text: Matouš 6,9–13
Join co-hosts Adrian M. Gibson & Greta Kelly as they chat with author Laura E. Weymouth about her new novel The Castle & the Cloister, cultural identity and rootedness, the intersection of politics/religion/war, incorporating themes of religion and competing faiths into fantasy, kinghood and tyranny, shifting trends and surviving in publishing, writing YA vs. adult fantasy, lyrical prose that isn't overindulgent, unreliable narrators and more.NOTE: This is part one of a two-part chat with Laura. Stayed tuned next week for her writing masterclass on Parenting in Speculative Fiction.OUR SPONSOR:Go Back by Emily Wagner is a dystopian novel that explores the role of technology in our lives, and the ways in which governments can control it.Purchase it here in hardcover, paperback and eBook.SHOUTOUT TO THE 'SFF ADDICT' PATRONS:Thank you Ian Patterson, Emily Marie Wagner, David Hopkins, Luke F. Shepherd, Christopher R. DuBois and Luke A. Winch for supporting us on Patreon at $10+.SUPPORT THE SHOW:- Patreon- Rate and review SFF Addicts- Share us with your friendsEMAIL US WITH YOUR QUESTIONS & COMMENTS:sffaddictspod@gmail.comABOUT OUR GUEST:Laura E. Weymouth is the author of The Light Between Worlds, A Treason of Thorns, A Rush of Wings and more. Her latest novel is The Castle & the Cloister, which you can purchase here.Find Laura on Instagram, Amazon and her website.ABOUT OUR HOSTS:Adrian M. Gibson is the author of Mushroom Blues and A Murder Most Fungal. M.J. Kuhn is the author of Among Thieves, Thick as Thieves and Killswitch Protocol. Greta Kelly is the author of The Queen of Days, The Frozen Crown, The Seventh Queen and the upcoming The Throwaways.FOLLOW SFF ADDICTS:LinktreeMUSIC:Intro: "Into The Grid" by MellauSFXOutro: “Galactic Synthwave” by DivionAD ATTRIBUTION:- Music: "Catching the Killer" by JoelFazhari- Video made using licensed materials from https://envato.com/
CELÝ ROZHOVOR V DÉLCE 60 MIN. JEN NA HTTPS://HEROHERO.CO/CESTMIR A HTTPS://FORENDORS.CZ/CESTMIR „Když mladí lidé nebudou moci bydlet v Praze, je to pro město ohromný průšvih,“ říká architekt Vít Máslo. Jeho vlastní byt v Holešovicích podle něj za pět let zdvojnásobil cenu ze 120 na 240 tisíc korun za metr čtvereční. Pokud budou nemovitosti kupovat především investoři a lidé, kteří už několik bytů vlastní, mladší generace se bude muset odstěhovat za Prahu a každý den dojíždět. Město tím podle něj zestárne, přijde o ekonomicky aktivní obyvatele a zároveň ještě více zatíží dopravu. Důvodem bytové krize je podle Másla především to, že se málo staví. Systém jsme prý „zaplevelili takovou spoustou zákonů a regulací, že se tady vlastně nedá stavět“. Sám pracuje na třiceti projektech, většina ale stojí a čeká na razítko. Praha by se přitom neměla dál rozpínat do krajiny, ale využívat brownfieldy, stavět uvnitř svých hranic a nebát se vyšších budov. „Hustota je ekologická věc, výšková stavba je ekologická věc,“ tvrdí. Architektura je podle něj umění svázané klientem, normami, penězi i veřejným zájmem. „Vlastně vyplňujete excelovou tabulku a vyleze vám dům,“ popisuje. České školy navíc budoucí architekty připravují na navrhování galerií a filharmonií, přestože většinu měst tvoří obyčejné bytové a kancelářské budovy. Neučí je podle něj ani komunikovat, spolupracovat nebo správně spočítat vlastní honorář. Máslo kritizuje také neschopnost institucí přijímat rozhodnutí. Dvorecký most bez aut označuje za „totální průšvih“, u Výtoňského mostu se podle něj čeká „až vlak spadne do vody“. Zároveň ale nechce centrum podřídit automobilům: parkovat by v něm měli především rezidenti a lidé dojíždějící do Prahy by měli auta nechávat na jejím okraji. Debata o dopravě se podle něj změnila v kulturní válku, v níž existují jen „cyklisté a Filip Turek“ a nic mezi tím. Proč se mladým lidem vzdaluje možnost bydlet v Praze? Může nový stavební zákon skutečně urychlit výstavbu? Potřebuje město vyšší domy, méně aut a instituce, které se konečně odváží rozhodovat? A nakolik jeho podobu určují architekti a nakolik developeři, úředníci a aktivisté? Pusťte si celý rozhovor.
What happens when historical research uncovers a truth you are not sure you want to know? In this episode of Shifting Schools, Tricia speaks with author Christine Kuehn and her husband and research partner, Mark Schiponi, about Family of Spies: A World War II Story of Nazi Espionage, Betrayal, and the Secret History Behind Pearl Harbor. Christine's investigation began with a startling discovery: members of her family had been deeply involved with the Nazi Party, and her grandfather had been convicted for his role connected to the attack on Pearl Harbor. What followed was a 30-year search through family testimony, declassified FBI files, National Archives records, historical accounts, photographs, and long-buried memories. Christine and Mark describe the emotional strain of researching a painful family history and the many times the project was packed away because the discoveries became too difficult to face. They also explain how they compared official records with family stories, handled contradictions, organized years of handwritten notes, and decided what evidence could be trusted. The conversation also examines the craft of making history readable. Christine and Mark wanted the book to reach people who might never choose a conventional work of World War II history. They discuss weaving the past together with Christine's present-day investigation, writing nonfiction with the momentum of a novel, and removing compelling material when it no longer served the larger story. For educators, the episode offers a useful exploration of historical inquiry, source evaluation, inherited narratives, memory, and the role storytelling plays in keeping difficult history visible. It raises questions that belong in history, humanities, media-literacy, and ELA classrooms: How do we respond when evidence challenges the stories we have inherited? What responsibilities come with uncovering painful history? How can writers make complex historical research accessible without weakening its accuracy? What can students learn by comparing personal testimony, archival documents, photographs, government records, and published histories? Christine also reflects on secrecy, shame, and the realization that people are not responsible for their ancestors' actions. They can, however, decide how honestly they will confront that history and what choices they will make in their own lives. In this episode: • The emotional cost of investigating a family's Nazi past • Using declassified FBI files and National Archives records • Comparing family memories with documentary evidence • Turning 30 years of research into a coherent narrative • Writing history for readers who do not consider themselves historians • Confronting inherited shame and family secrecy • Deciding what to remove when it no longer serves the story • Teaching difficult history through human stories • Responding to historical denial and misinformation Timestamps: 00:00 The emotional and practical challenges of the research 03:49 Organizing decades of evidence and handwritten notes 07:20 Why confronting painful truths can matter 11:36 Sharing a private family history with the public 15:15 Historical storytelling and what comes next 18:55 Creating the book's past-and-present structure 21:48 Knowing when a powerful passage must be removed About the book: Family of Spies by Christine Kuehn combines memoir, archival investigation, World War II history, Nazi espionage, and the secret history surrounding Pearl Harbor. The book follows Christine's effort to understand her family's involvement and the effects that secrecy had on later generations. Content note: This conversation discusses Nazism, antisemitism, the Holocaust, Pearl Harbor, family trauma, and inherited shame. Resources mentioned: Family of Spies by Christine Kuehn Christine Kuehn's Politics and Prose conversation The United States National Archives Declassified FBI records and Freedom of Information Act research Subscribe to Shifting Schools for conversations about education, historical and media literacy, emerging technology, storytelling, and the questions shaping how young people understand the world.
Irish writer Doireann Ní Ghríofa on turning archival fragments into living narrative, writing across the borders of genre, and giving voice to the forgotten lives of women committed to a Victorian asylum. You'll learn Why the greatest gatekeeper between a writer and the page is often the writer themselves. How a single word buried in clinical notes can become a bridge to a silenced voice. What poetry can teach prose writers about immediacy and the shock of a strong opening. The case for pointing at the gaps in the record rather than papering over them. When a fleeting curiosity is worth following, and what happens once you treat it as real. How third person can give a writer just enough distance to keep going. A sense of fidelity to the reader you imagine standing at your shoulder. How the drowsy space between sleep and waking can become an engine for ideas. The ethics of using real names, and the difference between the dead and the long dead. How the act of leaving things out turns even “fact” into a story. Resources & Links Said the Dead by Doireann Ní Ghríofa A Ghost in the Throat by Doireann Ní Ghríofa About Doireann Ní Ghríofa Doireann Ní Ghríofa is an Irish writer devoted to exploring how the past makes itself felt within the present. 'A Ghost in the Throat' finds an 18th century poet haunting a young mother, leading her through visions of blood, milk, lust, and murder. Written on the roof of a multi-storey car park in Ireland, it went on to be described as "powerful" (New York Times), "captivatingly original" (The Observer), and a "masterpiece" (Sunday Business Post). 'A Ghost in the Throat' won the James Tait Black Prize and was voted overall Book of the Year at the Irish Book Awards, while the US edition was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award and a New York Times Notable Book of the Year. It was translated into 20 further languages worldwide. Doireann is also the author of seven critically-acclaimed books of poetry, each a deepening exploration of birth, death, desire, and domesticity. Awards for her writing include a Lannan Literary Fellowship (USA), the Ostana Prize (Italy), a Seamus Heaney Fellowship, and the Rooney Prize for Irish Literature, among others. Her new book, Said the Dead, distils hundreds of hours of archival research into a polyphonic portrayal of a single institution — a derelict Victorian asylum in Cork, and the women once committed within its walls. For show notes, transcripts and to attend our live podcasts visit: podcast.londonwriterssalon.com.For free writing sessions, join free Writers' Hours: writershour.com.*FOLLOW LONDON WRITERS' SALONTwitter: twitter.com/WritersSalonInstagram: instagram.com/londonwriterssalonFacebook: facebook.com/LondonWritersSalonIf you're enjoying this show, please rate and review this show!
Today, we're uncovering the winning innovative submission for the 2026 Award in Innovation, sponsored by Guy Carpenter. NAMIC CEO Neil Alldredge talks with Charlie Wendland, Branch's chief claims officer, about his team's initiative to transform first notice of loss process efficiency through artificial intelligence. This episode is sponsored by Holborn.Register for the Agricultural Risk Conference.Read Lindsey Stephani's "Pro Se and Trial Bar Use of AI."
Matt and Jordan check out Julian Schnabel’s In The Hand of Dante, a rare midsummer Netflix prestige picture with a stacked cast that includes Oscar Isaac, Al Pacino, Gerard Butler, John Malkovich, Jason Momoa, and Martin Scorsese as a bearded medieval sage. Despite the talent and the reliably gorgeous cinematography, Schnabel’s film might be the worst thing Matt and Jordan have had to endure through the show’s first twelve episodes. Also on the show, some Dante-inspired streaming recommendations and streaming recs for a listener who shares little in common (movie-wise) with his spouse. And the debut of “What’s In A Name,” a new movie trivia game. (#012) Intro, In The Hand of Dante (00:00:00–00:34:55) Rec Seg: Dante-Inspired Streaming Recommendations (00:34:56–00:50:32) Listener Request Recommendations (00:50:33–01:06:44) Trivia: What’s In A Name (01:06:45–01:22:34) New to Streaming / Credits (01:22:35–01:31:14) Show Notes Now Streaming on Bazooga - A Filmspotting: SVU Archive https://letterboxd.com/samvanhallgren/list/now-streaming-on-bazooga-a-filmspotting-svu/ The Starlog Podcast hosted by Jordan https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YwWNy9zLV0k Pre-Order Matt's book "Funny Business: The Old-School Wedding Crashers and Knocked-Up Virgins Who Changed Comedy Forever" (Coming October 6th): https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/790241/funny-business-by-matt-singer/ Feedback: Email us at feedback@filmspottingSVU.com Follow Matt on Blue Sky: @mattsinger.bsky.social Follow Jordan on Blue Sky: @jhoffman.bsky.social Follow the Show: https://www.instagram.com/superpulse/ https://www.facebook.com/FilmspottingSvu Follow the Show: https://www.instagram.com/superpulse/ https://www.facebook.com/FilmspottingSvuSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
Leigh Batnick Plessner is the chief creative officer of Catbird. Before landing at Catbird, Plessner graduated from Georgetown University with a degree in English literature and anthropology, and she worked at various DC coffee shops and as a cocktail waitress before landing a job in the children's room at renowned DC bookstore Politics and Prose. At the bookstore, she was eventually promoted to sidelines buyer, selecting everything for the store other than books. While in this position, she had the opportunity to go to various stationery shows, which prompted her to start a stationery brand of her own called Jezebel. In 2005, she met the founder of jewelry brand Catbird, Rony Vardi, at a stationery trade show. Soon after, she started working at the brand's storefront in New York. Eventually she transitioned out of running her stationery brand and into working full-time for Catbird. She grew with the company and now holds the role of chief creative officer, where she's responsible for the visual identity of the brand, including Catbird's partnerships with talent like Clairo and Phoebe Bridgers.
How do you write about the most painful experiences of your life without being overwhelmed by them? How can timed writing and a braided story help you untangle your hardest stories? With Nicole Walker. In the intro, Self-Publishing Pop Up Books [Self-Publishing with ALLi]; New in KU [BookBub]; The solar sail theory of indie publishing [ProductiveIndieFictionWriter]; Bones of the Deep; Selfie Awards Shortlist 2026. This episode is sponsored by Publisher Rocket, which will help you get your book in front of more Amazon readers so you can spend less time marketing and more time writing. I use Publisher Rocket for researching book titles, categories, and keywords — for new books and for updating my backlist. Check it out at www.PublisherRocket.com This show is also supported by my Patrons. Join my Community at Patreon.com/thecreativepenn Nicole Walker is a nonfiction author, essayist, poet, and editor, as well as a creative writing teacher. Her latest book is Writing the Hard Stuff: Turning Difficult Subjects into Meaningful Prose. You can listen above or on your favorite podcast app or read the notes and links below. Here are the highlights and the full transcript is below. Show Notes Why writing helps us understand “the puzzles of the universe” — and when to trust that intuition The braided essay: alternating between trauma and an everyday obsession to unlock the hard stuff How two-minute timed writing lets you go deep and then safely step back Rooting pain in the body, using the senses, scene, and dialogue instead of words like “trauma” Truth in memoir, big T versus little t, and the emerging genre of speculative nonfiction What actually sells books: pairing up on book tour and getting readers back out into the world You can find Nicole and NikWalk.com. Transcript of the interview with Nicole Walker Jo: Nicole Walker is a nonfiction author, essayist, poet, and editor, as well as a creative writing teacher. Her latest book is Writing the Hard Stuff: Turning Difficult Subjects into Meaningful Prose. So welcome to the show, Nicole. Nicole: Hi, Joanna. It's so nice to be here. Jo: I've lots to talk about, but first up— Tell us a bit more about you and your journey into writing and publishing. Nicole: I was always a writer. As all writers say, I've been writing since I was five. I kept little journals and things like that, and I was on the high school literary magazine. I was an English major in college, but that was always tempered with some serious commitment to the sciences, to English literature, to German, to Spanish. I had a wide variety of interests, but there was always something that tugged at me about writing that made me feel like, this is where I feel most at home. This is the way I like to understand the puzzles of the universe. This is how I make sense of the world—through writing. So even though I got my BA in English at Reed College in Portland, Oregon, I stuck around Portland for a few years because I loved it. I worked for various non-profits, and that was great. At some point I said, “I really want to take this seriously.” So I went ahead and applied to graduate school, and ended up in the University of Utah's PhD programme, where I stayed for eight very lovely years. I always recommend to my own students: never graduate. Stay in graduate school forever, because it's such a beautiful place where people support your writing. You have professors who support it, but more importantly, you have your cohort. To this day, I have so many great friends. You make a lot of friends if you stick around for eight years. That sort of community-building is, I think, the other part of why I became a writer. Writing by myself is obviously a lonely business, and there's a lot of internal struggle that happens with that. I have found a literary community, both at the University of Utah and then growing from there, serving as president of the NonfictioNOW Conference, teaching my own graduate students, serving as the series editor for Crux, the imprint at the University of Georgia Press. I feel like my world has expanded because of my writing. So that's been a true gift. Jo: Oh, I love that. I love that you said you understand the puzzles of the universe through writing, and that this tugged at you. Could talk about that a bit more? Because a lot of listeners, I think, sometimes mistrust that feeling. They think, “Oh, maybe I shouldn't necessarily lean into that intuition.” It feels like you leaned very strongly into an intuition that this was the way. Nicole: Yes, and this book in particular, Writing the Hard Stuff, takes that to heart. I think about writing the hard stuff as writing all kinds of tricky things—things that are really hard to communicate. The book begins revolving around personal trauma. Things that happened in my childhood, as well as difficult subjects that happen to us when we're growing up. It also includes things like environmental issues and political issues: things that are really hard to talk about, that are philosophically difficult to express, that can be controversial, and that you can put people off by talking about. One of the goals of the book—one of my own philosophies—is that by looking deeply into the knotted ball of string that is a kind of trauma or a kind of difficulty, and beginning to pull those strings out, that's where you start to not only make meaning out of what happened to you, or what this particular problem is, but those strings themselves become connections. I talk about Donna Haraway's book Staying with the Trouble. It's primarily about how we can overcome our political differences regarding climate change, and one of her examples is to change the way we think about narrative. In Western thought, we often think there's a beginning, a middle, and an end, and she brings up the Navajo game that we all know as cat's cradle. So if you think of that ball of knots—your trauma, your difficult subject—you start pulling out the strings, and then you start playing with it. With cat's cradle, you make one design with your hands, and then a friend pulls it around and turns it into another design. To me, that's how reading and writing work. We share, and we build on each other's ideas, but we're always connected by those strings. So if you have this difficult subject and you're shying away from it, you're losing, I think, some of the opportunity to make connections and to make sense of what that nest of string sitting in your stomach actually is. Jo: I love that metaphor. I think it's brilliant. I've never heard it described that way, and I think it's fantastic. What's interesting is that some people don't have a mind's eye—I know several listeners who don't. So while in my mind I'm picturing the ball of string and then the cat's cradle, some people won't be able to do that, which is also fascinating in terms of how people's brains work. In terms of how you'd recommend people think about it: this ball of string that we want to turn into a design like a cat's cradle is a total mess. So where do we even start? How do we know where to start pulling on the threads? Because it might just feel like it's out of control. Nicole: Oh, I deeply appreciate both the idea that some people don't have that mind's eye, or just think differently. We all have different ways of imagining what we call our trauma, this nest of problems, this ball of string. Of course a metaphor does oversimplify in some ways. I say, “Well, you just take one of the ends of the string and start pulling.” But practically, what does that really mean to do? There are a couple of things I suggest in the book and offer at workshops. One is an exercise I call writing the braided essay. I ask the writer to sit down and think about a scene that was difficult in their life—something that had a lot of tension, that they're really still struggling with, that they don't love thinking about. I'm going to ask them to go there for just a couple of minutes. Then there's the other side of the braided essay: I ask them to think about something completely different, completely off-topic. Perhaps a walk they took in the aspen grove, or what they were making for dinner last night, or perhaps they're deeply invested in the networks of the blood in the human body—anything they're fascinated and obsessed with. I say, “Okay, I want you to write about your difficult subject for two minutes, but then I'm going to give you a break, and you're going to pop over and talk about how you spent all day weeding your garden, and yet there are still weeds.” Then I'm going to ask people to go back and talk about their difficult subject, and then go back and talk about their obsession with weeds. They write about each of these things for two minutes. What happens—which I think is a pretty compelling experiment, from my point of view and from theirs—is that they write back and forth, and they're able to take a break from the hard thing. They're also tempted to go back to it once they've had that break in their research. The other thing that happens—and, you know, every book in nonfiction has to have a colon, so of course it's called Writing the Hard Stuff: Turning Difficult Subjects into Meaningful Prose—is that by going back and forth, you'll see the connections these writers make. They make connections with word choice, with verbs, with colours and different kinds of imagery. They start to make meaning between those two ideas. What happens to the writer then—and to me, when I'm doing it—is that I now have something that is constructed. So it's not just this knot in my stomach. It's not just my interest in research. Now I've put these things together, and then I get to play. We get to the cat's cradle part of the metaphor, where I really start thinking about craft issues. Why did I happen to bring these two ideas together? What might they have in common? What does it mean that I'm telling the story of my parents' divorce and my personal trauma, and in the research part I'm talking about weeds? Well, maybe I felt in the weeds. You come up with some sort of overarching understanding of why you chose that research story, and it lets you go deeper into that personal trauma, now with some of the techniques of craft, which I think help shield you from some of the trauma and pain of that original hard story. Jo: Again, I really love that idea. Do you also think the timed writing actually helps people go deep and then withdraw a bit, which psychologically may help them write about these difficult subjects? People are like, “I need to sit down for two hours and write about this deeply traumatic thing,” which of course feels like it's going to be too hard. So perhaps that two-minute process actually releases people from that. Nicole: Oh, absolutely. What a great way to think about it. It is prohibitive to sit down and think, “Okay, I'm going to go into the worst thing that ever happened to me and sit with it for two hours.” Going back and forth, you create energy and tension. But also, nobody wants to sit with something by themselves for two hours. If you think of research as your companion—”I'm coming in there with you, buddy”—you have something to rely on, this other side of the story, and it gives you that space. The timed writing, the two minutes, two minutes, two minutes, also reminds you that you don't have to write for two hours straight any day. I have a goal where I write 500 words a day, which is mostly true, unless I'm really in the weeds. We'll use two metaphors today: we'll use string, and now we'll be using weeds. But when I'm really in the weeds teaching, or going around the country talking about books, I really do write 500 words a day. I often try not to write too much more, because sometimes it loses freshness, and it can be overwhelming. So I really appreciate you saying that having that timed writing is important, but also that having that balance of deep emotional investigation with this more cerebral, informational crutch can really help you get into the subject and go deeper. Jo: Yes, and perhaps it anchors the writing in something concrete. Because with memoir particularly—having also written one—it can be too easy to lean on big words like “pain” or “trauma,” but that's actually meaningless in a book. So why is it so important to be specific and concrete in our writing in order to convey these bigger topics? Nicole: I think we know our own trauma. We know how it feels in our bodies, and we've been living with it for a long time. So it's pretty hard to communicate it to others. Why does it matter to other people? Of course it matters to you, but how are you going to convey the breadth of that trouble with words that aren't rooted in the physical world? The nice thing about rooting things in the physical world is that every one of us has a body. We have different bodies, but we share that in common. So it's the old trope of using your senses first. What did it feel like? If you can't think of what part of your body it particularly hurts in, you have the availability of metaphor to describe how that might have felt. You have the opportunity to create scene. This is particularly difficult for memoir writers, I think, because we imagine it's the fiction folks who have to use dialogue, who have to have a setting, who have to put their bodies in a place. Thatt's one of my mantras when I teach: we need to be able to see where you are. We need to see what is physically happening, how the interactions work. Dialogue, I think, is one of the best ways to literally get your body on the page—and to get your other characters, or subjects, on the page—because to speak, you have to have a body. Once you start having dialogue, you can picture the way the speaker's face moves, the way they cross their legs. You can even picture the colour of the paint behind them, or the kind of chair they're sitting in. So dialogue is one of the first ways you can say, “All right, I must have a scene here.” I can't go on just telling people, “It was so traumatic. I suffered so much. It was terrible. I felt so much pain.” You can say that sometimes, that's totally fair, but you have to pair it with that physical, concrete imagery, so other people can begin to understand what it felt like for you in your body, so they can feel it in their body. Jo: Interesting that you bring up dialogue because one of the issues with memoir is—I've had people compare it to truth with a small “t” and truth with a big “T.” So you're telling some kind of big truth about your life. If you're writing dialogue about something that actually happened to you, in memory, it's very unlikely that it actually happened in that way, so it's not necessarily small-“t” true. So on a practical note, what are your thoughts and tips on truth. How do we tell our own story even if others don't see it that way? Nicole: This is a subject I'm deeply invested in right now. When I first started teaching creative nonfiction, it was at the height of the John D'Agata and David Shields questions. What is truth? Big T, little t? What am I obligated to do as a creative nonfiction writer? I had a great friend, Angie Truong, who came to teach one of my classes, and she said, “Nonfiction is a pretty big spectrum. You have journalism on one end, and then you have the lyric essay on the other end.” You imagine the lyric essay is full of metaphors and things like that, so you can approach truth. You're saying, “This is what it felt like. This is what it seemed like.” Check out my newest favourite thing. It's called speculative nonfiction, and I use a little bit of this in my book How to Plant a Billion Trees, which Writing the Hard Stuff is somewhat based on. I wrote them in tandem, which was a very strange and interesting and fun thing to do. But in How to Plant a Billion Trees I use this thing called speculative nonfiction, which goes even further along the spectrum, past the lyric essay, to this opportunity to use language like “perhaps,” “maybe,” “I imagined.” So I have sections in my book where I can't remember the dialogue exactly, but I know that the dialogue in some sense matters—that what might have been said will do much more to convey what was happening than my exposition over the matter. By using those turns of phrase, you're alerting your reader: “Dear reader, this definitely is not exactly what happened, but this is how I recall it.” Then you're being not only honest to the story and honest to your reader, but you're also conveying the feeling and the mood of the event—that other kind of truth that memoir is really trying to get at. It was like this for me, which is why I think this way now. It's a fledgling genre. I just read a book by Laraine Herring called A Constellation of Ghosts: A Speculative Memoir with Ravens. It's brilliant. It's an amazing book that pairs her actual colonoscopy and discovery of colon cancer with the story of her dad, who has passed already and comes back as a raven and helps her through it. So you're pulling on some of the tools of fiction, which creative nonfiction already has been doing. But it does so in this bright and, I feel, incredibly ethical way. You're alerting your reader, “My dad is not really a raven.” But you're also saying, “Oh my gosh, I sensed he was with me. I sensed every time a raven approached that I had somebody's hand on my shoulder.” That, to me, has been a lot of fun—a much more imaginative way of creating some of those scenes than doing something like, “Well, I don't remember the dialogue.” Or, even worse—and we know people have been unethical in their approach—recreating the dialogue as if they'd had a tape recorder with them when they were 17 years old. Jo: Mm. Nicole: So I offer that as an option to your listeners, as something to experiment with. Allow yourself to have that imaginative opportunity to show the reader what it might have been like. Jo: I love that. It's interesting, you talk there about the spectrum of nonfiction, which is ridiculously big, as is fiction. Obviously these are very big. But I wonder if we do get hemmed in by genre. I love the idea of a speculative memoir. I'm going to have to go read that book because I can't even imagine what that really means. I feel hemmed in by my expectations of a memoir. But then, from a business and marketing perspective—because we're all trying to sell our books— Do we risk not meeting the expectations of a reader of a genre that way? Nicole: Right. One of the good and bad things about my literary career is that I've spanned a lot of genres. My PhD is actually in poetry. Nobody expects the full truth from poetry. One of my poetry professors once said she wrote this really sad poem about her father's death, and the audience was moved, and then her real father stood up and said, “Good job, daughter.” And someone in the audience was just shocked: “You just read a poem about your dead dad, and here he is!” We have absolute expectations of genre, and expectations of truth, in everything we read. If you label it fiction, you're kind of off the hook—even though, of course, fiction uses so many elements of nonfiction: so much research, so much information, so much personal memory to create those fantastic landscapes. So when I think about how one sells one's memoir, I do think you also have to acknowledge what you expect your audience to be. With Laraine Herring's A Constellation of Ghosts, by putting “colon, a speculative memoir,” you're alerting your reader to that possibility. And because it's a pretty far-out way of thinking right now, it probably does curtail some of the sales. On the other hand, think of memoirs that are written for celebrities, and how many of them are ghostwritten—or written with other people, where the ghostwriter's not even part of the thing—but it comes across as the most legit of all memoirs, because it's a celebrity and we know them. We associate their lives with their story, and their story must therefore be true. So I think, with all levels of creative nonfiction, it's incumbent upon the writer to suggest right off the bat what kind of nonfiction they're reading. Are they reading journalism? Are they reading lyric essays? Are they reading speculative nonfiction? I think a lot, too—as an editor for a literary series for nonfiction books—about what I look for in memoir. It's something that takes the personal story and connects it into the larger conversation. Even if the larger conversation is directly about what the main subject is about, to me it's still about the crux of the matter. Why does your story make an impact on the world in this bigger way? How do you let the world inform your story? How does your past and your trauma, or your difficulties, connect to a larger world? Jo: Mm. Nicole: To me, that's something some memoirs are capable of doing. Some memoirs are truly invested only in that personal story, which I think is totally legitimate too, because I love learning how people think. I love understanding. This is just how my brain works. But in terms of sales? I don't know. Again, as the series editor and as the seller of my own books, I think you can't determine it in advance. So you should probably write what you want to write, what feels right to you, using as many craft techniques as you can hone. But the market, to me, feels very non-negotiable. You never know exactly how things are going to turn out. So I deeply believe: write the best, most well-crafted book you can, and I do think your readers will find you. Jo: We'll come back to marketing in a minute, but just returning to your own writing practice. I've got your book page up in front of me, and you've written all kinds of things: your essays, your memoirs, some fiction, and some poetry, as you mentioned. So I wondered: when you're researching something, or you've got a feeling about wanting to write, how do you choose the type of book you turn it into—or a poem, or an essay? Or do you pitch it as some kind of external work, or turn it into a workshop? How do you turn an idea into what it will eventually be? Nicole: I love that question because it's somewhat of a mystery to me, but I think I'm getting close to understanding. It really is in those first few words, that first sentence, that I think, “Okay, I know which direction this is going.” For example, the other day I woke up in the morning and thought, “All right, I'm writing this poem about how man took over for God, and that's how the planet ended up being such a mess.” So I started writing it, and it was pretty lyrical at the beginning. But then I started making full sentences, and explaining things a little bit more, and I thought, “Okay, this is not a poem. It's going to be an essay.” When I start writing fiction, I pull on something a little further, a little more distant from my experience, and then I pull it back into something more character-driven. For example, in a novel I'm writing, I begin with this whole story about McDonald's and ravens, and then I pull it back into the character. If I were to diagram the sentences between a poem, the nonfiction, and the fiction, I think I'd see fundamental differences between the three. Jo: Do you work on multiple projects at the same time, or once you commit to something, is that what you finish? Personally, I have lots of little things happening, and then a moment comes and I commit to a book, and I won't stop until I've finished that book—the rest will have to wait. It's that decision moment. How does it work for you? Nicole: My process is pretty similar to yours. I have a number of ongoing projects, percolating here and there. Some days I'll think, “All right, today feels like a fiction day.” But for the most part, you're absolutely right. There's a bunch of little things I'm writing, or things I'm dabbling in, but once there's a critical mass—which I'd say is around 20,000 words or something—I'm all in, and I've got to focus on this project. Even though I think I can do whatever multitasking, really it's important to try to maintain some sort of through-line in whatever project I'm working on. If I do that with too many projects, I lose that through-line. I also worry sometimes that the projects start to sound too similar. So say I'm writing a nonfiction collection and a novel—if I go back and forth every other day, those sentence differences I'm talking about might start to collapse, and they become too similar. Then what the heck would I be writing? I don't even know. Jo: It's interesting because you span academic publishing and, I guess, trade publishing—whatever you want to call it—where more non-academics read books. I'm just finishing up a master's myself at the moment, and writing academic stuff is completely different to writing my other books. So when you're deciding on these books, are you aiming for a specific publication market—as in, you want an academic publisher, or you want a trade publisher? How do you think about publishing in the process? Nicole: As much as I once really wanted to find some ground as a scholarly and academic writer—and I really do love to write reviews of other people's books, and Writing the Hard Stuff is a textbook that relies tremendously on so many other people's books. That is really important to me because that goes back to how one both creates and thanks one's community for creating the literary world we live in—I feel like there's a smaller audience for that sort of academic writing. But it's something we should do. As generous as you are here, for example, reaching out to other people about other people's books is probably the kindest thing you can do. So I hope to continue to take time to do that and make it part of my repertoire. It's not as fun, I'd say, as the imaginative elements of writing creative nonfiction, or fiction, or poetry. That's when I really love to groove and get into that mode of, “Oh, the words are coming. Oh, I never thought about it that way.” With academic writing, I feel I sometimes write in a slightly more stilted voice. My friend Ander Monson, who teaches at the University of Arizona, has done a really great job of writing—whether it's his personal essays or his critical essays—where he maintains the same voice. He doesn't move into that super-formal academic speak. He'll literally say things like, “You know,” or, “That's a banger of a sentence,” in the middle of an academic essay, and I really admire him for that. I feel like maybe if academic writing were more receptive to people writing in their unique voices, then maybe more people would read it. Jo: Yes. One of the pieces of feedback on one of my earlier essays in my master's year was around my sentence structure—that it would be far more appropriate in a novel than in an academic essay. I was saying to my husband, “I can't believe this, but I'm just going to have to change my style.” It's very interesting. We're almost out of time, and I also wanted to ask you: you have a recent blog post on how to try to get your forthcoming book attention in 4,231 simple steps, which made me laugh. We all find book marketing a challenge, so what have you found works best for you? I should tell the listeners—there are not 4,000 steps in your blog post. Although I think people would want them. Nicole: Exactly. I stopped at 72, but I can go on. That was sort of the pre-publishing process. There have been so many great things that have happened, but a lot of them have been driven by me. I have a publicist, but he works on a lot of other books, and I have a marketing person at Bloomsbury. They have to juggle a lot. The only person who is really, really, really committed to your book is you. So I've written companion essays. I haven't had any luck publishing them, which hasn't been true in the past, so I wonder what's going on there. I'll write something for the Huffington Post or Newsweek that's tangentially related to my book. I also might just write too much in essay voice instead of popular-magazine voice. As we were just talking about, academic voice versus novelistic voice. So that might be part of the problem too. Reaching out to people who might invite me onto podcasts has been really rewarding, and very, very kind. I think the best thing I did was to put myself on book tour and to pair myself with someone in that community. I've gone on book tour before by myself, and there have been occasions where there were two to three people in the audience, which can be really disheartening. The problem wasn't so much the bookstore's fault or my book's fault—it's just that if you go to a bookstore in a town where nobody knows you, they're not going to put a lot of effort into making the date happen, unless you're super famous. So what I did was find somebody in a community—a friend of mine—who would go with me and be part of the conversation. Even if their book was a couple of years old, we'd still go and have a conversation about each of our books. This has worked tremendously well. People will come to see their friend, and then they'll be introduced to you, and they'll ask you questions and buy your book. You create new connections and new friends thanks to that friend and that place. So that's my number one recommendation for how to get the word out in the world. I also did all the social media stuff. It doesn't work as well as it used to. It's kind of a strange time. But because of my suggestion about going to bookstores with people you know… I think we're coming out of our COVID time, where we got so used to doing everything on our computers and just staying in our electronic universe. People are hungry to get out. So one thing I want to do, and haven't done yet, is throw a big party. Go to weird places where you don't even do readings—you just offer people snacks and a glass of wine and say, “Hey, here's a book if you want to buy it.” To have these more informal gatherings that bring people together because I do think there's a hankering for people to get out into the world again. Jo: And just on that—you've got these two books coming at the same time: How to Plant a Billion Trees, which is the memoir, and Writing the Hard Stuff, the how-to book for writers. When you do these events, are you choosing one or the other depending on the audience? Or are you selling both at the same time? Because they're obviously very different. Nicole: Yes, I'm definitely selling both at the same time. Although I probably push How to Plant a Billion Trees first, because most of the people I'm pairing with are also writers of nonfiction or memoir. The other thing is, I can talk about How to Plant a Billion Trees, and if people have a really deep question about, “Well, how did you write this section?” I can say, “Well, if you refer to this book, Writing the Hard Stuff, you'll see.” So it's an easier segue. I think people aren't used to going to book events for craft books. But in the interview world—where people are reviewing books or interviewing me—Writing the Hard Stuff has definitely been the primary book I've been approached to speak about because people really do want techniques. So it depends on the context as to which book gets the spotlight, but it's been really fun to be able to talk about both in tandem. I don't know if they're competing against each other or supporting each other. That's my hope, that people think, “Oh, I read this one book, I might as well read the other one.” But that's asking a lot of people, to buy two books, so I try not to overstate that hope. Jo: They are very different, and I love the idea of doing that. Absolutely. So where can people find you and your books online? Nicole: You can find me at my Substack, which is substack.nikwalk.com—N-I-K-W-A-L-K. Or my website, which is the same: nikwalk.com. I might just start going as Nik Walk in the world, so people can find me more easily. I also really love to support Bloomsbury. They have really good deals, especially on the audiobook for How to Plant a Billion Trees, and they also have good deals if you buy both books, you get free shipping. So Bloomsbury is probably the number one place to get the books, but of course they're also available on Bookshop.org and Amazon.com, and on Amazon in the UK as well. Jo: Brilliant. Well, thanks so much for your time, Nicole. That was great. Nicole: Oh, it was so fun to talk with you, Joanna. Thank you again so much for this opportunity.The post Writing The Hard Stuff: Turning Difficult Subjects Into Meaningful Prose With Nicole Walker first appeared on The Creative Penn.
Vypadá to, že česká politika se v posledních týdnech peče výhradně na jižní Moravě. Nejdříve se v Brně konaly Sudetoněmecké dny, které se staly záminkou k vyvolávání nacionalistických démonů. Minulý týden zase brněnský Ústavní soud rozhodl ve svém předběžném stanovisku o účasti prezidenta republiky na summitu NATO. No a v závěru týdne byli na strážnickém folklórním festivalu vypískáni ministr kultury a ministr zahraničí.Navenek tyhle tři politické kauzy působí jako zásadní spory o principy. Ve skutečnosti jde o nesmyslné konflikty, které jen rozbíjejí českou společnost a dávají sporům ráz fanouškovských bojů mezi Spartou a Slavií. Ve všech těchto příbězích mají hlavní podíl Motoristé v čele se svým předsedou Petrem Macinkou. Všechny „principiální“ spory šlo ve skutečnosti vyřešit dohodami hlavních aktérů a koncentrovat se přitom na skutečně podstatné otázky naší doby.Vedení Motoristů se však radikalizuje a sází na veřejné vyvolávání konfliktů, které má ten efekt, že většinu veřejnosti odpudí, ale na menšinu stoupenců působí sympaticky a neotřele, takže to pomáhá budovat tvrdé jádro příznivců. V takovém prostředí je hledání českých národních pozic stále složitější. A do toho přichází vypískání Oty Klempíře a Petra Macinky na strážnickém festivalu folklórní hudby.Otázkou je, zda jde o předzvěst toho, že se Motoristé stanou pro Andreje Babiše neúnosnou koulí na noze, kterou budou muset pro zachování své vládní pozice nějak v exekutivě odsunout.
Atlantic Staff Writer Megan Garber argued that screens and social media have changed how we relate to each other. Politics and Prose in Washington, D.C., hosted this event. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Atlantic Staff Writer Megan Garber argued that screens and social media have changed how we relate to each other. Politics and Prose in Washington, D.C., hosted this event. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
In her new memoir, View from the East Wing, the former First Lady shares her experience in the White House, in her own words, during one of the most complicated periods in recent American memory—from behind the scenes stories from Camp David and Air Force One to how the Biden presidency changed the nation, and much more. In conversation with Emmy-Award winning journalist Paola Ramos, a contributor for Telemundo News and MS NOW, and co-host of the podcast "The Moment with Jorge Ramos and Paola Ramos." This program was held on June 3, 2026 in partnership with Politics and Prose. Watch on YouTube.
In Crisis of the Common Good: The Fight for Meaning and Connection in a Broken America, Senator Murphy draws on history and political philosophy to expose how six different cults have paved the way to our current troubles—profit, globalism, technology, consumption, credentialism, and corruption—and offers a new politics of the common good. in conversation with Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Jonathan Capehart, co-host of the morning edition of "The Weekend" on MS NOW and the New York Times bestselling author of Yet Here I Am: Lessons from A Black Man's Search for Home. This program was held on May 27, 2026 in partnership with Politics and Prose. Watch on YouTube.
Walt Whitman's outrage at American politics and politicians was surpassed only by his passionate faith in democracy's future. Both his anger and his hope fire his visionary prose writings on democracy, gathered for the first time in a new Library of America paperback edited by acclaimed political commentator and literary critic David Bromwich. Join Bromwich, Mark Edmundson (author of Song of Ourselves: Walt Whitman and the Fight for Democracy) and Karen Karbiener (The Modern Scholar: Walt Whitman and the Birth of Modern American Poetry) for an exploration of our essential poet of democracy and his prophetic vision for the country that speaks directly to our present moment. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/new-books-network
The Second Sunday after Pentecost ORISON: Now cheer our hearts this eventide – Nathan Jensen (b. 1968) PSALM 33:1-12 – Peter R. Hallock (1924-2014) HYMN: O God of Bethel (Tune: Dundee) – mel. from The CL Psalmes of David, 1615; harm. The Psalmes of David in Prose and Meeter, 1635 [H40 497] NUNC DIMITTIS – Plainsong, Tone VII; harm. Thomas Morley (1557-1602) ANTHEM: In pace – John Sheppard (c. 1515-1558) Jeremy Matheis, director • Scott Fikse, reader • Joel Bevington, cantor
"Maybe your first images are some bulked up organism, or whatever. Then there's that kind of like sinewy strength that you see in like middleweight fighters. Roberto Duran comes to mind as the epiphany, like a super powerful, sinewy guy, right? And so I think that's what we're talking about too, is just those different forms of power, economy is really seductive to me now," says Maccabee Montandon, whose piece on his brother Asher is featured as a "revived" Atavist story.The factory is running behind here at CNF Pod HQ, but we've got the first of two Atavist pods coming this month. It's Maccabee Montandon being featured for The Atavist's “revived” series. This story, originally published by Gawker in 2013, details the story of Mac's brother Asher, who was murdered in Los Angeles in the 1990s.Mac is a journalist, writer, filmmaker, all around creative person and in this episode we talk about: Obsessions and the best forms to tell stories Being creatively impulsive Word economy and sinewy strength How the proximity to tragedy often activates people Writing through grief And his strength as a writer (he's fast)Visit magazine.atavist.com to read "A Hollywood Ending."
Leah, Kate, and Melissa recap another busy week in legal news, covering the continued fallout from the Voting Rights Act case, Louisiana v. Callais, the ongoing saga of the DOJ's insurrectionist slush fund, wild twists with the Broadview Six, more ballroom drama, the curious case of the Georgia judge who had loud sex in her chambers and then lied about it, and more. They also cover SCOTUS opinions involving compassionate release for prisoners and compelled arbitration before Leah speaks with University of Michigan law professor Barbara McQuade about her book, The Fix: Saving America from the Corruption of a Mob-Style Government.Favorite things: Kate: Trump's Illegal $250 Bill: A Micro-History of Autocracy, Ruth Ben-Ghiat (Lucid); How Callais broke the Voting Rights Act and weaponized the equal protection clause, Issa Kohler-Hausmann & Kevin Z. Yang (SCOTUSblog); Beg For Me (JADE Remix), Lilly Allen; Harmeet Dhillon Is Not Wasting Any Time, Quinta Jurecic (The Atlantic); Brown's Advancing Impact on Maternal and Reproductive Health Lab Leah: Ronny Chieng's Harvard speech; Hit the Wall, Gracie Abrams; Midnight Sun, Zara Larsson Melissa: Strangers, Belle Burden; her event at Politics and Prose at The Wharf on 6/3/26; Liar's Kingdom: How to Stop Trump's Deceit and Save America, Andrew Weissmann Get tickets for STRICT SCRUTINY LIVE – The Bad Decisions Tour 2026! 6/20/26 – New York City Learn more: http://crooked.com/eventsBuy Melissa's bestselling book, The U.S. Constitution: A Comprehensive and Annotated Guide for the Modern ReaderPreorder a signed paperback of Leah's book, Lawless, here.Follow us on Instagram, Threads, and Bluesky
Hello Rebels and welcome to fireside chat number forty-four between Rachael Herron and I. To find out more about Rachael, you can listen to her show “How Do You Write” or visit her website. * If you like dark humor, learning through examples and want to create perfect prose, then you'll love my guide to crafting sensational sentences. Read The Anatomy of Prose today and start creating kick-ass stories.
Chelsea and Prose & Glow's Julia Washington deep dive into “This Is Me: A Reckoning,” the memoir from “Heroes” and “Nashville” star Hayden Panettiere. Together, they unpack Hayden's rise from child star with a momager (of course) to tabloid fixture while dealing with addiction, postpartum depression, and the crushing weight of being a young woman in the 2000s. Plus: her age-gap relationships with Milo Ventimiglia and Wladimir Klitschko, and why this memoir feels deeply haunting. A content warning: This episode contains discussions of sensitive topics, including substance use, domestic violence, and sexual abuse. Take care while listening and find helpful resources here. Contact us or send us your voice notes: hello@glamoroustrash.com Follow Chelsea: Instagram @chelseadevantez Join the cookie community: Become a member of the Patreon Thank you to our sponsors: Quince - Go to quince.com/glamorous for free shipping on your order and 365-day returns. Thrive Causemetics - Get 20% off your first order at thrivecausemetics.com/glamorous Libro.fm - Click here to get 2 audiobooks for the price of 1 with your first month of membership using code TRASH. Show Notes: Dringo! Card Yesteryear Book Club Link RHOBH alum Diana Jenkins denies she's the friend who put teenage Hayden Panettiere into bed with 'very famous' man (Entertainment Weekly) Where to find our guest: Julia Washington Glamorous Trash Candle Link Julia's Book Club (Patreon) Instagram *** Glamorous Trash is all about going high and low at the same time— Glam and Trash. We recap and book club celebrity memoirs, deconstruct pop culture, and sometimes, we cry! If you've ever referenced Mariah Carey in therapy... then this is the podcast for you. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices
In this episode of True Crime News The Sidebar Podcast: Eric Faddis joins host Joshua Ritter to break down the biggest cases making headlines across the nation. They discuss Hisham Abugharbieh's arrest in the slayings of FSU doctoral students Zamil Limon and Nahida Bristy, quadruple homicide suspect Austin Drummond asking to represent himself ahead of his death penalty eligible trial, and former police officer Matthew Farwell seeking bail as prosecutors claim he's a danger to the community. Tweet your questions for future episodes to Joshua Ritter using the hashtag #TCNSidebar. To learn more about listener data and our privacy practices visit: https://www.audacyinc.com/privacy-policy Learn more about your ad choices. Visit https://podcastchoices.com/adchoices
What is the process when a person wishes to represent themselves in court? How common is it? Is it true that a person who represents themselves "has a fool for a client?" Today in our "Ask a Judge" series, attorney and magistrate Amy Lin Meyerson and "small town lawyer" Ray Williams give tips for those who have no choice but to address the court on their own behalf. Here is the American Bar Association's virtual legal advice clinic (staffed by human legal minds, not AI!): https://abafreelegalanswers.org/ Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices