Robert Kolker — The Vanishing Family: Love, Fate, and the Quest to End Dementia — at Conn Ave
About This Event
From the #1 New York Times bestselling author of Hidden Valley Road comes the heart-wrenching journey of a family facing an unthinkable destiny, whose flawed genetic code might hold the long-sought key to a cure for dementia.In the idyllic American town of Pleasant Hills, Pennsylvania, there lived a family with nine siblings, the youngest a girl named Barb. As the older children headed off to college and started their lives, only Barb was home to see their beautiful, still-young mother fall under a gothic spell, changing into someone she didn’t recognize: withdrawn, neglectful, uncaring. Thus begins The Vanishing Family, journalist Robert Kolker’s superb follow-up to Hidden Valley Road (“Deeply compassionate and chilling,” wrote The Washington Post). This family, we learn, has a genetic mutation that causes dementia, but with an especially cruel twist. As early as their forties, formerly loving parents and hard-driving executives will lose their jobs, have affairs, take up drinking—shed all inhibitions and sense of responsibility—and become people their families hardly know. Their former personalities seem to vanish—and there is a fifty-fifty chance that it will happen to their children, too.The Vanishing Family unfolds like a heartbreaking thriller as the siblings begin to realize that what happened to their mother is happening to them: first one, then two, three, four, and more begin to change. Sue, in search of a calling, finds her place in caring for the others. Barb sets out to find a cure. Alongside their story, Kolker weaves in the dramatic scientific fight against dementia; after decades of blind alleys, this this family’s rare form of FTD (frontotemporal dementia) might lead to a breakthrough in the prevention and treatment of all dementia—including the scourge of Alzheimer’s disease. Moving, intimate, unexpectedly hopeful and redemptive, The Vanishing Family is an enthralling narrative about one family’s fate, and a medical detective story that speaks to all of us who fear losing ourselves at the end.Robert Kolker is a contributing writer at The New York Times Magazine and author of the #1 New York Times bestseller Hidden Valley Road, named an Oprah’s Book Club Pick, a New York Times Book Review Top 10 book of the year, a GQ Best Book of Literary Journalism of the 21st Century, and a Kirkus Reviews Best Nonfiction Book of the Century. His first book was Lost Girls, named a New York Times Notable Book and a Publishers Weekly Best Book of 2013.This event is free with first come, first serve seating.To request accommodations for this event or to inquire about accessibility please email events@politics-prose.com ideally one week in advance of the event date. We will make an effort to accommodate all requests up until the time of the event.
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Sally Hayden — This Is Also a Love Story: A Reporter's Search for Goodness in a Cruel World - with James Palmer — at Conn Ave
An acclaimed reporter takes us on an unforgettable journey, capturing the human capacity for love and connection against all odds.We live in an era defined by crisis—whether it be war and displacement, climate collapse, or growing inequality, and how the powerful profit from violence and exploitation. Celebrated foreign correspondent Sally Hayden has spent her career on the frontlines, uncovering some of the darkest moments of our time. Yet even in the face of unimaginable adversity, she’s witnessed the incredible goodness of regular people.In This Is Also a Love Story, Hayden reexamines catastrophe through the love stories she has come across. She introduces us to a mother in northeast Nigeria who risks everything to save her daughter from forced marriage to Boko Haram militants, and to a group of Syrian women who have tirelessly searched for their missing spouses and children, while launching a call for justice. We meet a couple separated by the Russian invasion of Ukraine and read letters from the bereaved to the dead, still being written over a decade after the tsunami that devastated Japan. Through these stories, which crisscross the globe, from Uganda to Lebanon, Ghana, Rwanda and Iraq, she challenges us to reconsider what it means to be alive on this planet today.What if news was recounted through the prism of the actions and decisions people take for those they love? Would it become harder to dehumanize those who seem different to us? This Is Also a Love Story dares us to recognize how innate generosity and self-sacrifice can be found in even the most difficult of times, and—as a result—to question what might be needed to create a better world.Sally Hayden is an Irish journalist focused on migration, conflict, and humanitarian crises. Sally’s work has been featured by The New York Times, the Irish Times, The Washington Post, Financial Times, The Guardian, CNN International, Al Jazeera, Time, BBC, and other outlets across the world. Sally’s first book My Fourth Time, We Drowned was the winner of the Orwell Prize and the Irish Book of the Year, and was a finalist for the Baillie Gifford Prize and the New York Public Library’s Helene Bernstein Book Award for excellence in journalism.Hayden will be in conversation with James Palmer. Palmer is a deputy editor at Foreign Policy and writes FP’s weekly China Brief newsletter. Palmer is the author of The Bloody White Baron: The Extraordinary Story of the Russian Nobleman Who Became the Last Khan of Mongolia and The Death of Mao: The Tangshan Earthquake and the Birth of the New China. He won the Shiva Naipaul prize for travel writing in 2003.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.
Devon Rodriguez — Work in Progress — at St. Paul's
As a child, Rodriguez wondered why he lived in a single cramped room with his family, where he was beaten often and never felt safe. But despite difficult circumstances, he always believed he was going to be a successful artist.When he was in the ninth grade, his art teacher invited him to ride the New York City subway, with one destination in mind: the development of his craft, by drawing the commuters sitting across from him. A blank page in his sketchbook was something Rodriguez could control in an otherwise chaotic life.In this astonishing memoir, he explains how his art, his grandmother, and his own relentless drive saved him from heart-wrenching circumstances and led him to redefine out-of-fashion realist portraiture as fresh and magical.Rodriguez writes with rhythm, verve, and an artist’s POV, painting a vivid picture of his native Bronx, the tattoos and rooftop graffiti that mesmerized him as a kid, and the teachers who saw his potential and nourished it.Painting regular people in all their complexity is Rodriguez’s gift and his offering to the world, an old-school act that has made him a new-school star. Work in Progress delivers Rodriguez’s most precise and moving portrait yet: of himself.Devon Rodriguez is a Bronx-born portrait artist of Puerto Rican and Honduran descent. He rose to notoriety for drawing realistic portraits of commuters on the New York City subway system. He has also portrayed such luminaries as former President Biden, Oprah, and more. The most-followed visual artist on TikTok, he was a finalist in the Outwin Boochever Portrait Competition. His work has been featured in The New Yorker and The New York Times. He was named a 2025 Time100 Creator and a Forbes Top Creator the same year. He lives in New York City.
Jennifer Welch — Not Today, Fascists: The Lies That Got Us Here, and the Truths That Will Reunite Us — at Lincoln Theatre
From Jennifer Welch, the host of the wildly popular “I’ve Had It” podcast and a trusted voice in new media, comes a piercing, incisive, no-holds-barred take on the rising threat of theocracy in America and a fresh vision for how we can take back our country.As a progressive atheist from a Bible Belt red state, Jennifer Welch has a unique perspective on the intersection of religion and politics in America. She has seen how the far right has used religion across denominations to coalesce power, and how their messaging, particularly the Evangelical prosperity gospel, reinforces economic inequality.In Not Today, Fascists, Welch explores:how America is moving not only toward fascism, but also theocracy;the current administration’s harmful platform and how it’s hurting everyday Americans;why the separation of church and state remains a fundamental principle of our country and the ways in which rogue actors are seeking to dismantle it;the role of Big Church and its economic and political sway over our government;how politicians on the left can create an effective platform and messaging on human decency, structural equality and a populist economics perspective to win electionsNot Today, Fascists will arm readers with the language and facts they need to discuss crucial politics issues, to win elections and to take back our country.Jennifer Welch has spent the last twenty-five years designing dynamic, highly specialized commercial and residential interiors across the country in a broad range of styles. In addition to her design firm, Jennifer is the star of Bravo’s Sweet Home, which gives all-access insight into her multifaceted, fast-paced design business, and the cohost of the I’ve Had It podcast. A mother of two boys, Dylan and Roman, and partner to attorney and photographer Josh Welch, Jennifer understands the balance of family and career and is a vocal advocate for women empowerment in business.