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A Reading Throughline — Creating an Enduring Democracy
A Reading Throughline — Creating an Enduring Democracy
Across the next three terms, we will follow a single arc: a democratic system, who controls it, and what happens when control is lost. We open with the US Constitution itself, a document built to resist easy change. From there we ask who holds power inside that system today, and why one generation is reluctant to hand it off. We close by tracing power to its breaking point, first through regimes that collapse by force, then through democracies hollowed out from within while still holding elections. Along the way, we will ask what it takes to hold the line before that happens.
Fall 2026 — An Ongoing Argument
Fall 2026 — An Ongoing Argument
America turns 250 this year and our readings mark the occasion by asking what the country actually promised itself. Jill Lepore traces the Constitution's built-in promise of amendment, and how that promise has been fought over since the ink dried. Beverly Gage takes the more literal route: a road trip through thirteen regions, weighing the country's accomplishments against its failures on the ground. One book reads the rules America wrote. The other reads the record of how the country has lived by them.
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Winter 2027 — The Art of Letting Go
Winter 2027 — The Art of Letting Go
We begin with a question most of us face eventually: what happens to a person’s sense of purpose once professional power starts to fade? Arthur Brooks, drawing on psychology and his own reckoning with decline, finds that the answer has less to do with clinging to relevance than with finding a different kind of strength. Then Samuel Moyn takes the question out of private life and into public office. The current U.S. Congress is older, on average, than at almost any point in its history and Moyn wants to know why so few members ever leave. He argues that one generation has consolidated the country’s wealth, offices, and institutions, and shows little sign of stepping aside. Letting go turns out to be both a personal choice and a political one. Each raises the same question: what do we owe the people coming after us.
Spring 2027 — The Fall and the Fight Back
Spring 2027 — The Fall and the Fight Back
Every authoritarian regime eventually meets its end but not all endings look alike. We examine two very different exits from the same danger: one violent and sudden, the other slow enough that a country can vote its way into it without quite noticing. Marcel Dirsus spent years interviewing coup plotters, exiled generals, and the handlers of fallen dictators to answer one blunt question: what actually brings a tyrant down. Zack Beauchamp traces an antidemocratic tradition born in America and now exported to Hungary, India, and Israel. He closes by offering what we must do to protect democracy - while we still can. Together, the two books cover the same danger moving at two different speeds - neither one ending in despair.
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