Embedded Files
Books in Conversation
The two books in each term are chosen together. Ideas raised in the first carry directly into the discussion of the second, so each pairing builds toward a fuller picture of its subject. Themes also return across terms, resurfacing months later from a new angle. Our conversations continue to build.Books in Conversation
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.
Summer 2026 — The Scramble for Resources
Summer 2026 — The Scramble for Resources
The global competition for strategic resources that shapes geopolitics, conflict, and economic power guide our reads. We open with the raw stuff of modern life, sand, salt, iron, copper, oil, and lithium, and the hidden supply chains that make phones, cars, and power grids possible. From there we move into four decades of rivalry between Saudi Arabia and Iran, a rivalry built on top of the same resource wealth. Read side by side, these books make the case that whoever controls physical materials still controls the world, trade wars and energy security headlines included.
Spring 2026 — Where and How We Live
Spring 2026 — Where and How We Live
A full-time job used to guarantee a roof over your head. This spring's books ask what changed. We follow families in Atlanta who work steadily and still lose their housing, then widen the lens to the climate disasters pushing entire communities out of their homes across the country. Different causes, same result: where and how Americans live is being rewritten, and not by choice.
Winter 2026 — When Innovation Outruns Us
Winter 2026 — When Innovation Outruns Us
A steel box and an algorithm, decades apart, share the same problem: neither came with instructions for the chaos it would cause. We start with the shipping container's quiet takeover of the global economy in the twentieth century, then turn to artificial intelligence and the question of whether we can contain a technology moving faster than the institutions meant to govern it. Read together, they suggest a pattern: society keeps building first and coping with the consequences later.
Fall 2025 — Who Holds Society Together
Fall 2025 — Who Holds Society Together
Government and public space rarely get much credit until they disappear. This term looks at both. We meet the federal employees, mine inspectors, statisticians, archivists, doing work most of us never think about, then turn to the libraries, parks, and public spaces that quietly hold neighborhoods together. Neither book is abstract. Both argue that trust, safety, and community depend on institutions and places we tend to take for granted, until they are gone.
Summer 2025 — Inequality Is a Choice
Summer 2025 — Inequality Is a Choice
Our first term asked an uncomfortable question: who benefits from poverty staying exactly as it is? Matthew Desmond starts with the policies and everyday choices that keep struggling families in place. Heather McGhee widens the lens to show how racism drains resources from everyone, not just its intended targets. Neither book treats inequality as bad luck. Both call it a decision, one made over and over, and one that can be unmade.
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