Next on my reading list: The Sirens’ Call: How Attention Became the World’s Most Endangered Resource by Chris Hayes.

“With the help of a few tech firms, we basically tore it down in about a decade.”

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The Sirens' Call: How Attention Became the World's Most Endangered Resource

• Hardcover Book
• Hayes, Chris (Author)
• English (Publication Language)
• 336 Pages - 01/28/2025 (Publication Date) - Penguin Press (Publisher)

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NBC News: “Biden plans to write another book, providing him with the opportunity to tell his version of his presidency and its conclusion.”

“Vice President Kamala Harris has a lot of options for her next act — including possible runs for governor of California in 2026 and president in 2028 — but writing a book may be first up,” NBC News reports.

Said literary agent Keith Urbahn: “Kamala Harris is poised to land the biggest book deal of any vice president in history. But the real question isn’t the advance — it’s whether the book can redefine her for 2028.”

Just published: The Origins of Elected Strongmen: How Personalist Parties Destroy Democracy from Within by Erica Frantz, Andrea Kendall-Taylor and Joe Wright.

Politico: “We’ve studied democratic erosion in countries around the world, and our research has found that the most important bulwark against an elected leader undermining democracy doesn’t come from opposition parties or pro-democracy activists. It comes from the ruling party — and particularly the powerful elites in that party — and their efforts to constrain their own leader.”

“The danger to democracy is particularly acute in political systems led by parties where leaders wield disproportionate influence relative to the political parties that back them — as is now the case in the Republican Party.”

The Origins of Elected Strongmen: How Personalist Parties Destroy Democracy from Within

• Hardcover Book
• Frantz, Erica (Author)
• English (Publication Language)
• 240 Pages - 08/24/2024 (Publication Date) - Oxford University Press (Publisher)

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“The Washington Post reporter Bob Woodward forcefully denied making statements attributed to him by James Comer, the Republican chair of the powerful House oversight committee, in which Woodward supposedly said Joe Biden was financially corrupt,” The Guardian reports.

Said Woodward: “The statements attributed to me in what is apparently his book are false. I made none of those statements he attributes to me. I repeat none, and not even in a paraphrased form.”

“President-elect Donald Trump’s team was given the questions asked by Fox News anchors at an Iowa town hall last January in advance by someone inside the network, according to a forthcoming book, in what would be a serious breach of journalism ethics,” CNN reports.

Revenge: The Inside Story of Trump's Return to Power

• Amazon Kindle Edition
• Isenstadt, Alex (Author)
• English (Publication Language)
• 03/18/2025 (Publication Date) - Grand Central Publishing (Publisher)

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A must-read: The Sirens’ Call: How Attention Became the World’s Most Endangered Resource by Chris Hayes.

Hayes writes in the New York Times: “Our attention is a wildly valuable resource, and some of the world’s most powerful corporations extract it at scale in increasingly sophisticated ways, leaving us feeling like bystanders to our minds. You might say we’ve built a machine for producing boredom and then entertainment to fill it in an endlessly accelerating and desperate cycle.”

“Boredom lurks around every corner in our lives.”

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The Sirens' Call: How Attention Became the World's Most Endangered Resource

• Hardcover Book
• Hayes, Chris (Author)
• English (Publication Language)
• 336 Pages - 01/28/2025 (Publication Date) - Penguin Press (Publisher)

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Melania Trump’s memoir has been on the New York Times bestseller list for 10 weeks and is back in the top position this week.

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Melania

• Hardcover Book
• Trump, Melania (Author)
• English (Publication Language)
• 256 Pages - 10/08/2024 (Publication Date) - Skyhorse (Publisher)

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Out early next year: Uncharted: How Trump Beat Biden, Harris, and the Odds in the Wildest Campaign in History by Chris Whipple.

“A disastrous debate, a would-be assassin’s bullet, an electrifying eleventh hour candidate swap, dramatic and surprising VP selections, betrayals behind closed doors, charges of a stolen election, game-changing blunders—the history-making 2024 presidential election is a political saga of Shakespearean proportions.”

Uncharted: How Trump Beat Biden, Harris, and the Odds in the Wildest Campaign in History

• Hardcover Book
• Whipple, Chris (Author)
• English (Publication Language)
• 240 Pages - 04/08/2025 (Publication Date) - Harper Influence (Publisher)

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Oliver Darcy: “Two of the journalists toughest on Joe Biden are teaming up to write a campaign book focused largely on the president.”

“CNN anchor Jake Tapper and Axios national political correspondent Alex Thompson, both of whom have treated the president to an unrelenting stream of hawkish coverage, have started reaching out to figures in Bidenworld as they begin reporting out their book, I’m told.”

“Unlike many of the campaign books due out next year, which center mostly on President-elect Donald Trump’s astonishing return to power, I’m told that Tapper and Thompson are focusing most of their efforts on the drama that Biden’s initial insistence on staying in the 2024 race, followed by his eventual exit, gave way to in Democratic politics.”

Donald Trump campaign issued an unusual statement, preemptively saying it will not comment on forthcoming book from Michael Wolff:

“As a group, we have decided not to respond to his bad faith inquiries, and we encourage others to completely disregard whatever nonsense he eventually publishes. Consider this our blanket response to whatever he writes,” read the statement signed by 15 staffers.”

Wolff had recently told the Daily Beast that Jeffrey Epstein had photos of Trump with “topless young women” sitting in his lap.

Bill Clinton writes in his new book of his “frustration” at being questioned about his affair with White House intern Monica Lewinsky while acknowledging that he has never apologized to her directly, The Guardian reports.

Citizen: My Life After the White House

• Amazon Kindle Edition
• Clinton, Bill (Author)
• English (Publication Language)
• 442 Pages - 11/19/2024 (Publication Date) - Knopf (Publisher)

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Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale, a novel set in a totalitarian society, has shot to the top of Amazon’s bestselling books list following Donald Trump’s reelection, CNN reports.

“The Handmaid’s Tale takes place in a theocratic, male-dominated future America where the US Constitution is suspended, media is censored and women (the titular ‘handmaids’) are forced to bear children for the ruling class.”

The Handmaid's Tale

• Amazon Kindle Edition
• Atwood, Margaret (Author)
• English (Publication Language)
• 325 Pages - 02/17/1986 (Publication Date) - Ecco (Publisher)

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Jonathan Martin: “If nothing else, the age of Trump has made abundantly clear that the post-World War II political consensus in America is over. With elections more an outgrowth of identity than a reflection of preference, the country has returned to a post-Civil War politics, when, as the saying went, people ‘vote as they shot’ in the years after the war.”

“I’ve been thinking about that period for two years, since reading Jon Grinspan’s book, The Age of Acrimony: How Americans Fought To Fix Their Democracy, 1865-1915. Grinspan, a historian at the Smithsonian, details another period of technological disruption, high immigration rates and, yes, close presidential races with soaring turnout and anger that metastasized into violence. And he also writes about how it ended after the turn of the century, chronicling the reformers who sanitized politics into what it was until the first decades of this century.”

“It turns out I’m not the only one who has turned to the past to better grasp the present. Grinspan’s book has quietly become something of a cult favorite with lawmakers also eager to understand this new, convulsive era of politics — and what can be done to tame it.”

The Age of Acrimony: How Americans Fought to Fix Their Democracy, 1865-1915

• Hardcover Book
• Grinspan, Jon (Author)
• English (Publication Language)
• 384 Pages - 04/27/2021 (Publication Date) - Bloomsbury Publishing (Publisher)

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“Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell delivered a scathing assessment of the modern Republican Party in an upcoming biography, saying the ‘MAGA movement is completely wrong’ and that Ronald Reagan ‘wouldn’t recognize’ the party today,” CNN reports.

Said McConnell: “I think Trump was the biggest factor in changing the Republican Party from what Ronald Reagan viewed and he wouldn’t recognize today.”

The Price of Power: How Mitch McConnell Mastered the Senate, Changed America, and Lost His Party

• Amazon Kindle Edition
• Tackett, Michael (Author)
• English (Publication Language)
• 410 Pages - 10/29/2024 (Publication Date) - Simon & Schuster (Publisher)

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