Lisa

Harnessing Grief

When Maria Kefalas’s daughter Calliope was diagnosed with a degenerative, uncurable genetic disease, the last thing Maria expected to discover in herself was a superpower. She and her husband, Pat, were head over heels in love with their youngest daughter, whose spirit, dancing eyes, and appetite for life captured the best of each of them.

When they learned that Cal had MLD (metachromatic leukodystrophy), their world was shattered. But as she spent time listening to and learning from Cal, Maria developed the superpower of grief. It made her a fearless warrior for her daughter. And it gave her voice a bell-like clarity—poignant and funny all at once.

This superpower of grief also revealed a miracle—not the conventional sort that fuels the prayers of friends and strangers but a realization that, in order to save themselves, Maria and Pat would need to find a way to save others. And so, with their two older children, they set out to raise money so that they, in their son PJ’s words, could “find a cure for Cal’s disease.”

They had no way of knowing that a research team in Italy was closing in on an effective gene therapy for MLD. Though the therapy came too late to help Cal, this news would be the start of an unexpected journey that would introduce Maria and her family to world-famous scientists, brilliant doctors, biotech CEOs, a Hall of Fame NFL quarterback, and a wise nun, and it would also involve selling 50 thousand cupcakes. They would travel to the FDA, the NIH, and the halls of Congress in search of a cure that would never save their child. And their lives would become inextricably intertwined with the families of 13 children whose lives would be transformed by the biggest medical breakthrough in a generation.

A memoir about heartbreak that is also about joy, Harnessing Grief is both unsparing and generous. Steeped in love, it is a story about possibility.

Francis de Véricourt

Francis de Véricourt is the co-author, with Viktor Mayer-Schönberger and Kenneth Cukier, of Framers: Human Advantage in an Age of Technology and Turmoil, published by Dutton. Praised as “A tightly written prescription for smart thinking” by the Financial Times, the book was chosen as one of their best books of 2021.

Francis is Professor of Management Science and the director of the Center for Decisions, Models and Data (DMD-Center) at ESMT Berlin. He was the first Associate Dean of Research at ESMT and held faculty positions at Duke University and INSEAD, where he also was the Paul Dubrule Chaired professor in Sustainable Development. He was a post-doctoral researcher at Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) and received a MS degree in applied mathematics and computer science at the Grenoble Institute of Technology as well as a PhD degree from Université Paris VI, France.

His general research interest is in the area of decision science, analytics and operations.

Coming Out Republican

For more than fifty years, gay Republicans have been a small but significant constituency for the party and some of its most enthusiastic activists, remaining loyal even as its platform has embraced evangelical Christian resistance to gay rights. And closeted gay Republicans have held influential positions in Republican administrations ever since Reagan. But they have been more than just good foot soldiers – their activism has been instrumental in creating the party of Trump.

Coming Out Republican: How LGBTQ Conservatives Paved the Way For the Modern GOP follows the gay men and women who, in the 1970s, from the boardrooms of Southern California and the bathhouses of San Francisco, mobilized an unexpected political movement dedicated to personal freedom and the right to be left alone. A diverse band of gay Republicans from small business owners, entrepreneurs, and military officers to leather daddies, drag queens, and bathhouse regulars – waged battles both at the ballot box and inside the GOP with the hopes of throwing Democrats out of office and homophobes out of their party.

They would not succeed at both. But even as their hopes of having a moderating influence on the party faded, gay Republicans adapted. And rather than leaving the party, many of them doubled down, sharpening the GOP’s far-right edge and helping to shape the modern Republican party. The compromises and calculations that gay Republicans made, and the embattled identity they cultivated, give us a new way of understanding the improbable rise of Trump and the conflicting currents that animate the GOP today.

Jocelyn Simonson

Jocelyn Simonson writes and teaches about criminal law, criminal procedure, evidence, and social change at Brooklyn Law School. Her scholarship explores ways in which the public participates in the criminal process and in the institutions of local governance that control policing and punishment. Her forthcoming book looks at bottom-up interventions in the criminal legal system, such as bail funds, copwatching, courtwatching, and participatory defense, asking how these real-life interventions should inform our conceptions of the design of criminal justice institutions, the discourse of constitutional rights, and the meaning of democratic justice.

Her most recent law review articles have appeared or are forthcoming in the Harvard Law Review, Yale Law Journal, Columbia Law Review, California Law Review, and Michigan Law Review. Professor Simonson’s scholarship has been cited twice by the Supreme Court, and was designated “Must Read” by the NACDL Getting Scholarship Into Courts Project.

Prior to joining the Brooklyn Law School faculty in 2015, Professor Simonson was an Acting Assistant Professor of Lawyering at New York University School of Law. Previously, she spent five years as a public defender with the Bronx Defenders.

Neil J. Young

Neil J. Young is a historian, writer, and podcaster, whose writing focuses on modern American politics and culture. He is a contributing columnist for The Week and his writing appears in the Washington Post, Atlantic, Los Angeles Times, Vox, Politico, Slate, and the New York Times. He formerly served as an opinion columnist for HuffPost.

Neil co-hosts and produces the popular history podcast, Past Present. Past Present‘s episodes have been downloaded more than one million times, and the podcast was chosen by iTunes as a “New and Notable” selection when it launched in 2015. He is also the co-creator and co-producer of a limited podcast series from Pineapple Street Studios, Welcome to Your Fantasy, about the history of the Chippendales.

His first book, We Gather Together, was published by Oxford University Press. It explores the rise of the Religious Right and the challenges of building religious and political alliances among conservative evangelicals, Catholics, and Mormons.

Lisa

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