Aug. 22, 2025, 12:07 p.m.
Today is Hotline’s last edition of August. We’ll be off next week for a summer break as we gear up to cover the closing weeks of the off-year elections and the latest redistricting news. To tide our readers over until our return, we asked friends of the program to share their summer reading recommendations. Enjoy, and we’ll see you after Labor Day.
Jacob Rubashkin, Inside Elections deputy editor:
Cahokia Jazz by Francis Spufford. A richly constructed alternate-history novel that blends speculative fiction with hard-boiled noir. Set in Cahokia, the capital city of a majority-Native American state in the Midwest, the novel follows detective and jazz pianist Joe Barrow as he navigates shifting racial and political alliances to solve a grisly murder. Read it before it inevitably gets the prestige TV treatment.
Louis Jacobson, Almanac of American Politics chief author:
Cloud Warriors: Deadly Storms, Climate Chaos—and the Pioneers Creating a Revolution in Weather Forecasting, by Thomas E. Weber.
A deeply reported look by a longtime journalist at the challenges weather professionals face in tracking and predicting the weather and the new technologies they may be able to rely on in the future. The book focuses to a surprising degree on the social science of how weather reports reach and are understood by the public.
Chris Cilliza, author of So What:
Challenger by Adam Higginbotham. INCREDIBLE.
Slow Horses series by Mick Herron. I’m reading all these after consuming all of the seasons of the TV show. Dark Horse: the Surprise Election and Political Murder of President James A. Garfield by Kenneth D. Ackerman. It’s all about James Garfield (via a Chuck Todd recommendation!)
Chuck Todd, host of The Chuck ToddCast:
I did a fun “what to read if you enjoy Gilded Age” in my Substack last week: American Disruptor: The Scandalous Life of Leland Stanford by Roland De Wolk. On the politics of the era: Destiny of the Republic by Candice Millard—also a good primer on the medical care of the era too. The Senator and the Socialite: America’s First Black Political Dynasty by Lawrence Otis Graham. The story of Blanche Bruce, a Black senator from Mississippi who was ousted in 1880.
Ledyard King, managing editor of National Journal Daily:
As a Beatles fanatic, I thought I had ingested most of what’s out there on the Fab Four. Then a fellow Beatlemaniac suggested The Beatles: All These Years – Volume 1 – Tune In, which chronicles in vivid detail the lives of John, Paul, George, and Ringo through 1962. Also, as an alum of the (Annapolis) Capital Newspaper, I highly recommend Pressed to Kill: Inside Newspapers' Worst Mass Murder, the chilling account of the 2018 shooting as told by the paper’s former editor and publisher Tom Marquardt.
Nathan Gonzales, Inside Elections editor and publisher:
Big Dumb Eyes: Stories from a Simpler Mind, by Nate Bargatze. We all could use a break from our day-to-day lives here in Washington.
— Kirk A. Bado
kbado@nationaljournal.com
