My second book The Edge of Space-Time: Particles, Poetry, and the Cosmic Dream Boogie debuts on April 7 in North America and May 7 in UK/Europe. If you haven’t preordered already, please do. Want a signed and personalized copy? Come see me on tour or preorder from Loyalty Books by March 30.

Last week, I announced my book tour. Then a few days later, I had to withdraw from one of the events because it’s being headlined by Jenna Bush Hager, who is not only war criminal President George W. Bush’s daughter, but also one of the most influential people in the book industry. That’s not a coincidence. She is where she is because of who she is, standing on the backs of hundreds of thousands of dead Iraqis, Afghans, and yes, Americans, too.

Of course, I know children are not their parents. All of us make our own choices about how we embrace or reject our family legacies. Jenna Bush Hager has embraced hers and built her name through books that whitewash her family’s history, which is full of war crimes committed by both her father and grandfather when they were Presidents of the United States, and her grandfather when he was head of the CIA, among other things.

In the book world, we don’t really talk about this. Instead, the publishing industry has allowed Bush Hager to become one of the most important book influencers in the English language. Her Read with Jenna Book Club comes with guaranteed sales for authors, a huge media splash, and access to resources that other authors can only dream of. Bush Hager also now has a deal to select books for publication — a deal with Penguin Random House, which is also my publisher because there are only 5 major book publishers left in the United States since anti-trust law isn’t enforced anymore.

The book world quietly rolls with this. And that means Bush Hager is invited to book festivals, including one in June where I had committed to participate. I only found out by accident that Bush Hager was the headliner.

I found out at 11 pm on Thursday night. I withdrew while eating breakfast the following morning. And it was easy to do, but also in material terms, a shitty choice to have to make.

In the best of times, releasing a new book would be a stressful thing to do. Reviews come in, and sometimes they’re not good, for reasons that have nothing to do with the book, really. You don’t know how the book is going to be received, whether people are preordering like you’re begging them to.

Of course, we are not living in the best of times. Instead, I haven’t heard from my fellow physicists who live in Tehran for a few weeks, and I have no idea if they’re ok. For no good reason — there’s never a good reason — Israel and the U.S. are bombing countries across the Middle East. Iran is bombing those that host U.S. military bases. People are dying, and young Americans are being sent to a war that some of them will come home in body bags from.

And I am 43, and I have lived through all of this before. I protested the Iraq war Bush Hager’s grandfather started when I was 7. I protested the “War on Terror” her father started when I was 19. And I now have to protest the war of “just because we can and Netanyahu doesn’t want to go to jail,” made possible using an apparatus that Bush Hager’s father put in place. And I am among the lucky ones — I am not having to evade bombs.

I do have to evade being kidnapped off the street by the president’s private militia, like generations of Black, Brown, and Indigenous folks before mine.

It might sound like the height of privilege to say “it’s hard to sell books in the midst of this,” but the truth is that every single element of these wars is in part about trying to get us to shut the fuck up. They are trying it by any means necessary: bombs, censorship, kidnappings, cutting funding, closing cultural spaces . . . the authoritarian catastrophe works to silence us in myriad ways, some more aggressive and permanently harmful than others.

I will keep writing whether I am paid or not, but whether I find an audience and can tune my work so that it’s at its best is determined in part by media institutions that are actively working against people like me. Publishing houses are starting to acquire fewer works of non-fiction on the premise that sales are down. The April 2026 Indie Next Book List only had one non-fiction book and one collection of poetry out of 25 — the institutions that should be supporting us aren’t bothering. PEN America made a most anticipated book list and didn’t include any science books on it, even though we’re very evidently in the middle of a science literacy crisis. And I’ve heard from journalists that they’d love to cover my book but simply don’t have the bandwidth because of the political situation.

In this context, it matters that Jenna Bush Hager is not only playing a major role in what books get promoted in the media but now also playing a growing role in what books get published at all. The resources allocated to her imprint and its books will not go to other books and people in the Random House imprint family.

It’s important to note that I am being published by a Random House imprint, that my views are my own, and I have not spoken to anyone at my imprint about this essay. But it’s worth highlighting that while I was in the early stages of writing The Edge of Space-Time, Penguin Random House fired the head of my imprint, Lisa Lucas, whose barrier-breaking work and vision as a Black woman in the book world is the reason I chose the imprint in the first place. Lucas is now one of the hundreds of thousands of Black women — many of them cultural workers — who are unemployed in Trump’s America.

The message is clear: Black women are out, and the children of war criminals are in.

It feels like the message is coming from all sides right now. Last night the film Sinners lost Best Picture at the Oscars to a film that I have taken to calling One Misogynoir After Another. I saw Sinners in the theater nine times and after one of those showings I came home and made the note, “Every time I saw Sinners, I wept and cheered for the ancestors — and for us.” Part of what makes it a remarkable work of art is that it is about, as Adrienne Rich once discussed in an essay about Thomas Avena, that in us which does go on responding. White supremacy has stolen so much from Black people, but it has never been able to kill our souls. The cultural work we do is daily proof of that. And when I wrote The Edge of Space-Time, I was writing into that belief, that the study of cosmic history is important cultural work. My work as a scientist — including writing about it for people who are like “what the fuck is quantum field theory?” — is part of that in us which does go on responding.

In a different world, this essay would have been better. I would have pitched it to a publication, maybe Catapult Magazine. But that publication, like many of the former homes for essays like this, is no longer publishing new work. A better known writer might have been able to get it into the Washington Post Books Section, which was recently closed. And that means a proliferation of newsletters (blogs by email) without editors, that essays about the universe-building that books do are struggling now more than ever to find a home and will not reach the audiences they used to.

As these venues disappear, Read with Jenna has increasing cultural power. Jenna Bush Hager, who does not need or deserve the platform, will be at a regional book festival with a lot of built-in media opportunity. The author she is there to support will sell books with her help. Meanwhile, I will probably sell fewer books because I chose to stand by my values, to refuse to share a marquee with a war criminal’s daughter. Fewer people will hear about my book.

A war criminal’s daughter helps choose what you read.

The Edge of Space-Time comes out on April 7 in North America and May 7 in the UK/Europe. Your preorders, especially from indie bookstores like Loyalty Books, help. A store that gets even three preorders may order more copies on the strength of that customer demand — your one order can make a huge difference.