The VIRA Briefing
September 13, 2026
Your one-email daily digest of everything VIRA Broadcasting published today.
Top Story
Regime Change: Inside the Imperial Presidency of Donald Trump
by Maggie Haberman and Jonathan Swan
Maggie Haberman and Jonathan Swan turn their unmatched access to the Trump orbit into a blow-by-blow account of a second term that runs less like a traditional presidency and more like a royal court — loyalty tested daily, dissent quietly purged. It’s less interested in relitigating 2024 than in mapping who actually holds power in the West Wing right now, and how fast that map keeps shifting. For readers trying to understand the mechanics behind the headlines, this is the most granular insider account yet.
Biological War
by Annie Jacobsen
Jacobsen, the investigative reporter behind Nuclear War: A Scenario, applies the same worst-case rigor to bioweapons — tracing how a single release could cascade into mass casualties within days. It reads less like speculative fiction than a briefing document, built on interviews with the officials who actually war-game these scenarios. A sobering companion piece for anyone who found her nuclear book more terrifying than they expected.
Read more → Behind the Seams: My Life in Rhinestones
by Dolly Parton
Parton’s new memoir uses her wardrobe — sequins, rhinestones, wigs and all — as the entry point into eight decades of reinvention, arguing the costume was never a distraction from the substance but the strategy itself. It’s warmer and funnier than a typical celebrity memoir, and sharper about the business of fame than her public persona usually lets on.
Read more → Katabasis
by R.F. Kuang
Kuang follows Babel and Yellowface with a dark-academic fantasy that sends two Cambridge graduate students literally into Hell to rescue their advisor — and uses the descent to skewer the exploitation baked into academia itself. It’s her funniest book yet, but the satire has teeth.
Read more → In Other News
- Whistler by Ann Patchett — a museum encounter reopens a decades-old wound in Patchett’s latest slow-burn character study.
- Strangers: A Memoir of Marriage by Belle Burden — an unflinching, occasionally funny reckoning with the end of a marriage.
- London Falling by Patrick Radden Keefe — a young man’s death from a luxury tower launches a deep-dive into money, power, and grief.
- Brain Damage by Freida McFadden — a thriller that traps its narrator in a hospital bed and a marriage that isn’t what it seems.
- Yesteryear by Caro Claire Burke — a tradwife influencer gets pulled into 1855 in this genre-bending homestead fantasy.
- The Killer Isn’t Alice by Iris Starling — an interactive whodunit that hands readers eighteen clues and asks them to do the detective work.
New From VIRA Today
Book Reviews
 Katabasis |  Yesteryear |  Brain Damage |
 Behind the Seams |  London Falling |  Biological War |
 Regime Change |  Whistler |  The Killer Isn’t Alice |
 Strangers |
VIRA Broadcasting
You’re receiving this because you subscribe to VIRA Broadcasting’s daily briefing.