The Coda explores contexts of speculative fictional responses to environmental crises as a way of bringing together the varied dialogues between literature, self-help, and agency at the heart of this study. It begins by surveying narratives of climate apocalypse and speculative possibility by Alexandra Kleeman, Margaret Atwood, Lidia Yuknavitch, and others before turning to consider in more depth Ben Lerner’s autofiction trilogy (Leaving the Atocha Station, 10:04, and The Topeka School) and his dialogic textual interactions with the work of his mother, bestselling feminist self-help author Harriet Lerner. These final reflections illuminate the submerged utopian and dystopian fantasies around personal and political change evident throughout the book and consider how self-help both enables and forecloses potentials for individual and collective authorship and agency in contemporary writing. The Coda argues that by pushing self-help to its limits – sometimes beyond the bounds of the human self – contemporary authors offer nuanced perspectives on what it means to ‘be better’, ethically, personally, ecologically, and socially, in a world of ongoing crisis.

On the eve of the first impeachment of Donald Trump in late 2018, constitutional law scholars Laurence Tribe and Joshua Matz published an insightful book emphasizing the critically important role of impeachment in establishing checks on abuse of power in the presidency. The authors’ vision, much like that of the Framers, was that the threat of impeachment can stop the worst abuses by a president. For reasons we explore here, it has not always worked out that way. Nonetheless, the proper role of impeachment in the US constitutional framework, including what the House and Senate should do to carry out their responsibilities in an impeachment proceeding, is important to discuss here.

Since the nation’s founding in the late eighteenth century, it has experienced trying times, including a civil war, two world wars, a Cold War with the Soviet Union, acts of domestic and international terrorism, a decade-long economic collapse in the 1930s precipitated by a stock market crash and a global trade war, another economic collapse after the 2008 financial crisis, a violent attempt to overturn a presidential election, civil unrest precipitated by racial tension, anti-war protests, and protests against immigration policy. All of these events, as well as countless others, have required the nation to act quickly and decisively to respond to unprecedented circumstances.

The President not only has the enumerated constitutional powers of Commander in Chief, and head of the Executive Branch, but also is the largest property manager in the United States, and apart from Russia and China, the world. The President shares with Congress management of federal land and collection of rents, royalties, and other fees for commercial uses of federal land.

President Trump’s actions and inactions on January 6, 2021 have sparked renewed interest and debate in the Constitution’s requirement that the President “shall take care that the Laws be faithfully executed.” The clause is original in the adoption of the Constitution in 1789. In this section, we explore the meaning of the language and application of (1) “shall take care,” (2) “faithfully execute,” and (3) “the laws.” We discuss what kind of duty this imposes on a president, whether it implies that it gives the President additional powers to carry out his duties, and whether it limits the “duty” of the President to only those laws passed by Congress.

David Foster Wallace’s work is soaked through with self-help practices – from Infinite Jest’s satirical-yet-serious portrayals of recovery culture to the critiques of self-absorbed personal growth cultures in his novels and stories and his more positive accounts of intergenerational advice transmission. Chapter 1 considers Wallace as writer and public advice giver, focusing on his posthumously published novel, The Pale King (2011), his 2005 commencement address at Kenyon College, and manuscripts from the Wallace archives, including an unpublished and unstudied letter composed in 1990 for James Harmon’s edited collection, Take My Advice: Recommendations for the Next Generation. I focus on Wallace’s lifelong engagement with self-help as a troubled but productive space through which to explore his concerns around public and private life, generational and gendered communications, and the transition to adult citizenship, and suggest that Wallace’s fantasies of advisory authority emerge, in part, as a response to the social fragmentation and individualism he attributes to post-1960s self-help.

On the day of his second inauguration, on January 20, 2025, President Trump signed an executive order challenging the Fourteenth Amendment’s Citizenship Clause which grants United States citizenship to anyone who is born in the United States. This right of citizenship always has been considered as an automatic vesting of citizenship upon birth in the United States.

Impeachment by Congress is the principal Article I check on the presidency. Presidents also can be held accountable in federal courts and sometimes by state courts. These include suits for injunctive relief against the President such as the famous Youngstown Steel case. More recent cases include Boumediene v. Bush and Biden v. Nebraska. A separate category is when a president or former president is personally sued for money damages. In these scenarios we consider what special rules, if any, apply when the President is a defendant?