Showing results by publisher "Audible Originals" in Politics & Social Sciences

Listen to the trailer now and the full podcast on 10/28.

Radiant Minds: The World of Oliver Sacks investigates consciousness, the brain, and the human experience, drawing inspiration from works by the neurologist and beloved author Oliver Sacks. Oliver cared for people with misunderstood neurological conditions at a time when many in the medical community had turned their backs on them.

A crew of 47 aboard an Alaskan fishing boat ominously nicknamed “The Danger Ranger” had been counting on a final run deep into the Bering Sea as a last-ditch effort to save a mediocre fishing season.

The future of democracy is uncertain. Populist world leaders are dominating headlines and creating a new kind of politics that challenges democratic values and the liberal order. They influence the media, exert economic power, appoint judges, cultivate populism and seek to undermine the very institutions which brought them into power. In this gripping narrative, Misha Glenny, journalist and best-selling author of McMafia, tells the stories of six strongmen’s unexpected rise.

Smartphones, social media, and surveillance tech are sold to us as ways to build a safer, more connected, and convenient world.

In weeks after the September 11 attacks, 18-year-old Mansoor Adayfi was kidnapped by Afghan militia and sold to US forces for bounty money. After months of interrogations, he was sent to the US military prison at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, as one of its first prisoners. Like the nearly 800 other men imprisoned at Guantanamo, Adayfi didn’t know why he was imprisoned or for how long. He had never seen a skyscraper and couldn’t imagine what the Twin Towers of the World Trade Center looked like, much less how they were destroyed.

Overwhelmed by conflicting narratives and sensationalism in the news? Wondering where you can get an objective analysis and direct-from-the-source reporting?

Look no further than In the Room with Peter Bergen. In a weekly nonpartisan news podcast, longtime national security journalist and bestselling author Peter Bergen goes beyond the headlines, to explore the world’s most important and captivating stories.

Whenever a tragic event happens, our first thoughts are with the victims, their families, and even with the motives driving the perpetrators. But what happens after the police tape comes down? Damned Spot revisits the places where painful memories of death and destruction still linger, and explores what a building and, ultimately, a community needs in order to heal.

If you believe in luck — or if you absolutely do not believe in luck, join Associate Professor of Philosophy Daniel Breyer as he makes the case for the essential role that luck plays in our lives — and has played throughout human history. In this 10-part overview, he will give you a completely new appreciation for the surprising interplay between luck, responsibility, and free will.

Over the next five years, millions of more Americans are expected to take Ozempic and other GLP-1 weight-loss drugs, which are rapidly being recognized as the miracle drugs of this century. If you’re not on them, you’ll probably know someone who is. What are the implications of the widespread use of these drugs, both on our bodies and our society? In this show, you’ll meet people across America who are either taking the jab or thinking about it, and the shocking intentional and unintentional results they are seeing.

This heartfelt Audible Original, narrated by Emmy and Tony Award-winning actress Mary-Louise Parker, follows three military veterans as they reclaim their most painful memories and turn them into comedy. Michael Garvey, Isaura Ramirez, and Patrick Harth left combat zones to challenge themselves in a stand-up comedy boot camp. As they learn to transform their raw emotions into cathartic experiences, they face the daunting challenge of trying to make an audience laugh with jokes about war, trauma, and mental health.

Nesta série, invertemos o ângulo pelo qual um caso de abuso sexual normalmente é tratado para mirá-lo sob um novo prisma: o da cobertura na imprensa. Por trás da explosão de denúncias contra o ex-líder espiritual João de Deus, acusado de estuprar mais de 300 mulheres, estava uma jornalista que enfrentou, dentro da própria redação, uma corrida de obstáculos para que um furo de reportagem fosse publicado. Silenciadas é uma série sobre jornalismo e sobre as vozes das mulheres.

There’s never been a more intriguing time to think about what the future holds for humanity.

When two Stanford graduate students set out to create a new kind of cigarette that wouldn’t kill them, they didn’t foresee all the obstacles that lay ahead — or the powerful forces their invention would unleash. Nearly 10 years after the launch of the JUUL, Backfired: The Vaping Wars asks: Could e-cigarettes have been the solution to one of the world’s most pressing public health problems—or was this technology doomed to introduce a whole new generation to nicotine, and end up perpetuating an intractable addiction?

Will Johnnie Veal—convicted of the murder of two police officers in 1970—be granted parole after 50 years in prison? How can he convince the parole board he’s reformed when he insists he’s innocent? What is prison time even supposed to accomplish? These are the questions that propel The Parole Room forward as it builds toward Johnnie’s 20th parole hearing—after 19 rejections.

In 2014, American private contractor Alan Gross was rotting in a Cuban prison, convicted of undermining the Havana regime. At that same time, Cuban intelligence agent Gerardo Hernández was serving two life sentences in a US federal penitentiary on charges related to espionage. Then, it all changed. I Spy: The U.S., Cuba, and the Secret Deal That Ended the Cold War describes how secret negotiations to free the two men helped bring an end to half a century of hostilities between the United States and Cuba.

Alaska’s recent history is one of massive changes: Western contact, colonization, climate change. But some stories have survived—including stories of mysterious creatures that may still be out there.

In this provocative investigation into OnlyFans— the adult platform where subscribers around the world spent more than $7 billion in 2024— journalist Leon Neyfakh teams up with comedian and OnlyFans creator Gracie Canaan for a one-of-a-kind exploration into the current state of human connection. Throughout, they discover that the site originally built for spicy adult content has quietly and surprisingly become something more complicated— an emotional marketplace where desire, performance, care, fantasy, and vulnerability seemingly blur together.

ADHD may be the defining diagnosis of our time. According to the latest data, more than 10 percent of American children (that’s 7.1 million kids) have been diagnosed with ADHD. And the number of stimulant prescriptions for adults in their 30s has shot up nearly threefold since 2012. In recent years, this explosion in demand has combined with other factors to create a widespread stimulant shortage in the US. In the second installment of Backfired, cohosts Leon Neyfakh and Arielle Pardes look at the unintended consequences of the ADHD industry, and trace the surprising path that brought us here.

Forty years ago, following the appointment of their professors to the federal bench, a tiny group of conservative law students at Yale Law School worried that their ideas might disappear from intellectual discourse in this bastion of liberal thought. They set out to fill that void. But they ended up achieving way more than that. Over the next few decades, the Federalist Society became an integral tool in the larger conservative movement, with political, judicial, and social repercussions ending in the conservative capture of the Supreme Court and the election of Donald Trump to the presidency.