Showing results by publisher "audible originals" in Politics & Social Sciences

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.

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.

Since their arrival in the mid-20th century, video games have become a sprawling, multi-billion dollar business. On an annual basis, the industry is even more profitable than Hollywood. Today’s video games feature stunning, lifelike visuals and complex storylines - but they didn’t start out that way. The origin of video games can be traced back to World War II. In the 10 lectures of A History of Video Games, listeners will follow the development of the digital game from its roots in the war room to its proliferation in the 21st-century living room.

In 1984, as a New York City subway train made its way downtown, a white man named Bernhard Goetz shot four unarmed Black teenagers he believed were going to rob him.

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.

Welcome to the era of true marriages of convenience. Discover the reality of trading someone’s hand in marriage, such as an American heiress, in exchange for money, power, or political clout through compelling history lectures. Showcased in novels such as Edith Wharton’s The Age of Innocence and in present day pop culture through works like Downtown Abbey, the Gilded Age was an era of contradictions. Life on both sides of the Atlantic was grimy and glamorous, prosperous and impoverished, traditional and revolutionary.

Winner of the 2018 ARIA Award for Best Sports Show

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.

AI has become the new religion. Are we going to follow it? Do we even have a choice? Or have the tech evangelists captured our future? Join Christopher Wylie and Coda Story’s Isobel Cockerell as they journey from exclusive crypto parties in Dubai, to the slums of Kenya where thousands of hidden workers are training AI models, to the hacker palaces of San Francisco where tech’s true believers talk about merging computers with our brains.

Harvest transports listeners to the beautiful and eerie world of India’s cotton fields. Source of the most intimate and universal of commodities, we find these white-flecked lands pushed to their limit by global pressures.

Ivan Beckley is about to become a fully-qualified doctor in the UK. But he’s not convinced that healthcare works for everyone equally. In this series he uncovers one of the biggest and most insidious injustices in modern medicine. Fixing it could save thousands of lives every year. And yet it’s invisible, unless it directly affects you. Statistics show that black, indigenous and people of colour have worse health outcomes and die more often than white people, across many fields of medicine and diverse illnesses.

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.

A record-breaking bodybuilder. A sex-positive dominatrix. A gaming pioneer with close to a million subscribers. A musical trailblazer who’s queering country music. They sound like a gang of social media influencers and young rising Hollywood stars. But nearly all of them are over 70 years old. In this series, Miriam Margolyes meets a new wave of seniors who are ripping up the rulebook when it comes to ageing, to learn what they can teach us about living life to the full, whether you’re 19 or 90.

These days it can feel like life is a never-ending to-do list, and it’s increasingly difficult to balance work and life. People everywhere are unhappy about their work-life balance, and we’re seeing growing numbers of people reporting burnout. Comedian and ex-lawyer Alice Fraser has experienced the costs of work-life imbalance first-hand, so she teams up with neuroscientist Ash Ranpura to look for solutions to the demands of modern life.

From Halloween costumes to patriotic parades to belly-busting meals, every holiday tradition tells a unique story—one encoded in symbols and layered meanings that stretch back over the centuries. In 19 lectures, professional storyteller Dr. Hannah B. Harvey takes listeners through the seasons and investigates the surprising stories behind seemingly odd holiday traditions.

Athena Aktipis of Arizona State University is a self-professed apocalypse enthusiast, and as the host of the podcast Zombified, she knows the undead inside and out. With Zombified: Real-World Lessons from Fictional Apocalypses, she’s compiled her research and insights into a fascinating Audible Original that will have you thinking deeper about all those shambling, brain-hungry corpses in pop culture—not to mention our everyday lives. Drawing on years of research on zombies and zombification, these six lessons offer a fun way to explore and understand the many forces that influence us.

How did a once faceless bureaucrat, a man whose own wife said he was born under the sign of the vampire, become the idealized face of Russian manhood and its authoritarian leader? Deputy Mayor Putin examines the man behind the myth. We will explore how Putin’s formative years shaped and drove him and how the supporting cast of characters he gathered along the way helped him get to the Kremlin’s inner sanctum.

In January 2019, culture writer Anne Helen Petersen set the internet on fire with her viral BuzzFeed essay diagnosing “millennial burnout” - a chronic state of stress and exhaustion that’s become a “base temperature” for young people today. Now, she continues this generation-defining conversation in a brand-new format, interviewing millennials around the country about their own deeply personal experiences with burnout, and the culture that creates it.

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.

Artist. Public intellectual. Political activist. James Baldwin was all of these and more. Raised in the slums of Depression-era Harlem in New York City, Baldwin would become an author and activist of international renown—one whose legacy has continued long beyond his death in 1987. Who was James Baldwin? How did he become the master of multiple literary genres and a champion for some of the era’s most notable political and social causes? And how is his influence still being felt today?