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

In December 2017 the famous porn star August Ames committed suicide in a park in the Conejo Valley. It happened a day after she’d been the victim of a pile-on, via Twitter, by fellow porn professionals - punishment for her tweeting something deemed homophobic. A month later, August’s husband, Kevin, connected with Jon Ronson to tell the story of how Twitter bullying killed his wife. What neither Kevin nor Ronson realized was that Ronson would soon hear rumors and secrets hinting at a very different story - something mysterious and unexpected and terrible.

It started with an anonymous post in 2017. They called themselves 'Q' and left a trail of cryptic messages for an increasing number of followers to obsess over. Over the years, the conspiracy theory became a movement, crashing into mainstream politics and breaking countless families along the way. Over this investigation, journalist Nicky Woolf dives into the online and offline world of QAnon in his search to find the shadowy figure behind it all and the legacy they've created.

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.

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.

True North Heists tells the tales of some of the most outlandish capers ever committed on Canadian soil.

In July 1997, the first contestant voted off the first episode of the first ever reality TV elimination show took his own life. Expedition Robinson was the first show of its kind anywhere, and it was going to be remembered not for breaking the mold of television, but for a death, the first of at least 40 suicides linked globally to a reality TV show.

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.

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.

Lunar New Year, or the first new moon of the lunar calendar, is celebrated by people around the world and across different cultures. Within Chinese culture, the ushering in of a new year is celebrated through one of 12 distinct zodiac animals, each of which is known for its power to map a person’s behavior, character, and fate. In The Chinese Zodiac in Cultures and Traditions, you’ll gain insights into how cultures make sense of the passing of time and our relationship to it.

Statistics show that women and people assigned female at birth spend more of their life in poor health, it takes longer for them to receive diagnoses for a variety of health conditions, they are less likely to be prescribed pain relief, and they are more likely to receive a mental health diagnosis for a physical problem.

From two-time Pulitzer Prize winner and two-time National Book Award winner Robert A. Caro: a short, penetrating reflection on the evolution and workings of political power - for good and for ill.

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.

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.

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.

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.

On October 17, 2018, Canada became the first G7 nation to legalize cannabis for recreational use.

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.

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.

In the 10 lectures of Wolves and Werewolves in History and Popular Culture, author and teacher Shannon Scott will take you around the world to explore the many ways humans have created and shared stories of wolves, shape-shifting, and lycanthropy.

They’re known as the bebés robados, or “stolen babies”–children stolen at birth from their mothers and sold to wealthy families around Spain. For decades, European reporters and activists have tried to penetrate the secretive networks responsible for the crimes, typically with little success. Until now. In The Lost, veteran journalists Matteo Fagotto and Matilde Gattoni investigate the story of a woman named Ana Belén Pintado, a middle-aged woman from a small village in Central Spain.