Showing results by author "Leona" in All Categories

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.

More than a decade since Michael Jackson’s death, his legacy remains complicated and unresolved.

Vivian Barrera, a professional woman focused on her company's success, doesn't know what to think when her sometimes-lover and long-time business partner Jack hires someone without her permission. The only thing she does know is that she doesn't like the newcomer. April Hawkins is determined to make her new job work. Left as the sole provider for her niece, she just wants to keep her head down and collect her paycheck. That proves to be difficult when one of her bosses seems to hate her and the other seems to like her a little too much.

Blake has turned the [Unnamed Ranch] into a bustling haven for slimes and those in need. With his mana gorl Glessal and darkness gorl Slanna by his side, life seems perfect. But there are a thousand fingers in a thousand pies, and all of them spell danger for Blake's slice of heaven.

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.

It was a time of crisis, a time of tragedy - and a time of transcendent courage and determination. Leon Uris’s blazing novel is set in the midst of the ghetto uprising that defied Nazi tyranny, as the Jews of Warsaw boldly met Wehrmacht tanks with homemade weapons and bare fists. Here, painted on a canvas as broad as its subject matter, is the compelling story of one of the most heroic struggles of modern times.

At the end of World War II, American army officer Captain Sean O’Sullivan is commissioned with rebuilding Berlin. Reeling from the death of his brothers at German hands and faced with the direct horrors of the Holocaust, O’Sullivan struggles against his animosity towards the nation he is helping restore. Meanwhile, Soviet forces blockade Germany in a bid for power, and the Western Allies must unite to prevent a communist takeover. When the airlift begins, the Allies find their deepest convictions tested as they fight against a threat even more dangerous than Hitler.

From the acclaimed author who enthralled the world with Exodus, Battle Cry, QB VII, Topaz, and other beloved classics of twentieth-century fiction comes a sweeping and powerful epic adventure that captures the "terrible beauty" of Ireland during its long and bloody struggle for freedom. It is the electrifying story of an idealistic young Catholic rebel and the valiant and beautiful Protestant girl who defied her heritage to join his cause. It is a tale of love and danger, of triumph at an unthinkable cost.

Once again, Commissario Guido Brunetti is willing to bend police rules for an acquaintance, even though Elisabetta Foscarini, the woman who asks the favour, is not really a friend. But her mother was good to Brunetti's, so he feels he has no choice but to repay the debt and agrees to look into the matter 'privately', rather than as a police official. Her son-in-law has alarmed his wife by telling her they might be in danger because of something he's involved with.

The Nuremberg Interviews reveals the chilling innermost thoughts of the former Nazi officials under indictment at the famous postwar trial. The architects of one of history’s greatest atrocities speak out about their lives, their careers in the Nazi Party, and their views on the Holocaust. Their reflections are recorded in a set of interviews conducted by a US Army psychiatrist. Dr. Leon Goldensohn was entrusted with monitoring the mental health of the two dozen German leaders charged with carrying out genocide, as well as that of many of the defense and prosecution witnesses.

When a wealthy Venetian woman is found brutally murdered, the prime suspect is her Romanian maid, who has fled the city. As she attempts to leave the country, carrying a considerable sum of money and forged papers, the maid runs into the path of an oncoming train and is killed. Case closed. But when the old woman's neighbour returns from abroad, it transpires that the maid could not have been the killer. Commissario Brunetti decides - unofficially - to take on the case himself.

A candid look at the who's who of the last 50 years of fashion and proof that fact is always devilishly more fascinating than fiction. André Leon Talley's engaging and detailed memoir is his story of surviving and thriving in the notoriously cutthroat fashion industry amidst racism, homophobia and other challenges to become one of the most legendary voices and faces in fashion journalism.

Blake was searching for simplicity, but fate had other plans. After an unexpected turn of events lands him in the fantastical world of Ylege, he's endowed with extraordinary physical abilities and inherits an unclaimed farmstead at the world's edge. Things seem to be falling into place until he encounters the gorls—beautiful, magical, sentient slimes.

For Commissario Guido Brunetti it began with an early morning phone call. A sudden act of vandalism had just been committed in the chill Venetian dawn, a rock thrown in anger through the window of a building in the deserted city. But soon Brunetti finds out that the perpetrator is no petty criminal intent on some annoying anonymous act. For the culprit waiting to be apprehended at the scene of the crime is none other than Paola Brunetti, his wife.

The murder of two clam fishermen off the island of Pellestrina, south of the Lido on the Venetian lagoon, draws Commissario Brunetti into the island's close-knit community, bound together by a code of loyalty and a suspicion of outsiders worthy of the Mafia. When the Vice-Questore's secretary Signorina Elettra volunteers to visit the island, where she has relatives, Brunetti finds himself torn between his duty to solve the murders, concerns for Elettra's safety, and his not entirely straightforward feelings for her....

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?

On a cold November evening, Guido Brunetti and Paola are up late when a call from his colleague Ispettore Vianello arrives, alerting the Commissario that a hand has been seen in one of Venice's canals. The body is soon found, and Brunetti is assigned to investigate the murder of an undocumented Sri Lankan immigrant. Because no official record of the man's presence in Venice exists, Brunetti is forced to use the city's far richer sources of information: gossip and the memories of people who knew the victim.

On a cold Venetian night shortly before Christmas, a man is killed in a scuffle in Campo San Stefano. The closest witnesses to the event are the tourists who had been browsing the man's wares before his death - fake handbags of every designer label. Officially termed a venditore ambulante or extracomunitario, the dead man was working as a vu cumpra, one of the many Black Africans purveying goods outside normal shop hours and without work permits. Arriving on the scene, Commissario Brunetti's response matches that of everybody involved: why would anyone kill a vu cumpra?

Political instability, poverty, climate change, and the insatiable appetite for cheap labor all fuel clandestine movement across borders. As those borders harden, the demand for smugglers who aid migrants across them increases every year. Yet the real lives and work of smugglers—or coyotes, or guides, as they are often known by the migrants who hire their services—are only ever reported on from a distance, using tired tropes and stereotypes, often depicted as boogie men and violent warlords.

From the co-creators of Slow Burn, Fiasco is a narrative podcast that transports listeners into the day-to-day reality of America’s most pivotal historical events.