Science Journalism

How did the Bushes, America's most powerful political family, become gradually seduced by and entangled with their Saudi counterparts?

In a collection of original essays, the venerated television journalist, Dan Rather, celebrates our shared values and what matters most in our great country, and shows us what patriotism looks like. Writing about the institutions that sustain us, such as public libraries, public schools, and national parks; the values that have transformed us, such as the struggle for civil rights; and the drive toward science and innovation that has made the US great, Rather brings his experience on the frontlines of the world's biggest stories, and offers listeners a way forward.

On August 11, 2008, 18-year-old Marie reported that a masked man broke into her apartment near Seattle and raped her. Within days, the police swiftly pivoted and began investigating Marie. Confronted with inconsistencies in her story and the doubts of others, Marie broke down and said her story was a lie - a bid for attention. More than two years later, Colorado detectives pursued a serial rapist who photographed his victims, threatening to release the images online, and whose calculated steps to erase all physical evidence suggested he might be a soldier or a cop.

This year is the fiftieth anniversary of Waterloo (the song, not the battle) – a seminal moment in pop history which saw Swedish sensation ABBA burst on to the international music scene. How is it that half a century later this seventies Eurovision act is bigger than ever – reaching listeners of all ages and spinning off into musicals, museums and holograms? Giles Smith, writer and music fan, sets out to find out why.

Had It Coming picks up where the Unfounded series left off. Doolittle brings a personal voice to what has been a turning point for most women: the #MeToo movement and its aftermath. The world is now increasingly aware of the pervasiveness of rape culture in which powerful men got away with sexual assault and harassment for years. Had It Coming is not a diatribe or manifesto, but a nuanced and informed look at how attitudes around sexual behaviour have changed and still need to change.

Media and law enforcement work at cross-purposes. Law enforcement want to solve a case as fast as possible and put the guilty behind bars. The media want a case to drag on as long as humanly possible and do all they can to extricate every last bit of drama, drop by bloody drop, in order to hold the attention of the millions of viewers who have gotten hooked. Law enforcement must abide by rules. The media make their own rules, and even then break them or find ways to work loopholes into them.

The voice is Anna Quindlen's. But we know the hopes, dreams, fears, and wonder expressed in all her columns, for most of us share them. With her New York Times-based column, "Life in the 30s", Anna Quindlen valued to national attention, and this wonderful collection shows why. As she proved in Object Lessons and Thinking Out Loud, Anna Quindlen's views always fascinate.

On July 22, 2011, Anders Behring Breivik detonated a bomb outside government buildings in central Oslo, killing eight people. He then proceeded to a youth camp on the island of Utøya, where he killed 69 more, most of them teenage members of Norway's governing Labour Party. In One of Us, the journalist Åsne Seierstad tells the story of this terrible day and what led up to it. What made Breivik, a gifted child from an affluent neighborhood in Oslo, become a terrorist?

The government is not a neutral arbiter of truth. It never has been. It never will be. Doubt everything. John Stossel does. A self-described skeptic, he has dismantled society's sacred cows with unerring common sense. Now he debunks the most sacred of them all: our intuition and belief that government can solve our problems. In No, They Can't, the New York Times best-selling author and Fox News commentator insists that we discard that idea of the "perfect" government - left or right - and retrain our brain to look only at the facts, to rethink our lives as independent individuals - and fast.

Before he became a novelist, Michael Connelly was a crime reporter, covering the detectives who worked the homicide beat in Florida and Los Angeles. In vivid, hard-hitting articles, Connelly leads the reader past the yellow police tape as he follows the investigators, the victims, their families and friends, and, of course, the killers, to tell the real stories of murder and its aftermath.

McMillan begins with her family, tracking their modest wealth to its roots: American policy that helped whites first. Simultaneously, she details the complexities of their advantage, exploring her mother's death in a nursing home, at forty-four, on Medicaid; her family's implosion; and a small inheritance from a grandfather. In the process, McMillan puts a cash value to whiteness in her life and assesses its worth.

Seasoned CBS reporter Sharyl Attkisson reveals how she has been electronically surveilled while digging deep into the Obama Administration and its scandals, and offers an incisive critique of her industry and the shrinking role of investigative journalism in today's media.

Chairs. Neat people. Ugliness. War. Over six decades of intrepid reporting and elegant essays, Andy Rooney has proven a shrewd cultural analyst. Andy Rooney: 60 Years of Wisdom and Wit brings together the best of more than a half-century of work (including long-out-of-print pieces from his early years) in an unforgettable celebration of one of America’s funniest men. Like Mark Twain, Finley Peter Dunne (Mister Dooley) and Will Rogers, Andy Rooney is a classic chronicler of America, a writer for the ages.

Veteran White House reporter April Ryan thought she had seen everything in her two decades as a White House correspondent. And then came the Trump administration. In Under Fire, Ryan takes us inside the confusion and chaos of the Trump White House to understand how she and other reporters adjusted to the new normal. She takes us inside the policy debates, the revolving door of personnel appointments, and what it is like when she, as a reporter asking difficult questions, finds herself in the spotlight, becoming part of the story.

On New Year’s Day 2013, two-time Pulitzer Prize-winner Gene Weingarten asked three strangers to, literally, pluck a day, month, and year from a hat. That day - chosen completely at random - was Sunday, December 28, 1986, by any conventional measure a most ordinary day. Weingarten spent the next six years proving that there is no such thing. That Sunday between Christmas and New Year’s turned out to be filled with comedy, tragedy, implausible irony, cosmic comeuppances, kindness, cruelty, heroism, cowardice, genius, idiocy, and much more....

There's No Crying in Newsrooms tells the stories of remarkable women who broke through barrier after barrier at media organizations around the country over the past four decades. They started out as editorial assistants, fact checkers, and news secretaries and ended up running multi-million-dollar news operations that determine a large part of what Americans read, view, and think about the world.

If you think the wildest, wackiest stories that Carl Hiaasen can tell have all made it into his hilarious, bestselling novels, think again. Dance of the Reptiles collects the best of Hiaasen’s Miami Herald columns, which lay bare the stories—large and small—that demonstrate anew that truth is far stranger than fiction.

Lee Johnson was a man with simple dreams. He never imagined that he would become the face of a David-and-Goliath showdown against one of the world's most powerful corporate giants. But a workplace accident left Lee doused in a toxic chemical and facing a deadly cancer that turned his life upside down. In 2018, the world watched as Lee was thrust to the forefront of one the most dramatic legal battles in recent history. The Monsanto Papers takes listeners behind the scenes of a grueling legal battle, pulling back the curtain on the frailties of the American court system.

In his timely new audiobook, Mikhail Shishkin, argues that Russia is not a 'riddle wrapped in a mystery inside an enigma': we just don't know enough about it. So what is the real story behind Putin's autocratic regime and its invasion of Ukraine? In My Russia: War or Peace? Shishkin traces the roots of Russia's problems, from the 'Kievan Rus' via the Grand Duchy of Moscow, empire, revolution and Cold War, to the now thirty-year-old Russian Federation.

On the morning of July 3, 1994, a misreported forest fire on Storm King Mountain in Colorado became one of the greatest tragedies in the annals of firefighting. In this dramatic reconstruction of the disaster and its aftermath, John N. MacLean tells the heroic and cautionary story of nature at its most unforgiving.