Showing results by narrator "Jonathan Todd Ross" in All Categories

What would you do with $30,000,000? That's the question everyone in Cedarville and every town near it is asking, because right now there's an unclaimed lottery ticket worth that much - and the money will go to whomever finds it first. Griffin Bing, The Man With The Plan, wants to be the lucky winner. But he's got competition. Darren Vader, Griffin's number-one enemy, will stop at nothing to find it. And a new kid in town, Victor Phoenix, is also in on the big hunt.

Dr. Nicholas Kardaras answers the question of why young people’s mental health is deteriorating as we become a more technologically advanced society. While enthralled with shiny devices and immersed in social media, our young people are struggling with record rates of depression, loneliness, anxiety, overdoses and suicide. Our immersion in toxic social media has created polarizing extremes of emotion and addictive dependency, while also acting as a toxic "digital social contagion”, spreading a variety of psychiatric disorders.

The rain hasn't stopped for a week, and the 12 guests of the Blue Vein Tavern are trapped by flooded roads and the rising Skidwrack River. Among them are a ship's captain, tattooed twins, a musician, and a young girl traveling on her own. To pass the time, they begin to tell stories - each a different type of folklore - that eventually reveal more about their own secrets than they intended. As the rain continues to pour down - an uncanny, unnatural amount of rain - the guests begin to realize that the entire city is in danger, and not just from the flood.

We are on the cusp of a major transformation in healthcare—yet few people know it. At top hospitals and a few innovative health-tech startups, scientists are working closely with patients to dramatically extend their "healthspan"—the number of healthy years before disease sets in. In The Age of Scientific Wellness, two visionary leaders of this revolution in health take us on a thrilling journey to this new frontier of medicine.

In 2020, an estimated 5.8 million Americans had Alzheimer’s, and more than half a million died because of the disease and its devastating complications. Sixteen million caregivers are responsible for paying as much as half of the $226 billion annual costs of their care. As more people live beyond their 70s and 80s, the number of patients will rise to an estimated 13.8 million by 2025. Part case studies, part meditation on the past, present and future of the disease, The Problem of Alzheimer's traces Alzheimer’s from its beginnings to its recognition as a crisis.

When literary agent Peter Katz receives a partial book submission he is intrigued by its promise. The author, Richard Flynn, has written a memoir about his time as an English student at Princeton in the late 1980s, documenting his relationship with the protégée of the famous Professor Joseph Wieder. One night just before Christmas 1987, Wieder was brutally murdered in his home. The case was never solved. Now, 25 years later, Katz suspects that Richard Flynn is either using his book to confess to the murder or to finally reveal who committed the violent crime.

Henry at Work invites listeners to rethink how we work today by exploring an aspect of Henry David Thoreau that has often been overlooked: Thoreau the worker. John Kaag and Jonathan van Belle overturn the popular misconception of Thoreau as a navel-gazing recluse who was scornful of work and other mundanities. In fact, Thoreau worked hard—surveying land, running his family's pencil-making business, writing, lecturing, and building his cabin at Walden Pond—and thought intensely about work in its many dimensions.

Few could explain, let alone seek out, a career in criticism. Yet what A. O. Scott shows in Better Living Through Criticism is that we are, in fact, all critics: because critical thinking informs almost every aspect of artistic creation, of civil action, of interpersonal life. With penetrating insight and warm humor, Scott shows that while individual critics - himself included - can make mistakes and find flaws where they shouldn't, criticism as a discipline is one of the noblest, most creative and urgent activities of modern existence.

The Supreme Court has always had the authority to issue emergency rulings in exceptional circumstances. But since 2017, the Court has dramatically expanded its use of the behind-the-scenes “shadow docket,” regularly making decisions that affect millions of Americans without public hearings and without explanation, through cryptic late-night rulings that leave lawyers—and citizens—scrambling. But Americans of all political stripes should be worried about what the shadow docket portends for the rule of law, argues Supreme Court expert Stephen Vladeck.

In the late 1990s, Patrick O’Brian’s multimillion-copy-selling historical novel series—the Aubrey-Maturin series, which was set during the Napoleonic Wars—seemed destined for film. With Russell Crowe as Jack Aubrey and Paul Bettany as Stephen Maturin, the production only needed a ship that could stand in for Lucky Jack’s HMS Surprise, with historical accuracy paramount. The filmmakers found the Rose, a replica of an 18th-century ship that would work perfectly. Only there was one problem: the Rose was in Newport, Rhode Island, not in Southern California.

Quantum physics is notable for its brazen defiance of common sense. (Think of Schrödinger's Cat, famously both dead and alive.) An especially rigorous form of quantum contradiction occurs in experiments with entangled particles. Our common assumption is that objects have properties whether or not anyone is observing them, and the measurement of one can't affect the other. Quantum entanglement rejects this assumption, offering impeccable reasoning and irrefutable evidence of the opposite. Is quantum entanglement mystical, or just mystifying?

While the world is transfixed by bitcoin mania, your competitors are tuning out the noise and making strategic bets on blockchain. Your rivals are effortlessly tracking every last link in their supply chains. They're making bureaucratic paper trails obsolete while keeping their customers' data safer and discovering new ways to use this next foundational technology to sustain their competitive advantage.

Hacking the Hacker takes you inside the world of cybersecurity to show you what goes on behind the scenes, and introduces you to the men and women on the front lines of this technological arms race. Twenty-six of the world's top white hat hackers, security researchers, writers, and leaders describe what they do and why, with each profile preceded by a no-experience-necessary explanation of the relevant technology.

Most of us know that sugar can wreak havoc on adult bodies, but few realize how uniquely harmful it is to the growing livers, hearts, and brains of children. And the damage can begin early in life. In his research on the effects of sugar on kids' present and future health, USC Professor of Pediatrics and Program Director for Diabetes and Obesity at Children's Hospital Los Angeles Michael Goran has found that too much sugar doesn't just cause childhood obesity, it can cause health issues in kids who are not overweight, too.

Pixar movies have transfixed viewers around the world and stirred a hunger in creative and corporate realms to adopt new and more impactful ways of telling stories. Former Pixar and The Simpsons animator and story artist Matthew Luhn translates his two and half decades of storytelling techniques and concepts to the CEOs, advertisers, marketers, and creatives in the business world and beyond. The Best Story Wins retells the "Hero's Journey" story building methods through the lens of the Pixar films to help business minds embrace the power of storytelling for themselves!

Kaya, raised in the undersea, high-tech world of Atlantis, has always been fascinated by the legends about life above the water. Despite the government’s insistence that they’re only stories, she can’t help but dream about the Sun People - and when a group of officials known as Erasers move to bury those legends for good, Kaya sets out to the surface to uncover the truth once and for all.

Creativity defines the human experience. It sparks achievement and innovation in art, science, technology, business, sports, and virtually every activity. It has fueled human progress on a global level, but it equally is the source of profound personal satisfaction for individual creators. And yet the origins of creative inspiration and the methods by which great creators tap into it have long been a source of mystery, spoken of in esoteric terms, our rational understanding shrouded in complex jargon. Until now.

In Defying Limits, Dave Williams shares the events that have defined his life, showing us that whether we’re gravity-defying astronauts or earthbound terrestrials, we can all live infinite, fulfilled lives by relishing the value and importance of each moment. The greatest fear that we all face is not the fear of dying but the fear of never having lived. Each of us is greater than we believe. Together, we can exceed our limits to soar farther and higher than we ever imagined.

No one thought that MacTrump - Lord of MacTrump Towers, Son of New York - would ascend to the highest position in the kingdom. Yet with the help of his unhappy but dutiful wife Lady MacTrump, his clever daughter Dame Desdivanka, and his coterie of advisers, MacTrump is comfortably ensconced in the White Hold as President of the United Fiefdoms, free to make proclamations to his subjects through his favorite messenger, McTweet. The Democrati, mourning the loss of their cherished leader O'Bama, won't give up without a fight.

Eighteen kids, one year of poems, one school set to close. Two yellow bulldozers crouched outside, ready to eat the building in one greedy gulp. But look out, bulldozers. Ms. Hill's fifth-grade class has plans for you. They're going to speak up and work together to save their school.