Résultats lu par "Janet Metzger" dans Toutes les catégories

Did NASA really spend millions creating a pen that would write in space? Is chocolate poisonous to dogs? Does stress cause gray hair? These questions are a sample of the urban lore investigated in this audiobook, Fact or Fiction: Science Tackles 58 Popular Myths. Drawing from Scientific American’s “Fact or Fiction” and “Strange But True” columns, we’ve selected 58 of the most surprising, fascinating, useful, and just plain wacky topics confronted by our writers over the years.

In the endless days of the pandemic, a woman spends her time sorting fact from fiction in the life and work of Herman Melville. As she delves into Melville's impulsive purchase of a Massachusetts farmhouse, his fevered revision of Moby-Dick there, his intense friendship with neighbor Nathaniel Hawthorne, and his troubled and troubling marriage to Elizabeth Shaw, she becomes increasingly obsessed by what his devotion to his art reveals about cost, worth, and debt.

All families have secrets but the facts requiring secrecy change with time. Nowadays a lesbian partnership, a "bastard" son, or a criminal grandfather might be of little or no consequence but could have unraveled a family at an earlier moment in history. Margaret K. Nelson is interested in how families keep secrets from each other and from outsiders when to do otherwise would risk eliciting not only embarrassment or discomfort, but profound shame and, in some cases, danger.

The 1950s through the early 1970s are widely seen as American academia's golden age, when universities - well funded and viewed as essential for national security, economic growth, and social mobility - embraced an egalitarian mission. Swelling in size, schools attracted new types of students and professors, including radicals who challenged their institutions' calcified traditions. But that halcyon moment soon came to a painful and confusing end, with consequences that still afflict the halls of ivy.

An in-depth look at the life of Oakland, California native, Barclay Simpson, Strong Ties focuses on the set of convictions and leadership qualities that allowed Simpson to build a successful business from nothing and to become one of the major philanthropists in the San Francisco Bay Area.

Women around the country are running in - and winning - elections at an unprecedented rate. It appears that women are on a steady march toward equal representation across state legislatures and the US Congress, but there is a sharp divide in this representation along party lines. Most of the women in office are Democrats, and the number of elected Republican women has been plunging for decades. In The Partisan Gap, Elder examines why this disparity in women's representation exists and why it's only going to get worse.

What happens when freedom of expression comes under threat? In frank and wide-ranging interviews, historian and critic Leonard S. Marcus probes the experience of thirteen leading authors of books for young people.

Defined by borders both physical and conceptual, the Roman city stood apart as a concentration of life and activity that was legally, economically, and ritually divided from its rural surroundings. Death was a key area of control, and tombs were relegated outside city walls from the Republican period through Late Antiquity. Given this separation, an unexpected phenomenon marked the Augustan and early Imperial periods: Roman cities developed suburbs, built-up areas beyond their boundaries, where the living and the dead came together in densely urban environments.

People love and remember the novels of Bobbie Ann Mason because they ring so true. This dazzling memoir has the same power. In it, Mason tells the story of her own family - a multilayered saga of three generations, their aspirations, their conflicts, and the ties that bound them to one another.

While exploring Shakespeare's plays with her students, Paula Marantz Cohen discovered that teaching and discussing his plays unlocked a surprising sense of compassion in the classroom. In this short and illuminating book, she shows how Shakespeare's genius lay with his ability to arouse empathy, even when his characters exist in alien contexts and behave in reprehensible ways.

The huge prison buildup of the past four decades has few defenders, yet reforms to reduce the numbers of those incarcerated have been remarkably modest. Meanwhile, an ever-widening carceral state has sprouted in the shadows, extending its reach far beyond the prison gate. It sunders families and communities and reworks conceptions of democracy, rights, and citizenship - posing a formidable political and social challenge. In Caught, Marie Gottschalk examines why the carceral state remains so tenacious in the United States.

"No women need apply." These four discouraging words of admonition often greeted female physicians looking for jobs in the frontier-era West. Despite the dire need for medical help, it seemed most trappers, miners, and emigrants would rather suffer and die than be treated by a female doctor. Nevertheless dozens of highly trained women headed West, where they endured hardship and prejudice as they set broken limbs, performed operations, delivered generations of babies - and solidified a place for women in the medical field.

The first in a series of books, I Somehow Survived is an extraordinary collection of true stories giving testimony to those who survived World War II. Based on interviews with numerous veterans from across the spectrum of wartime experience, the book documents and reflects upon one of the most gruesome times in history. From anti-partisan warfare in the French mountains and atrocities in East Prussia to the experience of a Norwegian concentration camp, the accounts include rarely heard stories from a range of people caught up in the war.

Digital Makeover: How L'Oreal Put People First to Build a Beauty Tech Powerhouse examines L'Oreal's successful people-driven digital transformation. Professors and authors Beatrice Collin and Marie Taillard set out exactly how L'Oreal turned itself into a digital and tech powerhouse by building on its legacy to reimagine relationships inside the company, and with its customers and partners.

As part of their own spiritual quest, miracle experts Katie Mahon and Joan Luise Hill discovered that when we are truly awake and present, miracles abound. It started by sharing their own stories which quickly prompted an unexpected outpouring of stories from others. Stories that had never been told, stories that didn't seem to matter, and stories that had been forgotten. While some defy explanation, others invite us to take a closer look, to discover common ground with each other, and to seek meaning in a whole new way.

In The Digital Transformer's Dilemma: How to Energize Your Core Business While Building Disruptive Products and Services, the authors show companies how to go digital while also advancing their core business. The book emphasizes how to strike a difficult balance between establishing a new (digital) business and revitalizing - and digitizing - the legacy business.

Great medical practices create an experience so positive that patients can't stop talking about it. Patients talk to friends, relatives, and acquaintances about the care they received. They can't help posting nice things about this great practice on social media. And they can't imagine recommending anyone else. Patient Care The Sandler Way shows how to create this experience. It offers timeless, proven principles for effective patient care, based on the communication skills and success principles of the Sandler Selling System.

An earthquake unnerves Tokyo on March 11, 2011, triggering the Fukushima nuclear disaster - and a tectonic stirring of the collective past. Mr. Yoshie Watanabe, an aging executive at an electronics company and a survivor of the atomic bomb, feels as though he is a fugitive of his own memory. As the seams of his country threaten to come undone yet again, he braces himself to make the biggest decision of his life. Meanwhile, four women narrate their own memories of Watanabe to an enigmatic Argentinian reporter investigating his life.

The reason we need sleep has long mystified scientists, but it’s crystal clear that we do need it. In fact, the more we learn about what happens while we snooze, the more we discover new benefits for multiple processes including hormone balance, immune function, emotional health, learning, and memory. Studies show that even one night of disturbed rest leads to measurable impairments, and for this mini-collection, we’ve gathered the most recent research on the mechanisms of sleep.

Applying to college can be competitive and complex. Admission Matters offers real-world expert advice for all students, whether you're aiming for an Ivy or the state school close to home. It also includes much needed guidance for students with special circumstances, including students with disabilities, international students, and transfer students. In addition, athletes, artists and performers, and homeschoolers will find valuable guidance as they plan for and apply to college.