Showing results by narrator "Neil Shah" in All Categories

As the head of Open Learning at MIT, Sanjay Sarma has a daunting job description: to fling open the doors of the MIT experience for the benefit of the wider world. But if you're going to undertake such an ambitious project, you must first ask: how exactly does learning work? What conditions are most conducive? Are our traditional classroom methods - lecture, homework, test, repeat - effective? And if not, which techniques are? Grasp takes listeners across multiple frontiers, from fundamental neuroscience to cognitive psychology and beyond, as it explores the future of learning.

Author and attorney Mark T. Mustian has won rave reviews for his ambitious novel, The Gendarme. Plagued by failing memory, Emmett Conn dreams he was a gendarme in World War I and that his great love, Araxie, was separated from him after the war. With the lines between past and present blurring more every day, Emmett sets out to find the woman he lost all those decades ago.

Vikram Chandra has been a computer programmer for almost as long as he has been a novelist. In this extraordinary new audiobook, his first work of nonfiction, he searches for the connections between the worlds of art and technology. Coders are obsessed with elegance and style, just as writers are, but do the words mean the same thing to both? Can we ascribe beauty to the craft of writing code?

On Not Dying is an anthropological, historical, and philosophical exploration of immortality as a secular and scientific category. Based on an ethnography of immortalist communities - those who believe humans can extend their personal existence indefinitely through technological means - and an examination of other institutions involved at the end of life, Abou Farman argues that secular immortalism is an important site to explore the tensions inherent in secularism.

Whilst working on a spreadsheet for a New York-based PR firm, Gerald has his consciousness uploaded into his company's Slack channel. He posts for help, but his colleagues assume it's an elaborate joke to exploit the new working-from-home policy and, now that Gerald's productivity is through the roof, his bosses are only too happy to let him work from...wherever he says he is. Faced with the looming abyss of a disembodied life online, Gerald enlists co-worker Pradeep to care for his body and Slackbot, the service's AI assistant, to help him navigate his new digital reality.

A group of entrepreneurs brings roaring back to life a defunct turbine factory and the town around it, promising a return to the days of dignity, jobs and the good life and bright future that a manufacturing center can dispense to a small town. But is a return to the days of plenty possible? And what of the changed relationships between lovers, and within families, that have transpired in the years since that earlier time? Perišić takes us there, into the past and into the future, and watches with a bemused sad smile as the inevitable wreaks havoc with the possible.

The handsome Texas sailor who offers dinner to a runaway in Central Park. The Midwestern college girl who stops a cop in Times Square for restaurant advice. The Brooklyn man on a midnight subway who helps a weary tourist find her way to Chinatown. The Columbia University graduate student who encounters an unexpected object of beauty at the Metropolitan Museum of Art....

A Syria-born dancer offers his deeply personal story of war, statelessness, and the pursuit of the art of dance in this inspirational memoir.

In the city of Mardin, near Turkey’s border with Syria, the orphaned Avdo finds purpose when an old mason takes him on as an apprentice. From Master Josef, he learns the importance of their art, which looks after the dead and bears witness to their lives. Avdo then travels the country and meets a woman he loves wholeheartedly, only to lose her through a tragic crime. Resigned to a lonely existence, he retreats from the world into his cemetery workshop, but even there, life, with all its sorrows, joys, injustices, and gifts, draws him in unexpected directions.

How does it feel to receive a phone call from your 14-year-old son who is in the back of a squad car because he laughed at a police officer? How does a young person of color cope with being frisked several times a week since the age of 15? These are just some of the stories in No Place on the Corner, which draws on three years of intensive ethnographic fieldwork in the South Bronx before and after the landmark 2013 Floyd v. City of New York decision that ruled that the NYPD's controversial "stop and frisk" policing methods were a violation of rights.

Evolutionary biologist Amina Abdul accepts a post-doc in Washington, DC, choosing her career studying hybrid zones over a faltering West Coast romance. Her brother and sister-in-law welcome her to the city, but their marriage is crumbling, and they soon rely on her to keep their son company. Omar, hungry to understand his cultural roots, fakes an Indian accent, invents a royal past, and peppers his aunt with questions about their cultural heritage. When he brings an ornamental knife to school, his expulsion triggers a downward spiral for his family.

An archeological team is excavating on the banks of the Betwa River near Jahnsi. A place where, legend has it, a couple forbidden to marry had run away to be together — forever cursing anyone who dares set foot on the island. When the head of the expedition defies the myth, the fallout is swift and deadly, the body found exactly as the ancient stories describe. Is the death a result of the ancient curse, or is it a down-to-earth case of murder?

A master of the short story, Saadat Hasan Manto opens a window onto Bombay's demimonde - its prostitutes, rickshaw drivers, artists, and strays as well, probing the pain and bewilderment of the Hindus, Muslims, and Sikhs ripped apart by the India-Pakistan Partition. From a stray dog caught in the crossfire at the fresh border of India and Pakistan, to friendly neighbors turned enemy soldiers pausing for tea together in a momentary ceasefire - Manto shines incandescent light into hidden corners with an unflinching gaze, and a fierce humanism.

Nineteen leading literary writers from around the globe offer timely, haunting first-person reflections on how climate change has altered their lives.

Against a background of wild forest, elegant castles, hidden temples and savage battlefields, the adventure that began with Emperor of the Eight Islands draws to its thrilling conclusion. The rightful emperor is lost. Shikanoko is condemned to live, half man and half deer, an outlaw in the Darkwood. Yet the mighty lords who now rule the Eight Islands are prey to suspicion and illness, and drought and famine choke the realm. Only Shikanoko can bring healing by restoring the preordained ruler to the Lotus Throne.

Stathis Rakis abandoned his small Greek village for a more worldly life, first in San Francisco, where the dot-com bubble had already burst, and then in Paris, France, where he is pursuing an MBA at an elite business school. After falling helplessly in love with a liberal New England journalist, Stathis moves to the United States to begin as a consultant for a company called Command. Luxury is a given; happiness is not.

Mysterium, known as Mount Sarasvati, looms over the Indian Himalayas as the range's tallest peak. Sarasvati "Sara" Troy is determined to reach the peak for which she was christened, and to climb it in honor of her mother, who perished in a mountaineering accident when Sara was just a child. She asks her father, a celebrated mountaineer and philosophy professor, to organize and lead the expedition. The six climbers he recruits are an uneasy mix. The party's journey is harrowing, taking them on a path that evokes the hell, purgatory, and heaven of Dante's Inferno.

Originally published in the hopes of children understanding their place in the world better, both in a geographic and global sense, these stories by Post foreign correspondents feature the real-life stories of kids all over the world. From Yuki who rides a subway train to school every day in Tokyo to Sayeed who guides tourists on camel rides in Egypt, these children's stories carry the underlying message that in the eyes of our children, there is far more that unites us than divides us.

In 1527, a conquistador arrived on the coast of modern-day Florida with hundreds of settlers and claimed the region for Spain. Within a year of navigational errors, disease, starvation and fierce resistance from indigenous tribes, only four survivors remained: three noblemen, and a Moroccan slave known as Estebanico. The official record contains only the accounts of the noblemen. This is the story of Estebanico – a vibrant merchant from Barbary forced into slavery and a new name, reborn as the first African explorer of the Americas.

Susan is the new girl - she's sharp and driven, and strives to meet her parents' expectations of excellence. Malcolm is the bad boy - he started raising hell at age 15 after his mom died of cancer, and has had a reputation ever since. Susan's parents are on the verge of divorce. Malcolm's dad is a known adulterer. Susan hasn't told anyone, but she wants to be an artist. Malcolm doesn't know what he wants - until he meets her. Love is messy and families are messier, but in spite of their burdens, Susan and Malcolm fall for each other.