Showing results by narrator "Shawn K Jain" in All Categories

At a time when a lasting peace between the Palestinians and the Israelis seems unattainable, understanding the roots of their conflict is an essential step in restoring hope to the region. In The Iron Cage, Rashid Khalidi provides a lucid context for the realities on the ground today, a context that has been, until now, notably lacking in our discourse.

In Not with a Bug, But with a Sticker: Attacks on Machine Learning Systems and What to Do About Them, a team of distinguished adversarial machine learning researchers deliver a riveting account of the most significant risk to currently deployed artificial intelligence systems: cybersecurity threats. The authors take you on a sweeping tour—from inside secretive government organizations to academic workshops at ski chalets to Google's cafeteria—recounting how major AI systems remain vulnerable to the exploits of bad actors of all stripes.

In this candid and personal account, Vineet Nayar—HCLT's celebrated CEO—recounts how he defied the conventional wisdom that companies must put customers first, then turned the hierarchical pyramid upside down by making management accountable to the employees, and not the other way around.

Ideology consists of normative prescriptions regarding how society should be shaped, together with an interpretive roadmap indicating how this normative vision can be implemented in reality. Ideological Fixation is the result of tensions and conflicts between these two elements. The book focuses on ideologies' factual claims about the world, typically subordinate to, and often distorted by, their normative commitment. In exploring this phenomenon, the book combines insights from evolutionary psychology regarding the nature of some of our deepest proclivities.

Through compelling case studies, including those of Starbucks, Coca-Cola, Sony, Amazon, and Google Books, Vaidhyanathan shows that the modern intellectual property systems reflect three centuries of changes in politics, economics, technologies, and social values. Although it emerged from a desire to foster creativity while simultaneously protecting it, intellectual property today has fundamentally shifted to a political dimension.

In The Time beneath the Concrete, Nasser Abourahme argues that settler colonialism is always as much an attempt to conquer time as it is to conquer land. Taking as his primary object Palestinian refugee camps, created in the fallout of the eliminatory violence of Israel's founding, Abourahme shows how these camps become the primary place where settler colonial attempts to dominate space and time encounter Indigenous refusal. Seen from the camps, Israel becomes a settler colonial project defined by its inability to move past the past—a project stuck at its foundational moment of conquest.

All Aaron wants for Christmas is for his brother, Casey, to get over his ex, Raquel. He’d prefer not to be at Winter Wonderland, the island north of Alaska that’s home to a year-round Christmas theme park. But Casey loves Christmas, so here they are. Unfortunately for Aaron, Casey’s determined to do anything to win Raquel back. All Kris wants for Christmas is for his uncle to move back to Winter Wonderland to be the first gay Santa. To make that happen Kris needs to win the Race, his grade’s annual competition to see who can get a guest to fall in love with them first.

Raam and his buddy, Cake, are ready to try out for their middle school's basketball team. Will Raam earn a spot on the roster this time around? Or will old rivals resurface?

1836, Wisconsin. Catalina lives with her pa and brother in a ramshackle cabin on the edge of the wilderness. Harsh winters have brought the family to the brink of starvation, and Catalina has replaced her poet's soul with an unyielding determination to keep Pa and her brother alive. When a sudden illness claims Pa, a strange man appears—a man covered in bark, leaves growing from his head, and sap dripping from his eyes.

Ophelia Blue Rivers is the specificity of her circumstance. She’s not just mixed in the American binary sense of being a racial amalgamation of two races; she’s a mix of two of the distinct racial identities that make up the politics of this continent. She’s Black and she is Native American, raised by her grandmother who is a Black descendent of Cherokee freedmen.

Thirty-three-year-old hijabi Sana Saeed has put away her childhood dream of ishq—an all-consuming, sweeping love. The arranged dates she's agreed to have failed time after time, and she has responsibilities to consider—namely her sweet, autistic younger brother, Zia. Sana and Zia are a package deal, and she wouldn't have it any other way. But their traditional mother won't allow Sana to be named as his future guardian . . . unless she's married.

Ashar is busy with the ice hockey team, studying to get into the best school, and hanging out with his friends. Shaheer and his father are always moving, following his dad's jobs. Shaheer has given up hope of finding a place where he can put down roots, a place that feels like home. The two boys have nothing in common. But when they meet on Shaheer's first day at his new school, it's like looking in a mirror.

The holidays are fast approaching, and the Belvedere siblings are a mess. Liz, a Hollywood showrunner and responsible eldest, has no idea how to follow up her hit show’s first season, or how to deal with her giant crush on its star, Violet Grace. Birdie turned her chronic middle-child syndrome into a career as a stand-up comic, but since she spends more time wooing women than working on new material, she’s facing one-hit-wonder status, especially once she gets axed by her manager.

Hunter Yee has perfect aim with a bow and arrow, but all else in his life veers wrong. He’s sick of being haunted by his family’s past mistakes. The only things keeping him from running away are his little brother, a supernatural wind, and the bewitching girl at his new high school. Luna Chang dreads the future. Graduation looms ahead, and her parents’ expectations are stifling. When she begins to break the rules, she finds her life upended by the strange new boy in her class, the arrival of unearthly fireflies, and an ominous crack spreading across the town of Fairbridge.

Now, as awareness of the apartheid nature of the State of Israel continues to grow, Omar Barghouti, founding member of the Palestinian Civil Society Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions (BDS) campaign against Israel, presents a renewed call to action. Aimed at forcing the State of Israel to uphold international law and universal human rights for the Palestinian people, here is a manifesto for change.

In Robyn’s 2010 track Dancing on My Own, the Swedish pop-singer chronicles a night on the dance floor in the shadow of a former lover. She is bitter, angry, and at times desperate, and yet by the time the chorus arrives her frustration has melted away. She decides to dance on her own, and in this way, she transforms her solitude into a more complex joy. Taking inspiration from Robyn’s seminal track, emerging art critic and curator Simon Wu dances through the institutions of art, capitalism, and identity in these expertly researched, beautifully rendered essays.

Amrita Sidhu belongs: in her Indian extended family, in her Sikh faith, in her California home. But when a family fight makes up her father's mind to take a job across the country in Ohio, she's torn from the fabric of her community and left to find her footing in a new high school and a new life. In Ohio, Amrita meets Dave Gill, who's funny, part-Indian, and also Mormon. At a series of Bollywood movie nights with friends, they begin to connect—despite the pressure they both feel not to date outside their own faith.

Completed as casualties mounted in the latest political and humanitarian crisis, Israelis and Palestinians is essential for anyone concerned by the ongoing violence in the Middle East.

In 1766, an insatiable vampire sails from London to the Malabar Coast, aboard an East India Company ship. But along the shores of the Indus lurk darker and more ancient powers, and a war is brewing in the night. Two centuries after the first European ship sailed to the Malabar Coast and made landfall at Calicut, The East India Company seeks to secure its future along the lucrative Silk Route, in the year 1766. An old evil now sails aboard a company ship, hoping to make a home in this new found land.

Terrible twos, temper tantrums, and grocery store meltdowns are usually the first things that come to mind when people think of toddlers. But pediatric emergency medicine physician and researcher Dr. Hasan Merali has long thought toddlers are among the best people in our society and adults could do well to learn from them. These extraordinary youngsters can be impulsive, yes, but with this comes a remarkable ability to take risks and ask questions—two qualities that can help us enjoy life more