Showing results by narrator "Sean Patrick Hopkin" in All Categories

Ten percent of people whose hearts stop and then restart report near-death experiences. Stories of lights, tunnels and reunion with late loved ones have been relayed - and dismissed - since ancient times. But when Dr Bruce Greyson's patients started describing events that he simply could not dismiss, he began to investigate. In After, he shares the scientific revelations of four decades of research into the dying process. He has become increasingly convinced that dying is less an ending than a transition, the threshold between one form of consciousness and another.

On January 20, 2021, standing where only two weeks earlier police officers had battled with right-wing paramilitaries, Joe Biden took his oath of office. The American people were still sick with COVID-19, his economists were already warning him of an imminent financial crisis, and his party, the Democrats, had the barest of majorities in the Senate. Yet, faced with an unprecedented set of crises, Joe Biden decided he would not play defense. Instead, he set out to transform the nation.

In the fall of 1871, Chicagoans knew they were due for the “big one”—a massive, uncontrollable fire that would decimate the city. It had been bone-dry for months, and a recent string of blazes had nearly outstripped the fire department’s already scant resources. Then, on October 8, a minor fire broke out in the barn of Irishwoman Kate Leary. A series of unfortunate mishaps and misunderstandings along with insufficient preparation and a high south-westerly wind combined to set the stage for an unmitigated catastrophe.

Why do we so often seek out physical pain and emotional turmoil? We go to movies that make us cry, or scream, or gag. We poke at sores, eat spicy foods, immerse ourselves in hot baths, run marathons. Some of us even seek out pain and humiliation in sexual role-play. Where do these seemingly perverse appetites come from? Drawing on groundbreaking findings from psychology and brain science, The Sweet Spot shows how the right kind of suffering sets the stage for enhanced pleasure.

Henry Kissinger analyses the lives of six extraordinary leaders—Konrad Adenauer, Charles de Gaulle, Richard Nixon, Anwar Sadat, Lee Kuan Yew, and Margaret Thatcher—through the distinctive strategies of statecraft that he believes they embodied. To each of these studies, Kissinger brings historical perception, public experience and, because he knew each of the subjects and participated in many of the events he describes, personal knowledge.

Across the world, people watch more than a billion hours of video on YouTube every day. Every minute, more than five hundred additional hours of footage are uploaded to the site, a technical feat unmatched in the history of computing. YouTube invented the attention economy we all live in today, forever changing how people are entertained, informed, and paid online. Everyone knows YouTube. And yet virtually no one knows how it works.

In 2020, while the COVID-19 pandemic raged, the US was hit by a ripple of political discontent the likes of which had not been seen since the 1960s. The spark was the viral video of the horrific police murder of an unarmed Black man. The killing of George Floyd galvanized a nation already reeling from COVID and a toxic political cycle. Tens of thousands poured into the streets to protest. The entire country suddenly seemed to be roaring for change in one voice. Then nothing much happened. Fredrik deBoer explores why these passionate movements failed and how they could succeed in the future.

Located deep in the Canadian wilderness, Snowfields Academy is the premiere school for equestrians from around the globe. With only a handful of students admitted every year, only riders who have the potential to win world-class tournaments are invited to attend. Shaman, a stallion new to Snowfields, has proven to be too much for the school. He’s too wild, too dangerous, and too unpredictable for even the most experienced riders on campus. Unexpectedly, the one person who can calm him is the girl least likely to become a student at Snowfields.

When a dead body is discovered stuffed inside a car trunk in the forest outside Rocky Points, Colorado, Chief Detective David Wolf finds himself involved in a case that will rock the local community. But as details emerge, the tension rises higher when it's clear the driver's last client was Tom Rachette, Wolf's loyal detective. Worse yet, Detective Rachette is no longer answering his phone. At the same time, Wolf gets a cryptic email that jars loose war memories he'd rather forget. And it soon becomes clear he must face his past head-on if he wants to save his friend.

In the city of Ombrazia, saints and their disciples rule with terrifying and unjust power, playing favorites while the unfavored struggle to survive. After her father’s murder at the hands of the Ombrazian military, Rossana Lacertosa is willing to do whatever it takes to dismantle the corrupt system—tapping into her powers as a disciple of Patience, joining the rebellion, and facing the boy who broke her heart. As the youngest captain in the history of Palazzo security, Damian Venturi is expected to be ruthless and strong, and to serve the saints with unquestioning devotion.

After 9/11, mental health professionals flocked to New York to handle what everyone assumed would be a flood of trauma cases. Oddly, the flood never came. In The End of Trauma, pioneering psychologist George A. Bonanno argues that we failed to predict the psychological response to 9/11 because most of what we understand about trauma is wrong. For starters, it’s not nearly as common as we think.

Newly divorced on the eve of her thirtieth birthday, Brynn is sick of heartbreak. She thought she had found her happy ending, but now she’s living with a roommate, Josh, to afford her mortgage, and she’s trying to adjust to her new single life. At least she’s got Carson’s Cove to binge, her beloved 2000s teenage soap. The show ended unexpectantly on a cliffhanger after five seasons, and the two main characters, Sloan and Spencer, never got to declare their love for each other.

A “problem of twelve” arises when a small number of institutions acquire the means to exert outsized influence over the politics and economy of a nation. The Big Three index funds of Vanguard, State Street, and BlackRock control more than twenty percent of the votes of S&P 500 companies—a concentration of power that’s unprecedented in America.

Just for a day, Colorado cop David Wolf trades slogging through murky meltwaters and even murkier small-town politics for an overnight camping trip in the wilderness with his son. But when a man with fresh burns turns up on their trail, falling from the heavy load in his backpack and running wild from something, Wolf suspects his father-son camping trip may have just taken a turn for the worse.

For seekers of all stripes, philosophy is timeless self-care. Notre Dame philosophy professors Meghan Sullivan and Paul Blaschko have reinvigorated this tradition in their wildly popular and influential undergraduate course “God and the Good Life,” in which they wrestle with the big questions about how to live and what makes life meaningful. Now they invite us into the classroom to work through issues like what justifies our beliefs, whether we should practice a religion and what sacrifices we should make for others....

A dead man has investigators stumped. His death mirrors the work of a serial killer who'd dropped off the face of the earth and believed to be dead. A visit from a strange new ghost forces Cassie's involvement. Unsure the entity's purpose for haunting her, Cassie is both intrigued and terrified at its potential implications.

Five years in the making, this brilliant, in-depth investigative reporting on the history, politics, and science of alcoholism will show how AA became our nation's de facto treatment policy, even as evidence for more effective remedies accumulated. US of AA is a character-driven, beautifully written exposé, full of secrecy, irony, liquor industry money, the shrillest of scare tactics and, at its center, a grand deception. US of AA shines a much-needed spotlight on the addiction treatment industry. It will forever change the way we think about the entire enterprise.

A week ago, Ruby Grace was an ordinary girl. Now she’s a wolf shifter, rejected by her fated mate and sent to live with an ancient coven of powerful witches. That’s not even the craziest part. Because Ruby’s been star touched—blessed by the gods with the rare ability to weave illusions with her mind.

Detective David Wolf’s slow winter in the Colorado Rockies is interrupted by two events: a mountain lion attack in a remote trailer park, and a wealthy man coming into headquarters to report the robbery of three valuable paintings.

A Rocky Points businessman goes missing, leaving behind an SUV drifted over in snow and a lot of questions for the Sluice-Byron County SD. But the answers are hard to come by, and Chief Detective David Wolf’s personal problems aren’t making investigating any easier for him and his team. As the temperatures rise in the Chautauqua Valley, the most important clue emerges from the melting drifts. At the same time, Wolf’s memories surface from the shadowy depths of his mind and back into his life.