Computer Technology and Computer Programming

A wildly fun and scientifically sound exploration of what alien life must be like Scientists are confident that life exists elsewhere in the universe. Yet rather than taking a realistic approach to what aliens might be like, we imagine that life on other planets is the stuff of science fiction. The time has come to abandon our fantasies of space invaders and movie monsters and place our expectations on solid scientific footing.Using his own expert understanding of life on Earth and Darwin's theory of evolution--which applies throughout the universe--Cambridge zoologist Dr. Arik Kershenbaum explains what alien life must be like: how these creatures will move, socialize, and communicate. Might there be an alien planet with supersonic animals? A moon where creatures have a language composed of smells? Will aliens scream with fear, act honestly, or have technology? The Zoologist's Guide to the Galaxy answers these questions using the latest science to tell the story of how life really work

An inspirational call to build deep business and personal relationships as the foundation of a meaningful life and purposeful collaborations, drawing from the wisdom of legendary partnerships including Jimmy and Rosalynn Carter, Ben and Jerry, Desmond and Leah Tutu, and the collective who saved humanity by closing the ozone hole.Our individualistic society has created an environment of fear, division, and domination, which has crushed our ability to relate meaningfully to each other and diminished our capacity to innovate and collaborate. Jean Oelwang, president and founding CEO of Virgin Unite, has been on a decade-long exploration to find out how to nurture relationships with depth and purpose. Deep connections shape who we are and have a profound ripple effect on everything we do, supporting us to achieve more, withstand anything, and amplify impact. Those enduring partnerships are the foundation of a meaningful life as well as the backbone of any successful organization and collab

The instant New York Times bestsellerBy the acclaimed author of In the Realm of Hungry Ghosts, a groundbreaking investigation into the causes of illness, a bracing critique of how our society breeds disease, and a pathway to health and healing.In this revolutionary book, renowned physician Gabor Maté eloquently dissects how in Western countries that pride themselves on their healthcare systems, chronic illness and general ill health are on the rise. Nearly 70 percent of Americans are on at least one prescription drug; more than half take two. In Canada, every fifth person has high blood pressure. In Europe, hypertension is diagnosed in more than 30 percent of the population. And everywhere, adolescent mental illness is on the rise. So what is really “normal” when it comes to health?Over four decades of clinical experience, Maté has come to recognize the prevailing understanding of “normal” as false, neglecting the roles that trauma and stress, and the pressures of modern-day living, ex

Longlisted for the 2022 National Book Award for PoetryLonglisted for the 2023 PEN Open Book AwardFinalist for the Poetry Society of America's Norma Farber First Book Award“Outstanding . . . the poetry in these pages is intelligent, lyrical, as invested in the past as the present and future with witty nods to pop culture.” —Roxane Gay, author of Hunger “I’ve never read anything like it. Truly a sublime experience.” —Jason Reynolds, author of Ain’t Burned All the BrightA groundbreaking collection about Afropioneerism past and present from Pushcart Prize-nominated poet and New York Times bestselling author Rio CortezFrom a visionary writer praised for her captivating work on Black history and experience comes a poetry collection exploring personal, political, and artistic frontiers, journeying from her family's history as "Afropioneers" in the American West to shimmering glimpses of transcendent, liberated futures. In poems that range from wry, tongue-i

A prizewinning, thrillingly subversive debut novel about a woman in Tokyo who avoids harassment at work by perpetuating, for nine months and beyond, the lie that she’s pregnantWhen thirty-four-year-old Ms. Shibata gets a new job to escape sexual harassment at her old one, she finds that, as the only woman at her new workplace, she is expected to do all the menial tasks. One day she announces that she can’t clear away her coworkers’ dirty cups―because she’s pregnant and the smell nauseates her. The only thing is . . . Ms. Shibata is not pregnant.Pregnant Ms. Shibata doesn’t have to serve coffee to anyone. Pregnant Ms. Shibata isn’t forced to work overtime. Pregnant Ms. Shibata rests, watches TV, takes long baths, and even joins an aerobics class for expectant mothers. She’s finally being treated by her colleagues as more than a hollow core―like the cardboard tubes for paper towel and toilet paper rolls that her company manufactures. But she has a nine-month ruse to keep up. Before long,

From the New York Times-bestselling author of Exit West, a story of love, loss, and rediscovery in a time of unsettling change.One morning, a man wakes up to find himself transformed. Overnight, Anders’s skin has turned dark, and the reflection in the mirror seems a stranger to him. At first he shares his secret only with Oona, an old friend turned new lover. Soon, reports of similar events begin to surface. Across the land, people are awakening in new incarnations, uncertain how their neighbors, friends, and family will greet them.Some see the transformations as the long-dreaded overturning of the established order that must be resisted to a bitter end. In many, like Anders’s father and Oona’s mother, a sense of profound loss and unease wars with profound love. As the bond between Anders and Oona deepens, change takes on a different shading: a chance at a kind of rebirth--an opportunity to see ourselves, face to face, anew. In Mohsin Hamid’s “lyrical and urgent” prose (O Magazine), Th

An exploration and polemic that redefines the power and potential for reading by a novelist whose “prose is as good as it gets” (NPR) and who has “a real voice: vernacular and fluid, with a take-no-prisoners edge” (Kirkus)How many times have we heard that reading builds empathy? That we can travel through books? How often have we were heard about the importance of diversifying our bookshelves? Or claimed that books saved our lives? These familiar words―beautiful, aspirational―are sometimes even true. But award-winning novelist Elaine Castillo has more ambitious hopes for our reading culture, and in this collection of linked essays, “she moves to wrest reading away from the cotton-candy aspirations of uniting people in empathetic harmony and reposition it as thornier, ultimately more rewarding work.” (Vulture) How to Read Now explores the politics and ethics of reading, and insists that we are capable of something better: a more engaged relationship not just with our fiction and our art

NOW IN PAPERBACK--The most important tool for the future of humanity. More data can't solve all our problems: this is a guide to the unique ability humans have to frame new questions and so get better results than anyone could have previously imagined.We long thought that the best decisions are based on data and lots of it. FRAMERS is an investigation of both the limits of data-driven artificial intelligence and a user's manual for the irreplaceable ability that has enabled Homo sapiens' most enduring platforms of prosperity and happiness. Cukier, Mayer-Schönberger, and de Véricourt define exactly what is the most important thing humans will always do better than robots. Frames are mental models of the world that we use to understand problems and to come up with new or refined solutions. As a tool, framing has always been with us. But as long as we were focused on traits like memory and reasoning that were more obviously essential to human cognition, framing didn't get much attention.

From a rising star New Yorker staff writer, the incredible and gripping true story of John Barker, a psychiatrist who investigated the power of premonitions―and came to believe he himself was destined for an early deathOn the morning of October 21, 1966, Kathleen Middleton, a music teacher in suburban London, awoke choking and gasping, convinced disaster was about to strike. An hour later, a mountain of rubble containing waste from a coal mine collapsed above the village of Aberfan, swamping buildings and killing 144 people, many of them children. Among the doctors and emergency workers who arrived on the scene was John Barker, a psychiatrist from Shelton Hospital, in Shrewsbury. At Aberfan, Barker became convinced there had been supernatural warning signs of the disaster, and decided to establish a “premonitions bureau,” in conjunction with the Evening Standard newspaper, to collect dreams and forebodings from the British public, in the hope of preventing future calamities. Middleto

The multimillion-copy bestselling modern classic of autobiographical fiction about a young woman's struggle with mental health, featuring a new foreword by Esm?Weijun Wang, the New York Times bestselling author of The Collected Schizophrenias, and a new afterword by the author A Penguin Classic After making an attempt on her own life, sixteen-year-old Deborah Blau is diagnosed with schizophrenia. With the reluctant and fearful consent of her parents, she enters a psychiatric hospital many hours from her home in suburban Chicago. Here she will spend the next three years, trying, with the help of a gifted psychiatrist, to find a path back to her "normal" life, and to emerge from the imaginary Kingdom of Yr in which she has sought refuge. A semiautobiographical novel originally published under the pen name Hannah Green just a year after Sylvia Plath's The Bell Jar--a very different portrait of psychological breakdown--I Never Promised You a Rose Garden remains, more than half a century la

A profoundly moving and suspenseful drama that untangles the complicated ties that bind families together―or break them apart―as a young Korean American man’s search for answers about his girlfriend’s mysterious death becomes a soul-searching journey into his own bi-cultural identity.When the Seoul police inform Min that his girlfriend Yu-jin has committed suicide, he’s sure it can't be true. She was successful, ambitious, happy, just on the cusp of graduating from university and claiming the future she’d always dreamed of. Min, on the other hand, born to an American father and Korean mother, has never felt quite the same certainty as Yu-jin about his life’s path. After growing up in California, where he always felt “too Korean” to fit in, he’s moved to Seoul in the hope that exploring his Korean heritage will help him find a sense of purpose. And when he meets Yu-jin, little does he know that their carefree relationship will set off a chain of events with tragic consequences for t

From one of our sharpest and most important political thinkers, a brilliant big-picture vision of the greatest challenge of our time―how to bridge the bitter divides within diverse democracies enough for them to remain stable and functionalSome democracies are highly homogeneous. Others have long maintained a brutal racial or religious hierarchy, with some groups dominating and exploiting others. Never in history has a democracy succeeded in being both diverse and equal, treating members of many different ethnic or religious groups fairly. And yet achieving that goal is now central to the democratic project in countries around the world. It is, Yascha Mounk argues, the greatest experiment of our time. Drawing on history, social psychology, and comparative politics, Mounk examines how diverse societies have long suffered from the ills of domination, fragmentation, or structured anarchy. So it is hardly surprising that most people are now deeply pessimistic that different groups might be

A deeply funny and shrewdly observed debut novel about being lost in the very place you know by heart.Bennett Driscoll is a Turner Prize-nominated artist who was once a rising star. Now, at age fifty-five, his wife has left him, he hasn't sold a painting in two years, and his gallery wants to stop selling his work, claiming they'll have more value retrospectively...when he's dead. So, left with a large West London home and no income, he's forced to move into his artist's studio in the back garden and list his house on the popular vacation rental site, AirBed. A stranger now in his own home, with his daughter, Mia, off at art school, and any new relationships fizzling out at best, Bennett struggles to find purpose in his day-to-day. That all changes when three different guests―lonely American Alicia; tortured artist Emma; and cautiously optimistic divorcée Kirstie―unwittingly unlock the pieces of himself that have been lost to him for too long. Warm, witty, and utterly humane, Super Hos

TARGET CONSUMER: For fans of contemporary, millennial perspectives and of authors such as Susie Yang, Charles Yu, Nancy Jooyoun Kim, and Kevin Kwan. Pitched as The Farewell meets Ocean's Eleven, PORTRAIT OF A THIEF is a lyrically written heist novel based on a true story of Chinese art vanishing from Western museums; about diaspora, unlikely friendships, the colonization of art, and the complexity of the Chinese American identity.Will Chen, a Chinese American art history major at Harvard, has spent most of his life learning about the West—its art, its culture, all that it has taken and called its own. Despite this, he believes art belongs with its creators, so when a Chinese corporation offers him a (very illegal) chance to reclaim five priceless sculptures China lost centuries ago, it’s surprisingly easy to say yes. Will’s crew, fellow students chosen out of his boundless optimism for their skills and loyalty, aren’t exactly the experienced criminals from Ocean’s Ele

An ambitious, discussable big think book by an influential economist, about the power of diversity and humanity’s growth, via a multidisciplinary approach that examines exactly what sets humans apart from the rest of the animal kingdom, charting humanity’s rocketing journey from subsistence in two centuries―a relative blink of the eye.For most of our existence, since our emergence as a distinct species nearly three hundred thousand years ago, the basic thrust of human life was defined by the pursuit of survival and reproduction. It has long been the prevailing wisdom that prosperity rose gradually. In actuality, the astounding ascent in living conditions in the past two centuries has been the product of an abrupt transformation rather than of a process that gained momentum, incrementally. Most people in the 18th century led lives more comparable to those of their distant ancestors than to those of their present-day descendants. Over this two-hundred-year period, a split-second in h

For anyone who wants to be heard at work, earn that overdue promotion, or win more clients, deals, and projects, the bestselling author of Captivate, Vanessa Van Edwards, shares her advanced guide to improving professional relationships through the power of cues.What makes someone charismatic? Why do some captivate a room, while others have trouble managing a small meeting? What makes some ideas spread, while other good ones fall by the wayside? If you have ever been interrupted in meetings, overlooked for career opportunities or had your ideas ignored, your cues may be the problem – and the solution. Cues – the tiny signals we send to others 24/7 through our body language, facial expressions, word choice, and vocal inflection – have a massive impact on how we, and our ideas, come across. Our cues can either enhance our message or undermine it. In this entertaining and accessible guide to the hidden language of cues, Vanessa Van Edwards teaches you how to convey power, trust, leadershi