ace the coding interview with Python and JavaScript

Mexico City has always been a seat of empire. With its grandiose pretensions, sheer swagger, and staggering proportions, it gives the impression of power exercised over great time and distances. And y

Much of human experience can be distilled to saltwater: tears, sweat, and an enduring connection to the sea. In Vast Expanses, Helen M. Rozwadowski weaves a cultural, environmental, and geopolitical history of that relationship, a journey of tides and titanic forces reaching around the globe and across geological and evolutionary time.Our ancient connections with the sea have developed and multiplied through industrialization and globalization, a trajectory that runs counter to Western depictions of the ocean as a place remote from and immune to human influence. Rozwadowski argues that knowledge about the oceans—created through work and play, scientific investigation, and also through human ambitions for profiting from the sea—has played a central role in defining our relationship with this vast, trackless, and opaque place. It has helped us to exploit marine resources, control ocean space, extend imperial or national power, and attempt to refashion the sea into a more tractable arena

Monsters under Glass explores our enduring fascination with hothouses and exotic blooms, from their rise in ancient times, through the Victorian vogue for plant collecting, to the vegetable monsters o

For millennia, corals were a marine enigma, organisms that confounded scientific classification and occupied a space between the animal and plant kingdoms. Our cultural relationships with coral have b

Majestic and untwinkling, Jupiter is the grandest of all planets. It is the largest planet in our solar system and among the brightest objects in the night sky. It shines with a noble, steady luster,

Gypsies have for centuries been simultaneously vilified and romanticized—associated with criminality and dirt, but at the same time with color, magic, and music. Gypsy music is popular around th

Multimedia experiments are everywhere in contemporary art, but the collaboration and conflict associated with multimedia is not a new phenomenon. From opera to the symphonic poem to paintings inspired

Has ever a plant inspired such love and such hatred as the rhododendron? Its beauty is inarguable; it can clothe whole hillsides and gardens with a blanket of vibrant color. The rhododendron has a pro

In the turmoil of the 1920s and ’30s, Claude Cahun challenged gender stereotypes with her powerful photographs, montages, and writings, works that appear to our twenty-first-century eyes as utterly co

Few thinkers better encapsulate the two polarities of economic and social thought in the twenty-first century than Friedrich Hayek and John Maynard Keynes. Wrestling with the horrors of world wars, th

Joseph Beuys is one of the most important and controversial German artists of the late twentieth century, an artist whose persona and art is so tightly interwoven with Germany’s fascist past—Beuys was

Cacti are full of contradictions. Although many are found in the driest and most barren environments on earth, some grow exclusively in the branches of the rainforest canopy. Many species bristle with

With the recent surge in terrorist acts and military confrontations, as well as ever-strengthening fundamentalist ideologies, the Christian–Muslim divide is perhaps more visible than ever—but it is no

Add a gurgling moan with the sound of dragging feet and a smell of decay and what do you get? Better not find out. The zombie has roamed with dead-eyed menace from its beginnings in obscure folklore a

Elegant flowers dressed in simple white and green, snowdrops look far too fragile to deal with wintry weather. But that’s just what they do, and they have become treasured by horticulturalists for the

In his lifetime the early Netherlandish painter Hieronymus Bosch was famous for his phantasmagoric images, and today his name is synonymous with the infernal. The creator of expansive tableaus of fant

The ancient Egyptians worshipped them, the Romans dressed them in fitted coats, and the Christians associated them with their divine savior. InSheep, Philip Armstrong traces the natural and cultural h

Rest your eyes long enough on the skylines of Delhi, Guangzhou, Jakarta—even Chicago or London—and you will see the same remarkable transformation, building after building going up with the breakneck

A Manhattan or a Sazerac; neat, on the rocks, or with a splash of soda—no matter how it’s served up, whiskey is synonymous with the poet’s inspiration and the devil’s spirit

From the Penguin Books logo to The March of the Penguins, a certain tuxedo-adorned member of the animal kingdom has long captured our hearts and imaginations. Stephen Martin regales us here with the

Drug trafficking and consumption are among the most pressing global issues of our time and the approaches to alleviating them are myriad and complex. With Drugs and the World, Axel Klein takes a remar

The graceful winged form of the swan has inspired works of art from fairy tales to ballets, and airborne the bird is a majestic sight - moving steadily with strong, slow wing-beats and with its slende

A revealing account of an artist whose enduring obsession with chance and coincidence shaped both his life and work, Marcel Duchamp illuminates one of the most important and influential figures in al

The conflation of reality and the fantastic, ambiguity, the relentless confrontation with horror, the fractured sense of identity: Franz Kafka created a wholly unique and enduring worldview through hi

Nuclear bombs and geopolitical controversy are often the first things associated with North Korea and its volatile leader Kim Jong-II. Yet behind the secretive curtain of this isolated nation also lie

Most writing on modern warfare begins with the French Revolutionary Wars and continues through World Wars I and II, giving post-1945 conflicts only a cursory glance through the lens of Cold War polit

The oyster is the ultimate aphrodisiac, and Casanova knew what he was doing by eating 50 raw oysters each morning with his mistress of the moment - in a bathtub designed for two. Like all seafoods th

China to Chinatown tells the story of one of the most notable examples of the globalization of food: the spread of Chinese recipes, ingredients and cooking styles to the Western world. Beginning with

This book deals with the history of mining and smelting from the Renaissance to the present. Martin Lynch opens with the invention, sometime before 1453, of a revolutionary technique for separating si

In this illuminating and provocative survey, Stephen Barber examines the historical relationship between film and the urban landscape. Projected Cities looks with particular focus at the cinema of Eur

China to Chinatown tells the story of one of the most notable examples of the globalization of food: the spread of Chinese recipes, ingredients and cooking styles to the Western world. Beginning with

Representing the Republic provides an intriguing account of the mapping of America from its colonial origins to 1900. The most significant maps and mapmakers are discussed in a survey that begins with

Claire Preston’s Bee tells the busy story of our long, complex relationship with this industrious, much-admired insect. Moving from ancient political descriptions to Renaissance debates about mo

At the end of his long, prolific life, Titian was rumored to paint directly on the canvas with his bare hands. He would slide his fingers across bright ridges of oil paint, loosening the colors, blend

Thirty years ago, Prague was a closed book to most travelers. Today, it is Europe’s fifth-most-visited city, surpassed only by London, Paris, Istanbul, and Rome. With a stunning natural setting

In January 2006, a man tried to break Marcel Duchamp’s Fountain sculpture with a small hammer. The sculpted foot of Michelangelo’s David was damaged in 1991 by a purportedly mentally ill artist. Each

Bats have been maligned in the West for centuries. Unfair associations with demons have seen their leathery wings adorn numerous evil characters, from the Devil to Bram Stoker’s Dracula. But the

In remembering the Holocaust, we have largely ignored the contributions made by German artists in the first twenty years after the end of the war. But how did artists in Germany deal with their own ex

Public sculpture is a major draw in today’s cities, and nowhere is this more the case than in New York. In the Big Apple, urban art has become synonymous with the municipal “brand,”

With eye-popping colors and shapes, intense flavors, and curious textures, sweets and candy are beloved by people of all ages worldwide. They provide minor treats, lessons in economics for children, a