Showing results by narrator "Ian Putnam" in All Categories

“Engrossing and suspenseful." —The New York Times “Expertly pulls readers in.” —The Guardian “Smith sharply chronicles the revolutionary moment.” — Financial Times The origin story of the post-truth age: the candid inside tale of two online media rivals, Nick Denton of Gawker...

Xi Jinping has made his ambitions for the People's Liberation Army (PLA) perfectly clear, first, that China should become a "great maritime power" and secondly, that the PLA "become a world-class armed force by 2050." China as a Twenty-First-Century Naval Power focuses on China's navy and how it is being transformed to satisfy the "world class" goal.

When life hands you lemons, you can either make lemonade or lob them like hand grenades at your problems. Nothing is going as Idina Moorfield planned. It’s what happens when magical powers you don’t know you have manifest when you least expect it. Idina needs to make new plans, even if those plans are loosely based on her CO telling her to figure things out. Time to make lemonade. There’s all sorts of tasks Idina and her unit could be doing. Getting them to help out is another issue. Can she figure out how to get them to help her without asking them to help?

Idina Moorfield is a new kind of magical with a dark and twisty lineage. Any other combat engineer in the 82nd Airborne Division would be proud of how far Idina's come, but the visions and voices in her mind are only getting worse. When it affects her work, Idina gets transferred to a new unit—a unit of misfits with their own problems. But sometimes, what seems like the worst move ever, can turn out to be the beginning of something great. Who says outcasts can’t be heroes?

Formed in Hermosa Beach, California, in 1978, for eight brutal years Black Flag made and played brilliant, ugly, no-holds-barred music on a self-appointed touring circuit of America’s clubs, squats, and community halls. They fought with everybody: the police, the record industry, and even their own fans. They toured overseas on pennies a day and did it in beat-up trucks and vans. Spray Paint the Walls tells Black Flag’s story from the inside, drawing on exclusive interviews with the group’s members, their contemporaries, and the bands they inspired.

In this astute new work, Jakob Feinig shows how the relation between money users and money-issuing governments changed from British colonial North America to today's United States, discussing how popular movements reshaped money-creating institutions, and how their opponents attempted to silence them.

Humans and fungi share nearly 50 percent of the same DNA. Because we're related, designing drugs to combat the varieties that attack us is a challenge. Meanwhile, in an ever hotter, wetter world, fungi may be finding new ways to thrive, queueing up global outbreak potentials for which no vaccine and woefully few medications exist; some fungi are already beginning to resist treatment. Among other lifeforms, bats, amphibians, and essential crops are also increasingly threatened by these pathogens.

Idina Moorfield isn’t the only one on her team with unusual powers. Her buddy, Stop remembers everything he sees, and Cake is a new kind of man of steel. That’s the last two, which means everyone in Idina’s unit has a unique talent. Why would the Army want to bring them all together? Her commander, Hines is still refusing to answer her questions. She’s on a need-to-know basis, and right now, she doesn’t need to know. But Idina’s untapped powers are getting stronger and more aggressive.

Lieutenant Colonel Richard MacBlair has appeared out of thin air. Idina Moorfield has far more questions than the few answers her Uncle is willing to give her. He wants her to wait and she’s tired of waiting. Does she have a choice? Not really when Uncle is also your boss. Why is he trying to ignore their family connection? Has he been helping her from the sidelines all along? Someone is gunning for Idina and has her in its sights. She just doesn’t know who or what it is.  

More and more organizations worldwide are using teams of employees to respond to adversity. Employees can no longer rely on their own knowledge, skills, and abilities to get their work done. Rather, employees have to work collaboratively with one another and combine their expertise to achieve the synergy and breakthrough thinking that is necessary to be successful at completing complex tasks in today's dynamic environments.

What makes a state? This question has attracted more and more attention in recent years with Catalan's illegal vote for independence from Spain and Palestine's ongoing search for international recognition. And while Scotland chose to remain with the United Kingdom, discussions of independence have only continued as the ramifications of the Brexit vote begin to set in. Kosovo, South Sudan, and the situation in Ukraine - each in its way reveals the perils of creating a nation separate from neighbors who have dominated it.

What grounds the fictional world of a novel? Or is such a world peculiarly groundless? In a powerful engagement with the latest debates in novel theory, Daniel Wright investigates how novelists reckon with the ontological status of their works. Philosophers who debate whether fictional worlds exist take the novel as an ontological problem to be solved; instead, Wright reveals the novel as a genre of immanent ontological critique.

In 2020, engineering firm Velentium faced an unprecedented ask: partner with a small medical device company and a very large vehicle manufacturer to increase emergency ventilator production from hundreds per month to thousands per week—in just twenty-eight days.

Algorithms—rules written into software—shape key moments in our lives: from who gets hired or admitted to a top public school, to who should go to jail or receive scarce public benefits. Such decisions are both technical and moral. Today, the logic of high stakes software is rarely open to scrutiny, and central moral questions are often left for the technical experts to answer.

Society and democracy are ever threatened by the fall of fact. Rigorous analysis of facts, the hard boundary between truth and opinion, and fidelity to reputable sources of factual information are all in alarming decline. A 2018 report published by the RAND Corporation labeled this problem "truth decay", and Andrew J. Hoffman lays the challenge of fixing it at the door of the academy. But, as he points out, academia is prevented from carrying this out due to its own existential crisis - a crisis of relevance.

Business owners, consumers, and employees have long relied on the news to make financial decisions—what to buy, who to hire, and what products to sell. In the 21st century, that news has shifted. Only the big businesses and executives can afford expensive subscriptions, while most consumers and small-business owners are left scrambling to find the news they need to succeed and thrive. The Future of Business Journalism explores how the field evolved into this divide and offers solutions on how business journalism can once again provide the stories and content that a broad society needs.

Drawing on the example of post-WWII Britain and looking ahead at America in the 2020s, Jed Esty suggests that becoming a second-place nation is neither disastrous, as alarmists claim, nor avoidable, as optimists insist. Contemporary declinism often masks white nostalgia and perpetuates a conservative longing for Cold War certainty. But the narcissistic lure of "lost greatness" appeals across the political spectrum.

Sin, the newest contribution by Gregory Mellema, provides a short and lively summary of what contemporary philosophers are saying about the relationship between the traditional theological category of sin and contemporary philosophical ethics.

Bourbon whiskey is perhaps Kentucky's most distinctive product. Despite bourbon's prominence in the social and economic life of the Bluegrass state, many myths and legends surround its origins. In Kentucky Bourbon, Henry C. Crowgey claims that distilled spirits and pioneer settlement went hand in hand; Isaac Shelby, the state's first governor, was among Kentucky's pioneer distillers. Crowgey traces the drink's history from its beginnings as a cottage industry to steam-based commercial operations in the period just before the Civil War.

In The Practice of Folklore: Essays Toward a Theory of Tradition, author Simon J. Bronner works with theories of cultural practice to explain the social and psychological need for tradition in everyday life. Bronner proposes a distinctive “praxic” perspective that will answer the pressing philosophical as well as psychological question of why people enjoy repeating themselves. The significance of the keyword practice, he asserts, is the embodiment of a tension between repetition and variation in human behavior.