Audiobooks narrated by Graham Winton

The Most Powerful Court in the World: A History of the Supreme Court of the United States

An authoritative, even-handed, and accessible history of the Supreme Court of the United States, the most powerful court in the world and the final arbiter of the world's oldest constitution. Will abortion be legal? Should people of the same sex be allowed to marry? May colleges prefer black applicants over white ones? These are among the most bitterly contested issues in the United States today. We answer these questions, and many more, by presenting them to nine lawyers--the justices of the Supreme Court of the United States. No other nation commits so many important questions to its highest court. Stuart Banner's The Most Powerful Court in the World is an authoritative history of the United States Supreme Court from the Founding era to the present. Not merely a history of the Court's opinions and jurisprudence, it is also a rich account of the Court in the broadest sense--of the sorts of people who become justices and the methods by which they are chosen, of how the Court does its work, and of its relationship with other branches of government. It is about how the Court acquired so much power, how it has retained its power in the face of repeated challenges and criticisms, and what it has done with its power over the years. Rather than praising or criticizing the Court's decisions, Banner makes the case that one cannot fully understand the decisions without knowing about the institution that produced them. Offering a fresh analytical window into today's contentious debates about the Court--debates that often rest on dubious ideas about the Court's history--The Most Powerful Court in the World helps readers see cases through the justices' eyes.

Stuart Banner (Author), Graham Winton, TBD (Narrator)

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Is Earth Exceptional?: The Quest for Cosmic Life

A New York Times-bestselling astrophysicist and a Nobel laureate describe the quest to discover how and where the universe breathed life into matter For a long time, scientists have wondered how life has emerged from inanimate chemistry, and whether Earth is the only place where it exists. Charles Darwin speculated about life on Earth beginning in a warm little pond. Some of his contemporaries believed that life existed on Mars. It once seemed inevitable that the truth would be known by now. It is not. For more than a century, the origins and extent of life have remained shrouded in mystery. But, as Mario Livio and Jack Szostak reveal in Is Earth Exceptional?, the veil is finally lifting. The authors describe how life's building blocks-from RNA to amino acids and cells-could have emerged from the chaos of Earth's early existence. They then apply the knowledge gathered from cutting-edge research across the sciences to the search for life in the cosmos: both life as we know it and life as we don't. Why and where life exists are two of the biggest unsolved problems in science. Is Earth Exceptional? is the ultimate exploration of the question of whether life is a freak accident or a chemical imperative.

Jack Szostak, Mario Livio (Author), Graham Winton, Tbd (Narrator)

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Glad to the Brink of Fear: A Portrait of Ralph Waldo Emerson

The canonical nineteenth-century American writer Ralph Waldo Emerson is known for his many essays, such as “Self-Reliance,” “Nature,” “Individualism,” and “Experience,” and as a prominent figure in the New England literary and philosophical movement known as Transcendentalism, which also included Henry David Thoreau, Margaret Fuller, Amos Bronson Alcott, and many others. In this book, the writer James Marcus offers a fresh, twenty-first-century perspective on Emerson’s life and work, and argues for Emerson’s continuing relevance. Across sixteen thematic chapters, each of which uses one of Emerson’s essays as a point of departure, Marcus draws on Emerson’s journals, correspondence, and biographical details to consider the writer’s views on such topics as religion, marriage, friendship, children, politics, grief and loss, slavery and freedom. He looks beyond Emerson’s image as a lofty and canonical figure to capture the flawed and very human essayist as a husband, a grieving parent, a literary celebrity, and more. In an engaging, personal style, Marcus explores Emerson’s literary and cultural legacy and reflects on how his ideas and insights speak to the challenges of contemporary life.

James Marcus (Author), Graham Winton, TBD (Narrator)

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American Civil Wars: A Continental History 1850-1873

A Pulitzer Prize winner’s masterful history of the Civil War and its reverberations across the continent. In a beautifully crafted narrative of soaring ideals and sordid politics, of civil war and foreign invasion, Alan Taylor presents a pivotal twenty-year period in which the United States, Mexico, and Canada all transformed themselves into nations. The American Civil War stands at the center of the story, its military dimension and the drama of emancipation the focus. The American West and its Native peoples feature prominently, with fascinating detail on California and the southwest borderlands. The instability in the United States shakes the continent: it invites a French invasion of Mexico that fuels long-standing hostilities between Conservative and Liberal forces; in Canada it raises the urgency of a continental confederation to manage the differences of Francophones and Anglophones. The vivid character portraits throughout are indelible: from Lincoln, Jefferson Davis, and the great Liberal leader Benito Juárez to key Black abolitionists such as Martin Delany and Mary Ann Shadd.

Alan Taylor (Author), Graham Winton (Narrator)

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Performance All the Way Down: Genes, Development, and Sexual Difference

An award-winning biologist and writer applies queer feminist theory to developmental genetics, arguing that individuals are not essentially male or female. The idea that gender is a performance--a tenet of queer feminist theory since the nineties--has spread from college classrooms to popular culture. This transformative concept has sparked reappraisals of social expectations as well as debate over not just gender, but sex: what it is, what it means, and how we know it. Most scientific and biomedical research over the past seventy years has assumed and reinforced a binary concept of biological sex, though some scientists point out that male and female are just two outcomes in a world rich in sexual diversity. In Performance All the Way Down, MacArthur Fellow and Pulitzer Prize finalist Richard O. Prum brings feminist thought into conversation with biology, arguing that the sexual binary is not essential to human genes, chromosomes, or embryos. Our genomes are not blueprints, algorithms, or recipes for the physical representation of our individual sexual essences or fates. In accessible language, Prum shows that when we look closely at the science, we see that gene expression is a material action in the world, a performance through which the individual regulates and achieves its own becoming. A fertilized zygote matures into an organism with tissues and organs, neurological control, immune defenses, psychological mechanisms, and gender and sexual behavior through a performative continuum. This complex hierarchy of self-enactment reflects the evolved agency of individual genes, molecules, cells, and tissues. Rejecting the notion of an intractable divide between the humanities and the sciences, Prum proves that the contributions of queer and feminist theorists can help scientists understand the human body in new ways, yielding key insights into genetics, developmental biology, physiology. Sure to inspire discussion, Performance All the Way Down is a book about biology for feminists, a book about feminist theory for biologists, and a book for anyone curious about how our sexual bodies grow.

Richard O. Prum, Richard Prum (Author), Graham Winton, TBD (Narrator)

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I've Been Thinking

Brought to you by Penguin. 'Who would have guessed that a philosopher's life could be so full of adventures?' Daniel C. Dennett, philosopher and cognitive scientist, has spent his career considering consciousness. I've Been Thinking traces the development of Dennett's own intellect and instructs us how we too can become good thinkers. Dennett's restless curiosity leads him from his childhood in Beirut to Harvard, and from Parisian jazz clubs to 'tillosophy' on his tractor in Maine. Along the way, he encounters and debates with a host of legendary thinkers, and reveals the breakthroughs and misjudgments that shaped his paradigm-shifting philosophies. Thinking, Dennett argues, is hard, and risky. In fact, all good philosophical thinking is inevitably accompanied by bafflement, frustration and self-doubt. It is only in getting it wrong that we, very occasionally, find a way to get it right. This memoir by one of the greatest philosophers of our time will speak to anyone who seeks a life of the mind with adventure and creativity. ©2023 Daniel C. Dennett (P)2023 Penguin Audio

Daniel C. Dennett (Author), Graham Winton (Narrator)

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The Sound of the Future: The Coming Age of Voice Technology

Why voice technology is the next big thing in technology, as big as mobile a decade ago and the internet in the late 90s, fundamentally altering the way companies do business. Voice is the next technology - remarkably similar in potential impact to the internet and mobile computing - poised to change the way the world works. Tobias Dengel is in the vanguard of this breakthrough, understanding the deep, wide-ranging implications voice will have for every industry. In The Sound of the Future, he connects the dots about this emerging paradigm to vividly illustrate how business leaders can stay ahead of the game, rather than scrambling to catch up, as voice technology gradually reveals its power, creating a host of new winners and losers. Using fascinating, colorful stories, Dengel explains how the "voice-first" experience is becoming part of the global technology mainstream, exploring the ways voice will do a better job of serving basic human needs such as safety, speed, accuracy, convenience, and fun, as well as making it possible for hundreds of millions of people around the planet to participate more fully and productively in today's high-tech world by making interactions with technology virtually effortless. A pervasive technology like the internet and mobile, voice, with applications in marketing, sales, service, manufacturing, and logistics, will change the way we work at every level and every function, driving down costs, boosting productivity, and enabling the creation of entirely new business models. This is not simply about Siri and Alexa. They are the tantalizing but incomplete precursors of the ultimate interface that will make technology easier, faster, more accurate, and more human.

Tobias Dengel (Author), Graham Winton (Narrator)

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The Deadly Rise of Anti-science: A Scientist's Warning

During the height of the COVID-19 pandemic, one renowned scientist, in his famous bowtie, appeared daily on major news networks such as MSNBC, NPR, the BBC, and others. Dr. Peter J. Hotez often went without sleep, working around the clock to develop a nonprofit COVID-19 vaccine and to keep the public informed. During that time, he was one of the most trusted voices on the pandemic and was even nominated for a Nobel Peace Prize for his selfless work. He also became one of the main targets of anti-science rhetoric that gained traction through conservative news media. In this eyewitness story of how the anti-vaccine movement grew into a dangerous and prominent anti-science element in American politics, Hotez describes the devastating impacts it has had on Americans’ health and lives. As a scientist who has endured antagonism from anti-vaxxers and been at the forefront of both essential scientific discovery and advocacy, Hotez is uniquely qualified to tell this story. By weaving his personal experiences together with information on how the anti-vaccine movement became a tool of far-right political figures around the world, Hotez opens readers’ eyes to the dangers of anti-science. He explains how anti-science became a major societal and lethal force: in the first years of the pandemic, more than 200,000 unvaccinated Americans needlessly died despite the widespread availability of COVID-19 vaccines. Even as he paints a picture of the world under a shadow of aggressive ignorance, Hotez demonstrates his innate optimism, offering solutions for how to combat science denial and save lives in the process.

Peter J. Hotez M.D. Ph.D. (Author), Graham Winton (Narrator)

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How to Interpret the Constitution

From New York Times bestselling author Cass Sunstein, a timely and powerful argument for rethinking how the U.S. Constitution is interpreted The U.S. Supreme Court has eliminated the right to abortion and is revisiting other fundamental questions today—about voting rights, affirmative action, gun laws, and much more. Once-arcane theories of constitutional interpretation are profoundly affecting the lives of all Americans. In this brief and urgent book, Harvard Law School professor Cass Sunstein provides a lively introduction to competing approaches to interpreting the Constitution—and argues that the only way to choose one is to ask whether it would change American life for the better or worse. If a method of interpretation would eliminate the right of privacy, allow racial segregation, or obliterate free speech, it would be unacceptable for that reason. But some Supreme Court justices are committed to “originalism,” arguing that the meaning of the Constitution is settled by how it was publicly understood when it was ratified. Originalists insist that their approach is dictated by the Constitution. That, Sunstein argues, is a big mistake. The Constitution doesn’t contain instructions for its own interpretation. Any approach to constitutional interpretation needs to be defended in terms of its broad effects—what it does to our rights and our institutions. It must respect those rights and institutions—and safeguard the conditions for democracy itself. Passionate and compelling, How to Interpret the Constitution is essential reading for anyone who is concerned about how the Supreme Court is changing the rights and lives of Americans today.

Cass R. Sunstein (Author), Graham Winton (Narrator)

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Hamilton: The Energetic Founder

Alexander Hamilton (1755–1804) was a key founding father—a politician, a constitutional thinker, and the nation’s first secretary of the treasury. He led the effort to write the brilliant defense and exposition of the Constitution, The Federalist, and later, as the nation’s first treasury secretary, he pioneered efforts to interpret the Constitution broadly, as a source of executive and judicial power. Finding his purpose in the American Revolution and in its sequel, the creation of the United States and its constitutional form of government, he sought to give the nation and its government the power and energy required to preserve the fruits of the Revolution and the nation’s survival in a hostile world. In this concise, elegant, and scholarly overview of his life, thought, career, and legacies, acclaimed biographer R. B. Bernstein shows his life as a record of struggle, war, ambition, and of the practice of law, fierce politics, and good government. A war hero, a brilliant lawyer, and a skilled and effective polemicist, Hamilton devoted his life and his career to the cause of American independence, the Union, and an effective general government. A perennial focus of controversy, a skilled and often ruthless political fighter, Hamilton helped to define the emerging partisan politics of the new nation. He was a key player in the quarrels over what its constitution meant and what powers it gave the Union. A brilliant administrator and a shrewd and cogent economic theorist, he created the American government’s role in the nation’s economic system and helped tosecure for the nation an effective and energetic general government. Hamilton was also a principal exponent of political combat in defense of personal and political honor. As such, he was a tragic victim of the honor culture he did so much to establish as a component of national politics, dying as the result of a mortal wound he suffered in his 1804 duel with Aaron Burr, his longtime antagonist.

R.B. Bernstein (Author), Graham Winton (Narrator)

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Excluded: How Snob Zoning, NIMBYism, and Class Bias Build the Walls We Don't See

An indictment of America's housing policy that reveals the social engineering underlying our segregation by economic class, the social and political fallout that result, and what we can do about it The last, acceptable form of prejudice in America is based on class and executed through state-sponsored economic discrimination, which is hard to see because it is much more subtle than raw racism. While the American meritocracy officially denounces prejudice based on race and gender, it has spawned a new form of bias against those with less education and income. Millions of working-class Americans have their opportunity blocked by exclusionary snob zoning. These government policies make housing unaffordable, frustrate the goals of the civil rights movement, and lock in inequality in our urban and suburban landscapes. Through moving accounts of families excluded from economic and social opportunity as they are hemmed in through "new redlining" that limits the type of housing that can be built, Richard Kahlenberg vividly illustrates why America has a housing crisis. He also illustrates why economic segregation matters since where you live affects access to transportation, employment opportunities, decent health care, and good schools. He shows that housing choice has been socially engineered to the benefit of the affluent, and, that astonishingly the most restrictive zoning is found in politically liberal cities where racial views are more progressive. Despite this there is hope. Kahlenberg tells the inspiring stories of growing number of local and national movements working to tear down the walls that inflicts so much damage on the lives of millions of Americans.

Richard D Kahlenberg (Author), Graham Winton (Narrator)

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Distrust: Big Data, Data-Torturing, and the Assault on Science

There is no doubt science is currently suffering from a credibility crisis. This thought-provoking book argues that, ironically, science’s credibility is being undermined by tools created by scientists themselves. Scientific disinformation and damaging conspiracy theories are rife because of the Internet that science created, the scientific demand for empirical evidence and statistical significance leads to data torturing and confirmation bias, and data mining is fuelled by the technological advances in Big Data and the development of ever-increasingly powerful computers. With accessible examples ranging from COVID disinformation to bitcoin and conspiracy theories, this fascinating book examines the impacts of society’s growing distrust of science, and ultimately, through constructive suggestions, paves the way forward for restoring the credibility of the scientific community.

Gary Smith (Author), Graham Winton (Narrator)

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Audiobooks Narrated by Graham Winton