Showing results by narrator "Jonathan Todd Ross" in All Categories

Roger Ebert, the famed film writer and critic, wrote biweekly essays for a feature called "The Great Movies," in which he offered a fresh and fervent appreciation of a great film. The Great Movies collects one hundred of these essays, each one of them a gem of critical appreciation and an amalgam of love, analysis, and history that will send listeners back to that film with a fresh set of eyes and renewed enthusiasm–or perhaps to an avid first-time viewing.

When award-winning economist Emily Oster was a mom-to-be herself, she evaluated the data behind the accepted rules of pregnancy, and discovered that most are often misguided and some are just flat-out wrong. Debunking myths and explaining everything from the real effects of caffeine to the surprising dangers of gardening, Expecting Better is the book for every pregnant woman who wants to enjoy a healthy and relaxed pregnancy—and the occasional glass of wine.

Teens and pre-teens flock to any new offering from New York Times best-selling author Gordon Korman. Told through multiple viewpoints, Ungifted follows Donovan Curtis through his year at a magnet school for gifted and talented kids. Thanks to an administrative foul-up, the decidedly mediocre student Donovan finds himself enrolled in the Academy of Scholastic Distinction. Out of place and out of luck, Donovan joins the robotics team. And while he learns a few lessons from his gifted classmates, he also teaches a few of his own.

Cameron Boxer is very happy to spend his life avoiding homework, hanging out with his friends, and gaming for hours in his basement. It's not too hard for him to get away with it...until he gets so caught up in one game that he almost lets his house burn down around him. Oops. It's time for some serious damage control - so Cameron and his friends invent a fake school club that will make it seem like they're doing good deeds instead of slacking off. The problem? Some kids think the club is real.

Ridge and Sydney are thrilled to finally be together guilt-free. But as the two of them navigate this freedom, Warren and Bridgette’s relationship is as tumultuous as ever, and Maggie grapples with her illness. When she comes across an old list of things she wanted to do, Maggie decides to live life to the fullest. Maggie keeps Ridge updated, but he can’t help but worry, even as Sydney grows suspicious about their friendship. But if she’s going to move past this, she’ll need to reconcile how she and Ridge came together with the fact that Maggie will always be in their lives.

After sending his army to besiege another king's capital, King David forces himself on Bathsheba, a loyal soldier's wife. When her resulting pregnancy forces the king to murder her husband and add her to his harem, Bathsheba struggles to protect her son while dealing with the effects of a dark prophecy and deadly curse on the king's household. Combining historical facts with detailed fiction, Angela Hunt paints a realistic portrait of the beautiful woman who struggled to survive the dire results of divine judgment.

New York Times best-selling author Gordon Korman harkens back to his No More Dead Dogs days in this stand-alone that takes a tone more serious than you've ever heard from him before. A boy who's been a bully and hanging out with the wrong friends gets a new start after a memory-loss-inducing accident. But can someone really change who he is, or will the old him merely come back over time?

Eight years ago, when the Philistines stole and then surrendered the ark of the covenant back to the Israelites, Eliora left her Philistine homeland to follow the ark to the community of Kiryat Yearim. There, the family she was adopted into has guarded the ark at the top of a mountain in seclusion. Ronen is a Levite musician determined to return the ark to Shiloh, where his tribe believes it belongs. He never expected that the Philistine girl he rescued years ago would now be part of the very family he's tasked to deceive.

In the heart of ancient Persia, the empire’s Jewish citizens face an ominous edict that threatens their very existence. Roxannah, the daughter of an impoverished Persian lord, is devastated by the news but feels helpless to come to the aid of her Jewish friends. Desperate to support her family, Roxannah approaches the royal physician, Adin—the man whose kind eyes haunt her—and seeks his help to find employment in Queen Esther’s kitchens.

Jack Collins's upstart law firm is struggling to make ends meet. His solution is to bring in a new senior partner, a seasoned estate-planning lawyer well connected with the Greenwich elite. Unfortunately, his new partner is hiding a secret that could bring down the entire firm. When Jack catches the lawyer embezzling funds from a millionaire's estate, he thinks he's uncovered an isolated crime. But as he slowly connects the clues, he stumbles into a far larger conspiracy involving some of Connecticut's most powerful figures.

Gordon Korman knows the types of books kids like to read, considering he published his first novel at the ripe old age of 12. Since then, his unique brand of offbeat humor has helped him become a New York Times best-selling author. In this third tale featuring Griffin “The Man with the Plan” Bing, a tough new principal gets on Griffin’s last nerve, and the feeling is mutual. When a valuable ring is stolen from a school display case, Griffin realizes he’s been framed for the crime.

1983: Three students from a small college embark on a week-long road trip to film a documentary on roadside memorials for their American Studies class. The project starts out as a fun adventure with long stretches of empty road and nightly campfires where they begin to open up with one another. But as they venture deeper into the Appalachian backwoods, the atmosphere begins to darken. They notice more and more of the memorials feature a strange, unsettling symbol hinting at a sinister secret.

The Man With The Plan and his friends return in this fifth romp in the Swindle series! Hideout: a place to escape detection, especially when being chased by someone determined to have revenge... When Griffin Bing and his friends first met Luthor, he was a vicious attack dog working for the slimy S. Wendell Palomino - as known as Swindle. The kids rescued Luthor, and never thought they'd see Swindle again. But now Swindle's returned. And he wants his dog back.

Zoobreak revisits the characters from Korman's popular Swindle, as Griffin Bing and his friends come together for another heist. Savannah's pet monkey has been kidnapped and given to a zoo! Griffin quickly puts together a plan to steal the critter back, but not all goes smoothly. The crew realizes animals in the zoo are treated badly, so they hatch another scheme - to smuggle the animals into a better zoo.

When it first came to the public’s attention in the fall of 1986, the story of the Billionaire Boys Club and its leader, Joe Hunt, a young man labeled a “yuppie Charles Manson” by the prosecutor, was splashed across headlines and TV screens throughout the nation. The story of rich kids, flagrant excess, and multiple murders fascinated the American public, but deeper truths lay buried beneath. The saga was so complex that neither its scope nor its implications could be clearly discerned—that is, until The Price of Experience was published in 1996.

The inside account of an iconic team in baseball history: the 1969 New York Mets - a consistently last-place team that turned it all around in just one season - told by ’69 Mets outfielder Art Shamsky, Hall of Fame pitcher Tom Seaver, and other teammates as they reminisce about what happened then and where they are today.

What would you do with $30,000,000? That's the question everyone in Cedarville and every town near it is asking, because right now there's an unclaimed lottery ticket worth that much - and the money will go to whomever finds it first. Griffin Bing, The Man With The Plan, wants to be the lucky winner. But he's got competition. Darren Vader, Griffin's number-one enemy, will stop at nothing to find it. And a new kid in town, Victor Phoenix, is also in on the big hunt.

Chris Impey conducts listeners across the vast, fast-developing field of astrobiology, surveying the dizzying advances carrying us ever closer to the discovery of life beyond Earth—and the prospect of humans living on another planet. With a view spanning astronomy, planetary science, geology, chemistry, and biology, Impey provides a state-of-the-art account of what's behind this accelerating progress, what's next, and what it might mean for humanity's future.

Aram Sinnreich and Jesse Gilbert explore the many unpredictable, and often surprising, ways in which data surveillance, AI, and the constant presence of algorithms impact our culture and society in the age of global networks. The authors build on this basic premise: no matter what form data takes, and what purpose we think it’s being used for, data will always have a secret life. How this data will be used, by other people in other times and places, has profound implications for every aspect of our lives—from our intimate relationships to our professional lives to our political systems.

Quantum physics is notable for its brazen defiance of common sense. (Think of Schrödinger's Cat, famously both dead and alive.) An especially rigorous form of quantum contradiction occurs in experiments with entangled particles. Our common assumption is that objects have properties whether or not anyone is observing them, and the measurement of one can't affect the other. Quantum entanglement rejects this assumption, offering impeccable reasoning and irrefutable evidence of the opposite. Is quantum entanglement mystical, or just mystifying?