Audiobooks narrated by George Newbern

A Good Bad Boy: Luke Perry and How a Generation Grew Up

An artful and contemplative tribute to the late actor famed for his role as Dylan McKay in Beverly Hills, 90210. Best known for playing loner rebel Dylan McKay in Beverly Hills 90210, Luke Perry was fifty-two years old when he died of a stroke in 2019. There have been other deaths of 90's stars, but this one hit different. Gen X was reminded of their own inescapable mortality, and robbed of an exciting career resurgence for one of their most cherished icons—with recent roles in the hit series Riverdale and Quentin Tarantino's Once Upon a Time In Hollywood bringing him renewed attention and acclaim. Only upon his death, as stories poured out online about his authenticity and kindness, did it become clear how little was known about the exceedingly humble actor and how deeply he impacted popular culture. In A Good Bad Boy, Margaret Wappler attempts to understand who Perry was and why he was unique among his Hollywood peers. To do so, she uses an inventive hybrid narrative. She speaks with dozens who knew Perry personally and professionally. They share insightful anecdotes: how he kept connected to his Ohio upbringing; nearly blew his 90210 audition; tried to shed his heartthrob image by joining the HBO prison drama Oz; and in the last year of his life, sought to set up two of his newly divorced friends. (After his death, the pair bonded in their grief and eventually married.) Amid these original interviews and exhaustive archival research, Wappler weaves poignant vignettes of memoir in which she serves as an avatar to show how Perry shaped a generation's views on masculinity, privilege and the ideal of "cool." Timed to the fifth anniversary of Perry's death, A Good Bad Boy is a profound and entertaining examination of what it means to be an artist and an adult.

Margaret Wappler (Author), George Newbern, Jennifer Jill Araya, Margaret Wappler, TBD (Narrator)

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The Power of Going All-In: Secrets for Success in Business, Leadership, and Life

In The Power of Going All In, serial entrepreneur and sales leader Brandon Bornancin delivers a first-person account of what it takes to build, lead, and manage a world-class company. The author draws on his many years of experience launching and managing successful companies to present effective strategies for inspiring your people to do more, be more, and achieve more. You'll discover a customizable framework you can apply to your own environment to create your own unique path to leadership greatness, at school, at work, and anywhere else you're responsible for the performance of those who follow you. You'll find: tried-and-tested methods for unlocking the potential of the people you lead; effective alternatives to counter-productive leadership 'strategies,' like micromanagement; and reasons why leadership isn't about the letters behind your name or fancy titles on your office door. A practical and effective toolkit for entrepreneurs, managers, executives, board members, founders, sales professionals, and other leaders looking for ways to harness the full potential of the people they lead, The Power of Going All In is also perfect for those looking for a leadership methodology that's been proven to work in the real world.

Brandon Bornancin (Author), George Newbern (Narrator)

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Flight of the WASP: The Rise, Fall, and Future of America's Original Ruling Class

For decades, writers have proclaimed the diminishment of the White Anglo-Saxon Protestants, who for generations were the dominant socio-cultural-political force in America. While the WASP elite has, in the last half century, indeed drifted from American centrality to the periphery, its relevance and impact remain, as Michael Gross reveals in his compelling chronicle. From Colonial America's founding settlements through the Gilded Age to the present day, Gross traces the complex legacy of American WASPs through the lives of fifteen influential individuals and their very privileged, sometimes intermarried families. As the clans progress, prosper, and periodically stumble, defining aspects in the four-century sweep of American history emerge: our wide, oft-contentious religious diversity; the deep scars of slavery, genocide, and intolerance; the creation and sometime mis-use of astonishing economic and political power; an instinct to offset inequity with philanthropy; an equal capacity for irresponsible, sometimes wanton, behavior. In previous acclaimed books such as 740 Park and Rogues' Gallery, Gross has explored elite culture in microcosm; expanding the canvas, Flight of the WASP chronicles it across four centuries and fifteen generations in an ambitious and consequential contribution to American history.

Michael Gross (Author), George Newbern (Narrator)

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Sad Happens

A beautifully-illustrated, celebratory anthology exploring sadness—and the transformative power of tears. When was the last time you cried? Was it because you were sad? Or happy? Overwhelmed, or frustrated? Maybe from relief or from pride? Was it in public or in private? Did you feel better afterwards, or worse? The reasons that we cry—and the circumstances in which we shed a tear—are often surprising and beautiful. Sad Happens is a collective, multi-faceted archive of tears that captures the complexity and variety of these circumstances. We hear from Mike Birbiglia on the role that grief and pain have in comedy; Jia Tolentino on how motherhood made her cry in both hormonal joy and fervent rage; and Hanif Abdurraqib on the intimacy of crying on planes. We hear from Phoebe Bridgers on poignant moments of departure and JP Brammer on the strange disappointments of success; Matt Berninger on becoming a crybaby in his adulthood and Hua Hsu on crying during a moment of public uncertainty. We also hear from everyday people in a range of professions: an actor on the tips she learned from drag queens about preserving a full face of makeup while crying; a zookeeper on mourning the animals who have died during her tenure; a bartender on crying in the walk-in; and a TV critic on the shows that have moved her. Brimming with humanity, this anthology is confirmation that sad happens—but so does joy, love, a sense of community, and a host of other emotions. By turns moving and affirming, Sad Happens is an emotional balm and visual delight.

Brandon Stosuy (Author), André Santana, Cynthia Farrell, Deanna Anthony, Em Grosland, Eric Yang, George Newbern, Nikki Massoud, Reena Dutt (Narrator)

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Emotional Design: Why We Love (or Hate) Everyday Things

Why attractive things work better and other crucial insights into human-centered design Emotions are inseparable from how we humans think, choose, and act. In Emotional Design, cognitive scientist Don Norman shows how the principles of human psychology apply to the invention and design of new technologies and products. In The Design of Everyday Things, Norman made the definitive case for human-centered design, showing that good design demanded that the user's must take precedence over a designer's aesthetic if anything, from light switches to airplanes, was going to work as the user needed. In this book, he takes his thinking several steps farther, showing that successful design must incorporate not just what users need, but must address our minds by attending to our visceral reactions, to our behavioral choices, and to the stories we want the things in our lives to tell others about ourselves. Good human-centered design isn't just about making effective tools that are straightforward to use; it's about making affective tools that mesh well with our emotions and help us express our identities and support our social lives. From roller coasters to robots, sports cars to smart phones, attractive things work better. Whether designer or consumer, user or inventor, this book is the definitive guide to making Norman's insights work for you.

Don Norman (Author), George Newbern (Narrator)

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Escaping Addiction

Addiction is a worldwide curse that seems to be growing in seriousness on a yearly basis. While to the general public addiction may seem almost inescapable, the truth is that there are solutions to overcoming the various addictions, though to date they seem more elusive than attainable. The goal of Escaping Addiction is to highlight the variety of causes of addiction alongside an array of useful tools anyone can use to break the cycle of addiction, whether it’s to alcohol, drugs, food, or video games. The seeds of addictive behavior are often planted in childhood then fed to grow over years of the input-and-reward cycle. Detaching the rewards from the addictive input is key to breaking the habits that keep us addicted. Presented here are a variety of treatments—from medications to therapeutic approaches—that can help. Offering a better understanding of the mechanisms of addiction, this book can help anyone struggling with addiction to unravel it in their own lives.

George Koob, Patrick Bordeaux (Author), George Newbern (Narrator)

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A Brief History of Intelligence: Why the Evolution of the Brain Holds the Key to the Future of AI

A Brief History of Intelligence bridges the gap between AI and neuroscience by telling the evolutionary story of how the brain came to be. The entirety of the human brain’s 4-billion-year story can be summarised as the culmination of five evolutionary breakthroughs, starting from the very first brains, all the way to the modern human brains. Each breakthrough emerged from new sets of brain modifications, and equipped animals with a new suite of intellectual faculties. These five breakthroughs are the organising map to this book, and they make up our itinerary for our adventure back in time. Each breakthrough also has fascinating corollaries to breakthroughs in AI. Indeed, there will be plenty of such surprises along the way. For instance: the innovation that enabled AI to beat humans in the game of Go – temporal difference reinforcement learning – was an innovation discovered by our fish ancestors over 500 million years ago. The solutions to many of the current mysteries in AI – such as ‘common sense’ – can be found in the tiny brain of a mouse. Where do emotions come from? Research suggests that they may have arisen simply as a solution to navigation in ancient worm brains. Unravelling this evolutionary story will reveal the hidden features of human intelligence and with them, just how your mind came to be.

Max Bennett (Author), George Newbern (Narrator)

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Rewired: The McKinsey Guide to Outcompeting in the Age of Digital and AI

Many companies are stuck with digital transformations that are not moving the needle. There are no quick fixes but there is a playbook. The answer is in rewiring your business so hundreds, thousands, of teams can harness technology to continuously create great customer experiences, lower unit costs, and generate value. It's the capabilities of the organization that win the race. McKinsey Digital's top leaders Eric Lamarre, Kate Smaje, and Rodney W. Zemmel provide proven how-to details on what it takes in six comprehensive sections-creating the transformation roadmap, building a talent bench, adopting a new operating model, producing a distributed technology environment so teams can innovate, embedding data everywhere, and unlocking user adoption and enterprise scaling. Tested, iterated, reworked, and tested again over the years, McKinsey's digital and AI transformation playbook is captured in Rewired. It contains diagnostic assessments, operating model designs, technology and data architecture diagrams, how-to checklists, best practices and detailed implementation methods, all exemplified with demonstrated case studies and illustrated with 100+ exhibits.

Eric Lamarre, Kate Smaje, Rodney Zemmel (Author), George Newbern (Narrator)

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Tyranny of the Gene: Personalized Medicine and Its Threat to Public Health

A revelatory account of how power, politics, and greed have placed the unfulfilled promise of personalized medicine at the center of American medicine The United States is embarking on a medical revolution. Supporters of personalized, or precision, medicine-the tailoring of health care to our genomes-have promised to usher in a new era of miracle cures. Advocates of this gene-guided health-care practice foresee a future where skyrocketing costs can be curbed by customization and unjust disparities are vanquished by biomedical breakthroughs. Progress, however, has come slowly, and with a price too high for the average citizen. In Tyranny of the Gene, James Tabery exposes the origin story of personalized medicine-essentially a marketing idea dreamed up by pharmaceutical executives-and traces its path from the Human Genome Project to the present, revealing how politicians, influential federal scientists, biotech companies, and drug giants all rallied behind the genetic hype. The result is a medical revolution that privileges the few at the expense of health care that benefits us all. Now American health care, driven by the commercialization of biomedical research, is shifting focus away from the study of the social and environmental determinants of health, such as access to fresh and nutritious food, exposure to toxic chemicals, and stress caused by financial insecurity. Instead, it is increasingly investing in "miracle pills" for leukemia that would bankrupt most users, genetic studies of minoritized populations that ignore structural racism and walk dangerously close to eugenic conclusions, and oncology centers that advertise the perfect gene-drug match, igniting a patient's hope, and often dashing it later.Tyranny of the Gene sounds a warning cry about the current trajectory of health care and charts a path to a more equitable alternative.

James Tabery (Author), George Newbern (Narrator)

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Redefining the Boundaries of Medicine: The High-Tech, High-Touch Path Into the Future

Health care as it stands today needs to be re-imagined. Redefining the Boundaries of Medicine by Paul Cerrato and Dr. John Halamka challenges the profession to renegotiate its priorities and address the fact that it’s become timid and reluctant to explore new care delivery models. The guiding premise of this book is that rethinking and reimagining the way medicine is practiced in the 21st century will improve health outcomes, and that technology is central to this transformation. Dr. Halamka is the President and Paul Cerrato is the Senior Research Analyst and Communications Specialist for Mayo Clinic Platform, which is harnessing novel technologies to change how care is provided. This cutting-edge work, along with their combined 80 years of experience in healthcare, afford Dr. Halamka and Mr. Cerrato authoritative voices in technology and health care. This book shows how one-size-fits-all health care is slowly giving way to a more precise, personalized approach that takes into account each person’s unique environmental and genetic risk factors. It discusses the use of several emerging technological tools that give each patient a unique “topographical map” to navigate their journey. Artificial intelligence in health care must be accurate, equitable and ethical; providers need to embrace a better way to predict diseases, identify effective treatments and rethink much of the conventional wisdom that has been handed down over the decades. Redefining the Boundaries of Medicine provides the guide to doing just that.

John D. Halamka, Paul Cerrato (Author), George Newbern (Narrator)

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Look: How to Pay Attention in a Distracted World

A powerful exploration of how we pay attention that will transform the ways we connect with one another - at home, at work, and beyond. Paying attention is a crucial human skill, yet many of us have forgotten how to listen carefully and observe intentionally. Deluged by social media and hobbled by the increasing social isolation it fosters, we need to rediscover the deeply human ways we connect with others. Christian Madsbjerg, a philosopher and entrepreneur, understands this dilemma. To counteract it, he began a course at The New School in New York City called Human Observation, which lays out the ways that we can learn to pay attention more effectively. The course has been hugely popular since its inception, with hundreds of students filling waiting lists. In Look, Madsbjerg sets out the key observational skills needed to show how we can recapture our ability to pay attention. Drawing from philosophy, science, the visual arts, and his own life, he offers both practical insights and a range of tools for experiencing the world with greater richness and texture. The result is a dynamic approach to rethinking observation that helps all of us to see with more empathy, accuracy, and connection to others.

Christian Madsbjerg (Author), George Newbern (Narrator)

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The Forgiving Life: A Pathway to Overcoming Resentment and Creating a Legacy of Love

The Forgiving Life offers scientifically supported guidance to help people forgive those in their lives who have acted unfairly and have inflicted emotional hurt. It does not minimize the devastation of that hurt. It does not require reconciliation with the one who inflicted the hurt. Rather, it describes a process, followed with success by people around the world, to confront the pain, rise above it to forgive, and in so doing, to loosen the grip of depression, anger, and resentment that has soured life. In this book, noted forgiveness expert Robert D. Enright invites listeners to learn the benefits of forgiveness and to embark on a path of forgiveness, leaving behind a legacy of love. Guided by thought-provoking questions, journaling exercises, and Enright's kind encouragement, listeners can chart their own journey through a new life of forgiveness.

Robert D. Enright Phd, Robert D. Enright, Phd (Author), George Newbern (Narrator)

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Audiobooks Narrated by George Newbern