"Millions of people visit xkcd.com each week to read Randall Munroe's iconic webcomic. His stick-figure drawings about science, technology, language, and love have a large and passionate following. Fans of xkcd ask Munroe a lot of strange questions. What if you tried to hit a baseball pitched at 90 percent the speed of light? How fast can you hit a speed bump while driving and live? If there was a robot apocalypse, how long would humanity last? In...

Presents the original text of Shakespeare's play side by side with a modern version. Includes a section with discussion questions and quizzes for students. Shakespeare's tragedy of the Moor whose love for Desdemona is destroyed by jealousy unfolds in easy-to-follow English as we speak it today. Othello's passion and Iago's treachery become clear in this straightforward modern version. The complete original text is laid out side-by-side with a complete...

Inventor Flint Lockwood thought he saved the world when he destroyed his machine that turned water into food causing cheeseburger rain and spaghetti tornadoes. But Flint soon learns that his invention survived and is now creating food-animals. Flint and his friends embark on a dangerously delicious mission to battle hungry tacodiles, shrimpanzees, hippotatomuses, cheespiders and other foodimals to save the world again!

Mike Leonard is a lucky man. It’s not everyone who gets parents like Jack and Marge. At eighty-seven, Jack is a pathological optimist with an inexhaustible gift of gab. Marge, Jack’s bride of sixty years, though cut from the same rough bolt of Irish immigrant cloth, is his polar opposite–pessimistic and proud of it. What was their son, Mike, thinking when he took a sabbatical from his job with NBC News so he could pile these two...

When the body of a year-missing Ojibwa girl washes up on a Lake Superior island, rekindling Native American superstitions about mythical monsters, Cork O'Connor struggles to obtain information from reluctant witnesses to a brutal sex-trafficking operation. "When the body of a teenage Ojibwe girl washes up on the shore of an island in Lake Superior, the residents of the nearby Bad Bluff reservation whisper that it was the work of a mythical beast,...

Zootopia is a city like no other. Comprising habitat neighborhoods like ritzy Sahara Square and frigid Tundratown, it's a melting pot where animals from every environment live together. But when optimistic Officer Judy Hopps arrives, she discovers that being the first bunny on a police force of big, tough animals isn't so easy. Determined to prove herself, she jumps at the opportunity to crack a case, even if it means partnering with a fast-talking,...

"Dr. Ryan Stone ... is a brilliant medical engineer on her first shuttle mission with veteran astronaut Matt Kowalski. ... On a seemingly routine spacewalk, disaster strikes. The shuttle is destroyed, leaving Stone and Kowalski completely alone, tethered to nothing but each other and spiraling out into the darkness. As fear turns to panic, every gulp of air eats away at what little oxygen is left. But the only way home may be to go further out into...

A series of 24 Lectures on the New England Transcendalist Movement delivered by Ashton Nichols, Professor of English at Dickinson College.