An Interview with Python Crash Course Author Eric Matthes

This Author Spotlight is on Python programmer/educator extraordinaire Eric Matthes, author of the international bestseller (now in its third edition) Python Crash Course  from No Starch Press. In the following Q&A, we discuss how reader feedback shaped the latest edition of his book, why he chose teaching over a career in physics, the importance of

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Elizabeth Kolbert on Our Changing Climate and the Future Today’s Students Will Inherit

Contributed by Elizabeth Kolbert, author of Under a White Sky: The Nature of the Future “I’m a realist,” Ruth Gates was saying. “I cannot continue to hope that our planet is not going to change radically. It already is changed.” Gates, then the head of Hawaii’s Institute of Marine Biology, had taken me out to

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Columbia University Psychologist Lisa Miller on Cultivating Students’ Academic and Inner Lives

Contributed by Lisa Miller, PhD, author of The Awakened Brain: The New Science of Spirituality and Our Quest for an Inspired Life As an undergraduate psychology major at Yale, I always sat in the front row so that I might study not only the material but my professor as well. Like many students who sign

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Women Climate Leaders Provide Truth, Courage, and Solutions in All We Can Save

Contributed by Katharine K. Wilkinson, co-editor of All We Can Save: Truth, Courage, and Solutions for the Climate Crisis “I was shaking as I read the opening essay because I felt so empowered,” one of my students shared at the start of the fall 2020 semester. I’d spent the previous nine months co-editing the bestselling

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Neuroscientist Lisa Genova on the Intricacies of Memory

Lisa Genova is a Harvard-trained neuroscientist and the acclaimed author of novels such as Still Alice. She travels worldwide speaking about neurological diseases and has appeared on Today, PBS NewsHour, CNN, and NPR. Her new book, Remember, is a deep dive into the science of human memory and the intricacies of the brain that help us

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THE CLASS Explores a New Approach to STEM Education

Contributed by Heather Won Tesoriero, author of  The Class: A Life-Changing Teacher, His World-Changing Kids, and the Most Inventive Classroom in America (Ballantine Books, 2018). In the fall of 2015, I was a producer for the CBS Evening News. We were planning to do an endpiece for the show about Olivia Hallisey, a Greenwich, CT, teenager who

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