Colum McCann is an internationally renowned author of novels and short stories. Some of his well-known novels include TransAtlantic, Zoli, Dancer, Songdogs, and his National Book Award winning Let the Great World Spin. Thirteen Ways of Looking is McCann’s first book of short stories in a decade and doesn’t disappoint his readers. In 2004 McCann was attacked and knocked unconscious on the streets of New Haven, Connecticut. He had started writing these stories prior to that

Microbiologist and author Nathalia Holt discovered a remarkable group of women by happenstance while researching names for the daughter she was expecting. One name, Eleanor Frances, led her to Eleanor Frances Helin, who was a scientist at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) in charge of a program that tracked asteroids nearing Earth. Intrigued, Holt delved further, discovering a group of women known as “the human computers” at JPL during the 1940’s and 1950s. These women,