Here is a quick tidbit for the reader who doesn’t like buying books sight unseen. Each week, The New York Times posts on its web site the full text of the first chapter of books reviewed in The New York Times Book Review, or which otherwise appear on the NYT bestseller lists.

As the celebration of Mozart’s 250th birthday winds down, the International Mozart Foundation has offered up a nice gift to Mozart enthusiasts by putting online the master’s full body of work.

Yes, we’re on a little bit of an iTunes roll here this week. But no one
seems to be complaining. Next up from Stanford, it’s The Historical Jesus.

This is hot off the press, so to speak. Today, Stanford posted a new podcast of a course called Modern Theoretical Physics: Quantum Entanglement. It’s intriguing on several different levels. First, it’s in video.

What’s the most popular podcast in the Higher Education section of iTunes? Ahead of all the podcasts from Princeton, and all of those from Yale, and ahead of the Understanding Computers course from Harvard, and even the psychology course from UC Berkeley, is an unexpected podcast called Twelve Byzantine Rulers: The History of the Byzantine Em

Not long ago, we talked about UC Berkeley’s ambitious podcasting initiative, about how the university is currently distributing a large number of courses over iTunes.

Our directory of arts & culture podcasts is now 50 programs strong. Here you’ll find smart cultural programs
from NPR, The New York Times, MoMA, Salon, Slate and the BBC. And you’ll find programming originating from the US, the UK, Canada and Australia and even France.

As a follow-up to the Iraqi Experience in Digital, we simply wanted to put alongside one another two excellent podcasts that speak directly to the mounting Iraqi refugee crisis. Taken together they give you an excellent view of this problem.

Because our foreign language lesson podcasts have generated a lot of interest this week, we wanted to mention another intriguing foreign language resource: The Mixxer.
An excellent way to learn a language is to participate in a language exchange.

Five years ago, MIT launched an ambitious initiative with its OpenCourseWare project. The concept was fairly simple. It involved putting online the materials from MIT courses — the syllabi, reading lists, course notes, assignments, etc. — and making them available online to the world at large.