≡ Category: Media | ≅ Leave a Comment
In early October, The New Yorker magazine held its eighth annual festival in NYC. (Yikes! As I am typing I’m feeling my first earthquake here in California. Apparently 5.7 on Richter scale. Details here.) Anyway, the festival brings to the stage an impressive list of writers & artists (see the full schedule here). And while [...]
≡ Category: Music | ≅ 1 Comment
If you’re looking to build your jazz collection, this site offers some sound guidance. It features 100 top jazz CDs. Although inherently subjective, the list includes many indisputable classics that belong in any respectable jazz collection. (Note: if you click on the link for each album, you’ll find some background information that’s often worth reading.)
For [...]
≡ Category: Books, Media | ≅ Leave a Comment
Earlier this month, The New York Times Book Review launched an online Reading Room that lets readers tackle great books with the help of “an all-star cast of panelists from various backgrounds—authors, reviewers, scholars and journalists.” The first reading starts with Leo Tolstoy’s 1200+ page epic, War and Peace (1865-69), and it’s led by book [...]
≡ Category: Uncategorized | ≅ Leave a Comment
This sneaked up on us. Today marks the one year anniversary of our site. All in all, it’s been a decent maiden voyage. Last October, we started with the concept that the web abounds with great cultural/educational media, but no one’s really focusing on these smart podcasts/videos and providing users with a free and easy [...]
≡ Category: Uncategorized | ≅ Leave a Comment
At the end of another week, it’s time for another recap of the ground we covered:
Our Ancestral Mind in the Modern World: An Interview with Satoshi Kanazawa (Featured on Boing Boing)
Science for The Rest of Us: Podcasts At a Glance (by guest writer Elizabeth Green Musselman)
Better Thinking Through Podcasts
500 Years of Art in Morphing [...]
≡ Category: Science | ≅ 2 Comments
Here’s a zinger to mull over: The BBC has posted an article about a theory advanced by Oliver Curry, an “evolutionary theorist” working out of The London School of Economics, who suggests that humanity may split into two sub-species about 100,000 years down the road. And what we’d be left with is “a genetic upper [...]
≡ Category: Books, Current Affairs | ≅ Leave a Comment
It’s been an unspeakably bad week throughout much of fire-ravaged Southern California. As of Thursday, the toll looked liked this: 500,000 acres burned; 1,800 homes destroyed; 57 people injured and at least six killed. As all of this transpires, a new book has come out that gives you an inside look at firefighters who [...]
≡ Category: Blogs, Books | ≅ 1 Comment
The National Book Critics Circle has a blog and they’ve asked some of the country’s best literary critics to list the “five books a critic believes reviewers should have in their libraries.” The series provides a new list every week, and so far the choices are interesting not just for the books picked (and some [...]
≡ Category: Religion, Video - Politics/Society, Video - Science | ≅ 1 Comment
When debating religion, you can take the low road (e.g., Ann Coulter’s recent flirtation with anti-semitism) or the high road. Here’s Richard Dawkins, an avowed atheist and evolutionary biologist at Oxford, having a high-minded conversation about the existence (or non-existence) of God with Alister McGrath, who is Professor of Historical Theology at Oxford University and [...]
≡ Category: Books | ≅ Leave a Comment
After we mentioned Book Mooch last week, one of our faithful readers alerted us to another site — PaperBackSwap.com. PaperBackSwap is reportedly easier to use than Book Mooch, and the actual process of exchanging books runs more smoothly. Meanwhile, despite the site’s name, you can swap both paperback and hardback books there. In case you [...]
≡ Category: Podcast Articles and Resources | ≅ Leave a Comment
Yesterday it was science podcasts; today it’s podcasts that encourage better, deeper thinking.
The CBC (Canadian Broadcasting Corporation) has posted a feature that highlights podcasts (scroll down the page) that will take you beyond sound bites and into the realm of deeper thinking. The list, which has a noticeable Canadian bent, mentions programs that are certainly [...]
≡ Category: Science | ≅ Leave a Comment
Today, Elizabeth Green Musselman has penned a guest blog post that you’re bound to enjoy. Elizabeth is a professor and historian who works on the history of science, and she has recently launched a thoughtful podcast on the history of science, medicine, and technology. It’s called “The Missing Link” (iTunes - Feed - Web Site). [...]
≡ Category: Art, Video - Arts & Culture | ≅ Leave a Comment
This video takes you on a fairly amazing tour of the great portraits of women in Western art. It moves from da Vinci to Picasso, and, along the way, the portraits seamlessly morph one into another. This morphing allows you to see how artistic styles changed over time, and also how the human face has [...]
≡ Category: Video - Science, Web/Tech | ≅ Leave a Comment
Earlier this year, Michael Wesch, an assistant professor of cultural anthropology at Kansas State, released a smart video that immediately went viral on the internet. It was called Web 2.0… the Machine is Us/ing Us and it cleverly explained the often vague concept of Web 2.0 and why it matters. Now Wesch has launched another [...]
≡ Category: Books, Most Popular, Psychology, Science | ≅ 19 Comments
Human behavior is notoriously complex, and there’s been no shortage of psychologists and psychological theories venturing to explain what makes us tick. Why do we get irrationally jealous? Or have midlife crises? Why do we overeat to our own detriment? Why do we find ourselves often strongly attracted to certain physical traits? Numerous theories abound, [...]
≡ Category: Uncategorized | ≅ Leave a Comment
We’ve reached the end of another week. Let’s quickly recap what we served up in case you missed out. Have a good weekend and see you Monday.
Open Culture Readers & Where They Come From
Einstein and the Mind of God
5,000 Years of Religion in 90 Seconds
A New Model for Investigative Journalism
Jon Stewart’s “Daily Show” Now [...]
≡ Category: Uncategorized | ≅ 5 Comments
We’re always amazed (and pleased) by what a demographically diverse audience comes to this site. We thought you might be interested in seeing who, besides yourself, comes here. So we gathered some quick data (thanks to Google Analytics) and pasted it below. It gives you a snapshot of who visited the site yesterday:
Visitors by City:
1.) [...]
≡ Category: Comedy, Video - Arts & Culture | ≅ Leave a Comment
Listen closely. What’s that you hear? It’s the sound of American office productivity taking it on the chin.
Yesterday, “The Daily Show with Jon Stewart” put its entire video archive online (see www.thedailyshow.com). The archive goes back eight years. It’s completely free. And it’s all highly searchable. To get a feel for what this video trove [...]
≡ Category: Art, Philosophy, Science | ≅ 1 Comment
Speaking of Einstein–have you ever wanted to explain the world on a napkin? The Edge, self-described as “an online collective of deep thinkers,” has teamed up with the Serpentine Gallery in London to participate in a month-long Experiment Marathon. The Serpentine has been asking leading scientists and thinkers “What Is Your Formula?” and the Edge [...]
≡ Category: Physics, Religion, Science | ≅ 1 Comment
Speaking at a conference on science, religion and philosophy in 1941, Albert Einstein famously said that “science without religion is lame; religion without science is blind.” Einstein, a German-born Jew, considered himself religious. But what he meant by religion was not straightforward. The first episode of a two-part podcast called Einstein and the Mind of [...]
≡ Category: Audio Books | ≅ 1 Comment
This is just a quick note to let you know that we “re-orged” the Audiobook Podcast Collection. The list, which had become a bit unwieldy, is now broken down by genre: Literature/Fiction, Nonfiction, and Poetry. And, within these categories, the texts are organized by the author’s name. Hopefully this all makes the collection easier to [...]
≡ Category: Comedy, Video - Arts & Culture | ≅ Leave a Comment
Last week, we offered you Woody Allen’s stand-up routine in black & white; this week we’re doing it in animated color. (You can get more animated bits here and here, and note that we created a Comedy category here.)
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≡ Category: Books | ≅ Leave a Comment
This is a great concept & service for our readers. BookMooch is an online book swapping web site that has 45,000 members and 750,000 books in its inventory. What goes on here is fairly straightforward. Users can give away books they’ve read in exchange for books they want to read — all for no money, [...]
≡ Category: Business, Current Affairs, Media | ≅ Leave a Comment
As we’ve discussed before on this blog, one of the major casualties in the shifting new media landscape is the traditional investigative journalist–someone with the time and resources to research in-depth stories. In response to this problem a new group called Pro Publica is proposing a novel economic model: hire the journalists into a foundation [...]
≡ Category: Religion | ≅ 2 Comments
How has the geography of religion evolved over the centuries, and where has it sparked wars? This interactive map summarizes in a brief 90 seconds the history of Christianity, Islam, Hinduism, Buddhism, and Judaism. It shows where & when each religion originated, how the religions sometimes came into conflict, and how they spread across the [...]
≡ Category: Books, Comedy | ≅ Leave a Comment
In yesterday’s New York Times, Stephen Colbert took over Maureen Dowd’s regular opinion column and made a funny case for why he could be the next US president. Read it here. Also listen to his interview last week on NPR’s Fresh Air (iTunes - Feed - Web Site). These appearances all figure into a [...]
≡ Category: Books, Current Affairs, Google | ≅ 1 Comment
Since the release of An Inconvenient Truth, Al Gore has had quite a run. He first won himself an Emmy, then an Oscar, and now the Nobel Peace Prize. Although the film represents Gore’s most well known work on the environment, it’s hardly where his environmental efforts began. His campaign goes back to the late [...]
≡ Category: Uncategorized | ≅ Leave a Comment
We’ve reached the end of another busy week. Here’s an overview of what we posted. Feel free to peruse the individual posts and don’t forget to take advantage of our cultural/educational podcast collections that you can access here. Also go ahead and subscribe to our feed.
The Future of Collaborative Culture?
Coffee Break French (and Nine [...]
≡ Category: Media, Stanford, Technology | ≅ Leave a Comment
I just heard Jimmy Wales, founder of Wikipedia, speaking at Stanford Law School today. Wales is working on some new projects that he hopes will harness the community-driven collaboration of Wikipedia. He’s already had some success in branching out from the encyclopedia idea with Wikia, which is a “wiki farm” compiling information on a variety [...]
≡ Category: Video - Arts & Culture | ≅ Leave a Comment
When we announced last week that UC Berkeley had launched a new channel on YouTube, we were curtly informed by a European reader that Berkeley wasn’t the first to get into this game. Apparently, the European Graduate School (or EGS) has been at it for a while. The school’s YouTube collection features talks by important [...]
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