≡ Category: Apple | ≅ 4 Comments
The iPod can supercharge your learning. But it’s often a matter of finding the right software and content. Below, we’ve listed several new pieces of software that will let you suck more educational media (DVDs, web videos, audio files, etc.) into your iPod. And we’ve also listed some important pieces of content that will make [...]
≡ Category: History | ≅ 3 Comments
William F. Buckley, Jr., the intellectual force behind the strand of conservatism that peaked with Ronald Reagan, died yesterday. (See NY Times obit.) Here, we have some vintage Buckley. The video clip below features Buckley and Gore Vidal going at it, almost coming to blows, during the contested presidential campaign of 1968. It offers a [...]
≡ Category: Current Affairs, Video - Politics/Society | ≅ 7 Comments
Here’s a nice counterpoint to our post last week covering Susan Jacoby’s new book The Age of American Unreason and her lament that America has declined into a morass of anti-intellectualism and low expectations.
Let’s set the scene: A reporter selects a young Barack Obama supporter at a rally and starts peppering him with questions about [...]
≡ Category: Foreign Language | ≅ 2 Comments
We stumbled across this video (below) over on YouTube. It offers a quick survey of web resources that will teach you foreign languages for free. Among other items, the video mentions our Foreign Language Podcast Collection and, for that, we wanted to say thanks to whoever put this together.
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≡ Category: Film | ≅ Leave a Comment
Some of you may know GreenCine as a highbrow video-rental company, one that serves as an alternative to Netflix and Blockbuster. But the best thing about Greencine is its blog, maintained by David Hudson and updated several times a day. A thoughful and unpretentious collection of reviews, interviews, festivals and other worthwhile online film discussions, [...]
≡ Category: Film, Video - Arts & Culture | ≅ Leave a Comment
“Tarantino’s Mind,” an award winning short film from Brazil, decodes the filmography of Quentin Tarantino, drawing connections most Tarantino fans might not have drawn themselves. Acting in the film is Seu Jorge, a great Brazilian musician (check this album out) who has gained recent fame in the US. The clip runs a good ten minutes. [...]
≡ Category: Film | ≅ Leave a Comment
Great poster collection of Oscar winning films, from 1927 to this week. Check it out here.
via Kottke.org
≡ Category: Uncategorized | ≅ Leave a Comment
The answer is our collection called Free Online Courses from Great Universities, of course. We spent some time this weekend adding new courses to the collection, and it now includes about 110 free courses in total. We’ve also made it easy to pop these courses on your iPod (or any other MP3 player). From our [...]
≡ Category: Stanford | ≅ Leave a Comment
Quick fyi: Starting Monday, you can sign up for online writing courses at Stanford. (See list below.) Offered by Stanford Continuing Studies and the Stanford Creative Writing Program (one of the most distinguished writing programs in the country), these online courses give beginning and advanced writers, no matter where they live, the chance to refine [...]
≡ Category: Books | ≅ Leave a Comment
As discussed in this NY Times article, HarperCollins has made a few of its books available online for free. You can read them from start to finish in digital format. But you can’t download them, and they’ll only be available for a few more weeks. (Presumably new books will be made available in the future.) [...]
≡ Category: Uncategorized | ≅ Leave a Comment
This animated mockumentary traces the history of evil from Ancient Greece until today. It’s been getting some play on the internet this week. And, if anything, you have to give it points for creativity. We’ve added it to our YouTube Playlist.
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≡ Category: Music | ≅ Leave a Comment
Sir Paul talks about his classical album “Ecce Cor Meum” (Behold My Heart). It was performed live at Royal Albert Hall, and it’s now being released on DVD.
via The New Yorker’s Goings On blog
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≡ Category: Current Affairs, Law, Stanford, Video - Politics/Society | ≅ Leave a Comment
Below we have posted the last lecture that Lawrence Lessig will ever present on Free Culture. It’s an area where he has spent the past decade working, and this talk offers an excellent introduction to Lessig’s thought and work on this issue. Given at Stanford on January 31, the presentation is one that Steve Jobs [...]
≡ Category: Current Affairs | ≅ Leave a Comment
Here’s a quick follow up to our post on Susan Jacoby’s new book, The Age of American Unreason. Since the original post, we have pulled together some media featuring Jacoby and her views on America’s drift toward anti-intellectualism.
First, you can watch her recent interview with Bill Moyers: Video - Mp3 - iTunes - Feed.
Next, [...]
≡ Category: Politics | ≅ 1 Comment
Liberals outnumber conservatives in the academy. That’s a known fact. What explains this divergence? Some have attributed it to liberals creating a hostile environment for conservatives. But new research calls that view into question and offers an intriguing alternative explanation.
As described in The Chronicle of Higher Education, Matthew Woessner (a conservative academic) and April Kelly-Woessner [...]
≡ Category: Current Affairs | ≅ 5 Comments
There is a lot of publicity this week around Susan Jacoby’s new book, The Age of American Unreason. The new work fits into the tradition of Richard Hofstadter’s 1963 classic, Anti-Intellectualism in American Life. And it seemingly moves in the same orbit as Al Gore’s The Assault on Reason (2007). The upshot of Jacoby’s [...]
≡ Category: Religion, Science | ≅ Leave a Comment
At least in America, Charles Darwin has become the favorite whipping boy for many fundamentalists on the right. In one neat package, you get in Darwin all things deplorable. A godless “secular humanist” who denied the sanctity of humanity, God’s providence, and the integrity of the Bible. What more could you love to hate?
Somewhere lost [...]
≡ Category: Current Affairs | ≅ Leave a Comment
You’ve figured it out. You know exactly which presidential candidate you like the best. Or do you?
Psychologists at Harvard have posted an online quiz that lets you know whether your unconscious mind favors the same candidate as your conscious mind. Spend a few minutes with it and see whether you’re in sync with yourself. And [...]
≡ Category: Science, Video - Science | ≅ Leave a Comment
That’s one estimate of the size of our universe, and this video (added to our YouTube Playlist), using pictures from the Hubble Space Telescope, tries to put it in perspective. For more amazing photos from the Hubble, see this collection.
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≡ Category: Harvard | ≅ 2 Comments
Yesterday, Harvard University passed a motion (see proposal here) that will require its faculty members to publish their scholarly articles online. On the face of things, this marks a big victory for the open access movement, which is all about making information free and accessible to all. In reality, however, the real winner may eventually [...]
≡ Category: Uncategorized | ≅ Leave a Comment
They don’t call it the city of light for nothing.
≡ Category: Music, Video - Arts & Culture | ≅ Leave a Comment
It’s right up there with the Ukulele Orchestra performing ‘Smells Like Teen Spirit.’ Both are added to our YouTube Playlist, which now has 130 subscribers, which is not bad for a fledgling collection.
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≡ Category: Audio Books | ≅ 2 Comments
This is a book that needs no introduction, but we will give it a short one anyway. Published in serial format between 1918 and 1920, James Joyce’s Ulysses was initially reviled by many and banned in the US and UK until the 1930s. Today, it’s widely considered a classic in modernist literature, and The Modern [...]
≡ Category: History, Video - Politics/Society, Video - Science | ≅ Leave a Comment
What set the stage for Silicon Valley to change the entire landscape of technology? What made companies like Google, Yahoo and Hewlett Packard possible? According to this talk presented at Google by Steve Blank, it all goes back to the aftermath of World War II. It starts when Stanford University and its engineering/electronics department began [...]
≡ Category: Science, Video - Science | ≅ Leave a Comment
On Friday, we mentioned the BBC production called “What on Earth is Wrong with Gravity.” Below is another video by the same producers called “Psychedelic Science,” which surveys the past and present of psychedelic drugs, and the new era of scientists exploring ways to use these drugs again for therapeutic purposes (i.e., the treatment of [...]
≡ Category: Science, Video - Science | ≅ 1 Comment
Speaking of psychedelics, we’ve posted a documentary below (yet another BBC production) that takes a not entirely flattering look at the life of Timothy Leary, the Harvard psychology professor who went counterculture in 1960s and advocated the therapeutic and spiritual benefits of LSD. I remember seeing him years later when I was in college. My [...]
≡ Category: Podcast Articles and Resources | ≅ 1 Comment
Every now and then, we like to list the top ranking educational on podcasts on iTunes. No matter how much time goes by, one thing seems to stay the same: people like podcasts that teach foreign languages, particularly Spanish, above all else. Have a look, and if you want to learn more foreign languages, visit [...]
≡ Category: Film | ≅ Leave a Comment
What would it look like if you stuck today’s stars in Hitchcock’s classic films? Vanity Fair tried to figure it out.
≡ Category: Uncategorized | ≅ Leave a Comment
Courtesy of the BBC, this video features Brian Cox, a particle physicist and ex D:Ream keyboard player, who travels across the US, firing lasers at the moon and going wild in the Arizona desert, all in order to understand the deep secrets of gravity — something that neither Newton nor Einstein fully understood. It’s in [...]
≡ Category: Current Affairs | ≅ Leave a Comment
We covered the Second Amendment a couple of weeks ago. (Does it confer the right to bear arms?) So why not touch on the First Amendment this week and point you to an engaging interview (MP3 - iTunes - Feed) with the Pulitzer Prize-winning author Anthony Lewis, who has just released the new book: Freedom [...]
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