≡ Category: Psychology | ≅ Comments
The Time Paradox, a new book by Philip Zimbardo & John Boyd, puts forth an intriguing argument — our attitudes toward time, often unconscious ones, can strongly shape our personalities and the kind of lives we lead. They can contribute to our happiness and success, or our unhappiness and depression.
The argument goes something like this: Not [...]
≡ Category: History, Video - Politics/Society | ≅ Comments
If you could sync up a photo with every name and event mentioned in Billy Joel’s “We Didn’t Start the Fire,” you’d have a montage that offers a pretty good glimpse into the second half of the twentieth century. That’s what a University of Chicago grad student figured out when he put this viral video [...]
≡ Category: Music | ≅ Comments
Just a quick heads up: Amazon.com is running a pretty good looking deal on a box set of Mozart’s complete works. The package includes 170 CDs of music. And it also comes with a cd-rom containing essays on his works, artist bio’s, text and libretti’s. User reviews suggest that the recording quality is quite [...]
≡ Category: Books | ≅ Comments
Penguin asked its stable of writers what books they plan to give friends during the holidays, and what books they’d hope to receive. Here’s a quick sampling. And if you want to list your own gift ideas, feel free to add them to the comments below.
Khaled Hosseini, author of The Kite Runner and A Thousand [...]
≡ Category: Random | ≅ Comments
What’s Thanksgiving without Arlo Guthrie’s “Alice’s Restaurant?”
The video is below. The lyrics to the song, originally released in 1967, are here. An interview with Guthrie is here (use Real Player to listen).
Have a good holiday. We’ll be back on Monday (maybe sooner).
Arlo Guthrie Alice's Restaurant
≡ Category: Science, Video - Science | ≅ Comments
It’s almost eerie to watch how a tornado takes shape. As you’ll see below, it starts with a wisp of nothing much and, within minutes, morphs into a terrible force. For more precise details on how tornadoes form, you can check out this dynamic presentation over at USA Today.
Related Content: Waves Freeze in Newfoundland
via Daily [...]
≡ Category: Science | ≅ Comments
This week, Wired has posted a piece — Top 10 Amazing Biology Videos — that has started swirling around the web. Here you’ll find some serious videos (for example, a clip below showing high speed gene sequencing in action) alongside some lighter videos that feature, um, shrimp running on a treadmill. This piece is [...]
Almost exactly a year ago, I caught up with Jori Finkel, a journalist who covers the Los Angeles arts scene, and we talked about an art-world controversy that she first wrote about in The New York Times. The controversy focused on museums seeking funding from art galleries, which can be a direct conflict of interests, [...]
≡ Category: Music | ≅ Comments
Two American icons got together in Nashville in 1969 and recorded at least 22 tracks together, including some well known classics: Ring of Fire, I Walk The Line, Girl From the North Country, and You Are My Sunshine. You can listen in on the historic collaboration for free here.
via BoingBoing
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≡ Category: Current Affairs | ≅ Comments
Last week, we featured a rather prescient video clip highlighting Peter Schiff and his warnings in 2006-07 that that our economy is in deep trouble. Since then, many have wondered where Schiff sees things going next. So NPR’s Planet Money (iTunes - Rss Feed - Stream) caught up with him on Friday and asked him just that: The upshot [...]
≡ Category: Music | ≅ Comments
The Beatles’ White Album turned 40 last week. And that put the classic album back in the spotlight, leading critics to revisit the band’s most experimental and controversial work. Was it their masterpiece or biggest mess? (Feel free to post your thoughts in the comments below.) For one look back, you can listen to this [...]
≡ Category: Random | ≅ Comments
Nope, this is not exactly another piece of vintage YouTube goodness. From what I can piece together, Nokia is marketing a Bruce Lee cell phone in China, and this is the commercial that’s backing their promotion. Needless to say, there are some digital enhancements going on here. But it’s amusing nonetheless.
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≡ Category: Books | ≅ Comments
Malcolm Gladwell, the author of The Tipping Point and Blink, has a new book out. And it’s almost guaranteed to be another bestseller. Outliers: The Story of Success takes on an idea at the center of American mythology, the concept of the “self-made man.” For Gladwell, success stories aren’t largely the product of smarts and hard [...]
≡ Category: Comedy, Current Affairs | ≅ Comments
What happens when you take the 2004, Academy award-nominated German film Der Untergang (The Downfall) and turn it into a spoof? Here, the “downfall” is all about the decline of the housing market, and how Hitler becomes just another man with a home under water. There are some classic lines here, particularly if you looked [...]
≡ Category: Comedy | ≅ Comments
The Monty Python Channel on YouTube was launched with these words:
“For three years you YouTubers have been ripping us off, taking tens of thousands of our videos and putting them up on YouTube… We know who you are … we know where you live … and we could come after you in ways too horrible to [...]
A good days for fans of open culture: Google is bringing the massive LIFE photo archive online. 2 million photos are already uploaded, and another 8 million will be coming online soon. The current archive moves from The American Civil War to present, and it includes a large number of photos never seen before. Here’s one [...]
Thanks to Europa Film Treasures, you can spend hours looking back through an archive of European film. Theses films range from “comedy to science fiction, from westerns to animation, from erotic to ethnological movies.” And all films come with a fair amount of background information. And yes, of course, you can stream these films online [...]
Over at The New York Times, film critic A.O. Scott revisits John Ford’s 1940 film based on John Steinbeck’s classic novel about the Great Depression. Putting foreclosures and economic strain front and center, it’s suddenly a film for our age. Scott’s video segment runs about three minutes, features footage from the film itself, and takes a look [...]
≡ Category: Random | ≅ Comments
No commentary really needed. Just watch. Filed under “Random” and added to our YouTube playlist.
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≡ Category: Science, Video - Science | ≅ Comments
It’s grainy. It’s from 1964. It’s only a minute long. But, here, famed physicist Richard Feynman gives you the quick summary of what the scientific process is all about. Watch it below. (And if you want to watch him play the bongos and sing the praises of orange juice, then just click here. Also, you can download [...]
≡ Category: Current Affairs, Web/Tech, YouTube | ≅ Comments
We’re about to witness the beginning of the YouTube Presidency, as The Washington Post has dubbed it. When Barack Obama takes office in late January, he plans to give a new twist to a longstanding tradition. The weekly presidential radio address will now “air” on YouTube, meaning that you’ll be able to access the president’s messages in [...]
≡ Category: Music | ≅ Comments
Mitch Mitchell, the last surviving member of the Jimi Hendrix Experience, died late last week. Here we have him soloing in concert in Sweden, 1969. More on his passing here.
≡ Category: Business, Current Affairs | ≅ Comments
British historian Niall Ferguson has achieved the academic holy trinity, holding positions at Harvard, Oxford, and Stanford’s Hoover Institution. Only 44 years old, he has 9 books to his credit (including a new one: The Ascent of Money: A Financial History of the World), and you’ll often find him writing in the public press. In the [...]
≡ Category: Current Affairs | ≅ Comments
Several years ago, I had lunch with the former head of a large investment bank who talked about how Wall Street had a built-in bullish bias, and anyone who goes against the grain, does so at their own peril. Below you’ll find a good example of that. Here we have Peter Schiff, head of Euro Pacific [...]
≡ Category: Uncategorized | ≅ Comments
We have reached the final week of the presidential elections course. This week, Martin Lewis slices and dices the electoral results of the ‘08 election and highlights the big and potentially far-reaching shifts in US voting patterns. No doubt, this is one of the more detailed analyses that you’ll find on the web. You can [...]
≡ Category: Science, Video - Science | ≅ Comments
Yet further proof that ants are endlessly fascinating, and, on a related note, see our earlier piece: Central Intelligence: From Ants to the Web.
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≡ Category: Books, Literature | ≅ Comments
One of America’s great writers, John Updike, gave an interview this week on San Francisco’s airwaves. He has a new book out, The Widows of Eastwick, a sequel to The Witches of Eastwick, the bestseller he published back in 1984. During this hour, Michael Krasny, one of the better interviewers out there, talks with Updike [...]
≡ Category: Uncategorized | ≅ Comments
In case you were wondering what kind of media we would be most hungry for in hard times (big budget action movies? escapist sit-coms), don’t forget that this is recession 3.0. Introducing The puppy cam, with 22,000 viewers and counting. The shibu puppies are adorable, worry-free, and of course, non-union. Click here and tell us [...]
≡ Category: Literature, Video - Arts & Culture | ≅ Comments
Taken from a French television program, this vintage clip features Vladimir Nabokov (1899-1977) reading from Lolita and revealing his list of the most important novels of the 20th century, among other things. Nabokov speaks in English here. So don’t let the initial French throw you off. We’ve added this gem to our YouTube playlist.
Lolita, light [...]
≡ Category: Business, Economics, Science, Video - Science | ≅ Comments
Thomas Friedman has a new book out, Hot, Flat, and Crowded. And it gets into the whole question of what a “green revolution” is really all about. New books mean book tours, and here we have an outtake from a spirited talk he recently gave in Northern California. You can watch the full talk on [...]
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