The best free cultural & educational media on the web
The best free cultural & educational media on the web
≡ Category: Psychology | ≅ 1 Comment
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 | ≅ 3 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 | ≅ 1 Comment
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 | ≅ Leave a Comment
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 | ≅ 1 Comment
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 | ≅ 1 Comment
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 | ≅ Leave a Comment
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 [...]
≡ Category: Art | ≅ 2 Comments
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 | ≅ 2 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 | ≅ 1 Comment
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 | ≅ 2 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 | ≅ Leave a Comment
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 | ≅ 1 Comment
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 | ≅ Leave a Comment
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 | ≅ Leave a Comment
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 [...]
≡ Category: Art | ≅ Leave a Comment
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 [...]
≡ Category: Film | ≅ 1 Comment
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 [...]
≡ Category: Film | ≅ Leave a Comment
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 | ≅ Leave a Comment
No commentary really needed. Just watch. Filed under “Random” and added to our YouTube playlist.
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≡ Category: Science, Video - Science | ≅ Leave a Comment
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 [...]
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