The best free cultural & educational media on the web
The best free cultural & educational media on the web
Let me bring this to your attention. Erwan Bomstein-Erb, the founder and director of Canal Educatif in Paris, has released a documentary (in English) about The Gates of Hell, a monumental project that Auguste Rodin worked on, not necessarily consistently, for 37 years. On its own, this video is worth your time. But you should also know that this [...]
≡ Category: Literature, Philosophy, Television | ≅ 1 Comment
I’m no fan of Ayn Rand, but I found this footage intriguing. Back before 60 Minutes, Mike Wallace had his own TV interview show, The Mike Wallace Interview, which aired from 1957 to 1960. And what you get is Mike Wallace asking probing questions to celebrities of the day (and peddling cigarettes). An archive of [...]
≡ Category: Google, YouTube | ≅ 1 Comment
On Thursday, we announced the launch of YouTube EDU. Now, as promised, it’s time to give you some more details about the new university video hub.
I had a chance to chat with Obadiah Greenberg, a key Googler behind the launch. And he gave me some insight into the genesis of the project. As you can imagine, YouTube EDU [...]
≡ Category: Books | ≅ Leave a Comment
Noted by the LA Times:
Without permission or advance notice, FiledByAuthor has cataloged the information of about 1.8 million authors into individual pages. There are biographies, photos, links to purchase books from online retailers and links to share the author’s FiledBy page through a dizzying list of social networking sites. And everyone is there, from the [...]
≡ Category: Uncategorized | ≅ Leave a Comment
A heads up from Stephen:
Free mp3 of Behind Here Lies Nothin’ from Dylan’s new album available at bobdylan.com until 5.00 a.m. tomorrow (Time zone?) Very good it sounds too. Shades of Ry Cooder. Wishful thinking maybe…
Thanks SG
≡ Category: History | ≅ Leave a Comment
John Hope Franklin, a prolific historian who shaped our understanding of the African-American experience and influenced the Civil Rights movement, died last week at 94. He was the grandson of a slave, and knew the Jim Crow South firsthand. Above, we see him talking just last summer about the nomination of Barack Obama, and whether he ever [...]
≡ Category: Art | ≅ Leave a Comment
An FYI for art and poetry lovers: “Each month, TATE ETC. publishes new poetry by leading poets such as John Burnside, Moniza Alvi, Adam Thorpe, Alice Oswald and David Harsent who respond to works from the Tate Collection. (Subscribe to the Poem of the Month RSS feed.) This March Roger McGough presents his poem, Cadeau, based on Man Ray’s work [...]
≡ Category: Comedy | ≅ Leave a Comment
A funny little piece from The Onion. Thanks to JB for sending this along. Keep sending us good items @openculture on Twitter, or via email at mail@oculture.com
≡ Category: Current Affairs | ≅ 3 Comments
A quick heads up: The three-day Aspen Environment Forum is now underway, and it has gathered an impressive number of speakers (energy experts, government & business leaders, writers, photographers, and other thinkers) to take a serious look at our environmental challenges and the possible solutions. You can find video highlights from each day here, and [...]
≡ Category: Science | ≅ Leave a Comment
In April 1990, The Hubble Space Telescope was launched into space and has since sent beautiful images back to earth. The Telegraph in the UK has gathered together some of the most spectacular ones. Click here to see some of the best. (And look to the top right for the “Next” button to see more.)
≡ Category: Science, Video - Science | ≅ Leave a Comment
“NASA’s STEREO spacecraft sees Jupiter move behind the Sun in this 30 hour animation compressed into just 11 seconds. Meanwhile, you can see Jupiter’s moons orbiting it.” Get more on this cool footage from Discover Magazine and be sure to check out the Bad Astronomer Channel on YouTube, which features more videos along these lines.
≡ Category: Random | ≅ 1 Comment
If you’re visiting Open Culture thanks to The New York Times article, and if you’re looking for audio downloads for your next road trip, then please explore our Audio & Podcast Collection, which includes (among other things) free audio books, free foreign language lessons, free university courses, and much more. You can download these audio files [...]
≡ Category: Google, YouTube | ≅ 11 Comments
Here’s a little breaking news: Today, Google has launched YouTube EDU, which centralizes the content from over 100 universities and colleges (get list here). This robust collection gives you access to lectures by professors and world-renowned thought leaders, new research and campus tours. At the moment, you can access over 200 full courses from leading universities, including MIT, [...]
≡ Category: Podcast Articles and Resources | ≅ 1 Comment
Here’s an interesting factoid reported by The New Scientist… A study coming out of The State University of New York ”measured the performance of 64 students, half of whom watched a lecture via podcast and the other half who attended the live lecture. Students who used the podcast averaged a 71 out of 100 on the follow-up test [...]
≡ Category: Yale | ≅ Leave a Comment
In the past, I have written about Yale’s best-of-breed Open Course initiative, which makes available 15 free courses. They’re all recorded in high quality video and can be downloaded in multiple formats. You can access the full list here. Somewhere along the line (I’m not sure exactly when), Yale made these courses available on a [...]
≡ Category: Current Affairs, Economics | ≅ 1 Comment
It’s not often than a song gets written for an economics professor. It’s so bad that it’s actually good. Add that to the soundtrack for the Collapse.
≡ Category: Music, Web/Tech | ≅ Leave a Comment
At Stanford, students have found a way to get mobile phones to make music. As you’ll see, the iPhone can now reproduce the sounds of the ocarina, a twelve thousand year old flute-like instrument. That’s the hi-tech way of doing it. There’s also the low-tech way of getting the same result. In this classic bit [...]
≡ Category: Comedy | ≅ Leave a Comment
Woody Allen has a new comic piece in The New Yorker that weaves together lobsters, existentialism and Bernie Madoff. It starts:
Two weeks ago, Abe Moscowitz dropped dead of a heart attack and was reincarnated as a lobster. Trapped off the coast of Maine, he was shipped to Manhattan and dumped into a tank at a [...]
≡ Category: Current Affairs, Economics | ≅ 1 Comment
Once the Fed’s toolbox proved unable to stop the cascading global financial meltdown, the US government turned to the one strategy that it had left. It dusted off the old economic playbook of John Maynard Keynes and began introducing massive stimulus plans and other forms of government intervention. Since our collective fate now depends on [...]
≡ Category: Science, Stanford | ≅ Leave a Comment
This is Part 1 of a funny but also substantive talk about primate sexuality given by Robert Sapolsky to his Human Behavioral Biology class at Stanford University. As Cory Doctorow noted when featuring this video over at Boing Boing, Sapolsky (author of Why Zebras Don’t Get Ulcers) does a great job of lecturing on biology, [...]
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