The best free cultural & educational media on the web
The best free cultural & educational media on the web
≡ Category: History | ≅ 4 Comments
Although the flow of open educational resources has been slowing down lately (another casualty of the recession), the stream has not yet run dry. Stanford has recently added another free course to its iTunes collection. Taught by Jack Rakove, a Pulitzer Prize-winning historian, Colonial and Revolutionary America (iTunesU - Feed) covers the early phase of the traditional American [...]
≡ Category: History, Life, Literature, Philosophy | ≅ 3 Comments
Writing in The New Republic, Leon Wieseltier offers a response to the Feb 25 piece in the NYTimes: In Tough Times, the Humanities Must Justify Their Worth. His argument is worth a read, and here is one lengthy money quote: The complaint against the humanities is that they are impractical. This is true. They will not change [...]
≡ Category: Comedy, Life | ≅ 5 Comments
Ricky Gervais, the comedian and brains behind The Office, talks here about the difference between British and American humor, and it really gets down to deep cultural differences. Optimism, the belief that anything is possible, versus an ingrained pessimism and penchant for the underdog. I wonder whether UK readers would agree with this characterization. And, [...]
≡ Category: Media | ≅ 3 Comments
A little revolution is getting underway. The state of Virginia has published a new open source physics textbook under a Creative Commons license. As detailed in this piece from ZDNet, this peer-reviewed textbook was produced in less than six months by a team of authors, which included “active researchers, high school teachers, and college professors, as well [...]
≡ Category: Music, YouTube | ≅ 1 Comment
It was time to do something new. So I bought an acoustic guitar and decided to see what I could learn on my own. And this, then, led me to look for free resources on the web. Not shockingly, YouTube has a fair amount to offer. A number of different video providers have posted lessons [...]
≡ Category: Books | ≅ Leave a Comment
Dick Cavett, who hosted the “The Dick Cavett Show” from 1968 to 1982, now blogs for The New York Times. And, this week, he took his readers back to 1981, to when he hosted John Updike (recently deceased) and John Cheever (d. 1982) on the same show. The Times offers a complete video of the [...]
≡ Category: Books | ≅ 3 Comments
Have you ever lied about reading a book? Well, if so, you’re hardly alone. According to The Guardian, 65% of people polled in a survey admitted to having made such a lie. And what books did they claim to have read? George Orwell’s 1984 ranked #1. Then the order went something like this: Tolstoy’s War and Peace, [...]
≡ Category: Music | ≅ 1 Comment
Apparently, in April, Bob Dylan plans to release a new album. Let’s hope that he continues to defy gravity. Get more details here. Related Content When Bob Dylan Went Electric: Newport, 1965 Like A Rolling Stone 1966 Bob Dylan at The Super Bowl
≡ Category: Life, Philosophy | ≅ 1 Comment
If you’re not familiar with him, Peter Singer is an Australian-born philosopher who teaches at Princeton and who wrote Animal Liberation in 1975, helping to launch the animal rights movement. A practitioner of applied ethics, he has also taken controversial positions on euthanasia. Nowadays, he’s working on less sensitive issues. His latest book is called [...]
≡ Category: Books, Literature | ≅ Leave a Comment
When David Foster Wallace (Infinite Jest) committed suicide last September, he left behind family, friends and an unfinished third novel, The Pale King. This week, The New Yorker takes a long look at Wallace’s life, career, bouts with depression, and the novel he began in 1997. The magazine has also posted an excerpt of The [...]
Get updates as soon as they go live, via RSS feed, email and now Twitter!
Get the latest from our Twitter Stream.
Why can't we be friends?
Got a link we should post? Send it our way!
©2006-2012 Open Culture. All rights reserved.
