The best free cultural & educational media on the web
The best free cultural & educational media on the web
≡ Category: Random | ≅ Leave a Comment
At the TED Conference, actress Sarah Jones takes a funny look at “the invention of self,” which is a fancy way of saying she does some good impersonations. Coming up, Jones impersonates an elderly Jewish women, a young fast-talking Dominican college student, people from various nationalities (China, India, France, Germany, Jordan, etc.). And it’s all mixed with [...]
≡ Category: Online Courses | ≅ Leave a Comment
The folks at universitiesandcolleges.org have provided a very handy resource here. They’ve sifted through the big OpenCourseWare universe and centralized the resources for over 500 college courses. In some cases, you’ll find audio lectures. In other cases, you’ll find lecture notes, reading lists, and homework assignments. This mega list makes it easy to browse through [...]
≡ Category: Music | ≅ Leave a Comment
Pete Seeger, the great American folk singer who turns 90 next week, sits down here with biographer Alec Wilkinson, and talks about Turn! Turn! Turn!. It’s a song that Seeger wrote in 1959, using lyrics taken from the Book of Ecclesiastes in the Bible. And it was then famously covered by The Byrds in 1965 [...]
≡ Category: Film, Music | ≅ 2 Comments
Out in remix culture, one is never sure what one will find. Take this video for example. If you watched American TV during the 1980s, you’re likely to remember Diff’rent Strokes, a sitcom that had a kind of far-fetched premise: a rich white widower adopts two African-American children from Harlem, and they live happily together [...]
≡ Category: Current Affairs | ≅ 7 Comments
The most popular article in yesterday’s New York Times was an Op-Ed calling for a thoroughgoing overhaul of the traditional university. For Mark Taylor (chairman of the religion department at Columbia University), it’s time to get rid of the mass-production university model — the university that builds walls between disciplines, encourages academics to work on often [...]
≡ Category: Film, Television | ≅ 1 Comment
The Australian National Film and Sound Archive provides free and worldwide access to over 1,000 film and television titles – a treasury of down-under video 100 years in the making. In a partnership with the major networks and other learning organizations, the Archive has commissioned expert curators to annotate the holdings, which provides for a rich [...]
≡ Category: Amazon Kindle, Google, e-books | ≅ 10 Comments
According to Steven Johnson’s piece in The Wall Street Journal, the “breakthrough success of Amazon’s Kindle e-book reader, and the maturation of the Google Book Search service” could “make 2009 the most significant year in the evolution of the book since Gutenberg hammered out his original Bible.” Johnson goes on to explain why e-book readers (like [...]
≡ Category: Science, Video - Science | ≅ Leave a Comment
What will happen 3 to 5 billion years from now, when our galaxy will likely merge with the Andromeda galaxy? The (soundless) video above will give you a quick preview. This footage from the Hubble Space Telescope offers multiple views of recent galaxy collisions. It’s worth noting that when galaxies “collide,” they don’t literally hit one [...]
≡ Category: Random | ≅ Leave a Comment
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≡ Category: Television | ≅ 1 Comment
Here Bill Moyers sits down with David Simon, executive producer of The Wire, the stunning HBO production. As anyone who has watched the show knows, The Wire is not just a splendid drama. It is, as Simon has once called it, “a political tract masquerading as a cop show.” It takes a penetrating and aesthetically rich [...]
≡ Category: History, Literature, Philosophy, Stanford | ≅ 1 Comment
A new season of Entitled Opinions (iTunes Feed Web Site) recently got off the ground, and it doesn’t take long to understand what this program is all about. Robert Harrison, the Stanford literature professor who hosts the show, opens the new season with these very words:
Our studios are located below ground, and every time I go down [...]
≡ Category: Comedy, Current Affairs | ≅ Leave a Comment
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Here’s Jon Stewart talking Monday night about the revelation that America’s “extreme interrogation” techniques actually amount to torture. Somehow he manages to work The New York Review of Books, The Paris Review, McSweeney’s and The Utne Reader into the discussion. You’ll [...]
≡ Category: Art, Books, History, Media | ≅ Leave a Comment
Another big digital archive went live this week. Backed by the United Nations, the World Digital Library wants to centralize cultural treasures from around the world. Manuscripts, maps, rare books, musical scores, recordings, films, prints, photographs, and architectural drawings — they will all be absorbed into this growing online collection, and users will be able to [...]
≡ Category: Books, Media | ≅ 6 Comments
After Seth Harwood got his MFA at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, he began publishing in traditional magazines and journals, as most young writers do. But those publications were slow to launch his career. Things changed, however, once he started publishing online. And they really changed when he released his crime novel Jack Wakes Up as [...]
≡ Category: Books, Literature | ≅ 1 Comment
Mark Twain died nearly a century ago but that hasn’t slowed him down. Twain has a new book coming out today. It’s called “Who is Mark Twain,” and it brings together 24 previously unpublished stories, one of which you can read over at The Wall Street Journal. The piece is entitled “Frank Fuller and My [...]
≡ Category: Music | ≅ 1 Comment
Paul McCartney played a long 35 song set at Coachella this past weekend. And now we’re getting a little peek at his performance. Here, in homage to George Harrison, Paul plays “Something” and a little ukulele.
≡ Category: Film | ≅ 3 Comments
Morgan Spurlock’s 2004 documentary, Super Size Me, is available on YouTube for all to watch. Spend 30 days eating nothing but McDonald’s fast food and what happens? It’s not pretty. But you’ll get the picture in an entertaining 100 minutes. Super Size Me was nominated for an Academy Award, and won prizes at Sundance and [...]
≡ Category: Books, Film, Literature | ≅ 1 Comment
J.G. Ballard, the author of Crash and Empire died at 78 this weekend. Here we have a short interview from 1986 where he talks about how violent sensations now lubricate our modern world. It’s this line of thinking that finds its way into Crash, a controversial book that David Cronenberg brought to the big screen in [...]
≡ Category: Random | ≅ 4 Comments
Give this a minute. It gets quite good once it gets going. Thanks Philip for sending this along. (Readers always feel free to send intelligent audio & video our way.)
≡ Category: Comedy, Life | ≅ 2 Comments
Take Malcolm Gladwell’s new book, Outliers: The Story of Success. Boil it down. Make it funny. And here you have our next video produced by Kirby Ferguson. NB that there are a few words sprinkled in that won’t be safe for work (unless you work in a special kind of place).
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