The best free cultural & educational media on the web
The best free cultural & educational media on the web
≡ Category: Comedy, Current Affairs | ≅ Leave a Comment
From last night’s White House Correspondents’ Dinner. (Also get Wanda Sykes’ standup appearance here. Rather funny.) These clips come from CSPAN’s YouTube Channel, which is included in our Intelligent YouTube Video Collection
≡ Category: Literature | ≅ 5 Comments
Rewind the videotape to 1968. Jack Kerouac, author of On the Road, appears (seemingly drunk) on William F. Buckley’s “Firing Line.” As you’ll see, this meeting of the Beat and the father of modern American conservatism is not exactly filled with substance. But the clip has some historical curiosity. You can find more Kerouac video [...]
≡ Category: Literature | ≅ Leave a Comment
When Vladimir Nabokov died in 1977, he was working on a manuscript called The Original of Laura. And he asked that it remain locked in a Swiss vault and never published. His son, Dmitri, who also happens to be his translator and surviving heir, is now wondering what to do with “the most concentrated distillation of [my [...]
≡ Category: iPhone | ≅ 1 Comment
With a little luck, we’re going to be bringing you an Open Culture iPhone app in the next couple of months. In the meantime, here’s a handy list of iPhone apps for “serious self-learners.” Let me give you a quick sample of the apps you’ll find highlighted here: Aristotle’s complete works, The Oxford Dictionary of Literary Terms, Lonely [...]
≡ Category: Art | ≅ 2 Comments
Curious piece in the Telegraph. It starts: He is known as the tortured genius who cut off his own ear as he struggled with mental illness after the breakdown of his friendship with a fellow artist. But a new study claims Vincent Van Gogh may have made up the story to protect painter Paul Gauguin who [...]
≡ Category: Amazon Kindle, Apple | ≅ 4 Comments
Before you get dissuaded by my original comments, please see my latest update down below. As we mentioned earlier this week, Amazon unveiled its new Kindle this morning in NYC. The Kindle DX ($489) features a large screen (9.7 inches measured diagonally) and it’s intended to make reading newspapers, college textbooks and PDFs a more [...]
≡ Category: Theatre | ≅ 3 Comments
When Israel entered Gaza earlier this year, Caryl Churchill, whom Tony Kushner calls “one of the most important and influential playwrights living,” wrote a nine minute play entitle “Seven Jewish Children: A Play for Gaza.” In February, it had a brief run at London’s Royal Court Theatre and elicited very different reactions. Some celebrated the [...]
≡ Category: Literature | ≅ Leave a Comment
As a former Sovietologist (skills that today help me understand our public broadcasting system), I read with excitement the New Yorker’s article on the grand bells of Moscow’s Danilov Monastery and their return after 70-some years from the United States to Russia. Writing in the April 27 issue, Harvard grad Elif Batuman notes how bells—not [...]
≡ Category: Books | ≅ Leave a Comment
It started as an audio podcast (iTunes - RSS Feed - MP3) and now it’s being released in print by Random House today. Seth Harwood’s Jack Wakes Up is out, and you can read the first three chapters as a free pdf here. A couple of weeks back, we featured a short video showing how Harwood has used web 2.0 (podcasts, videos, [...]
≡ Category: Life | ≅ Leave a Comment
Google co-founder Larry Page spoke at commencement this weekend at the University of Michigan. While the talk may not rise to the level of Steve Jobs’ masterful presentation at Stanford back in 2005Â (the graduation speech that really stays with me), it does have a nice personal touch, particularly at the beginning and end. And there [...]
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