The best free cultural & educational media on the web
The best free cultural & educational media on the web
≡ Category: History | ≅ 1 Comment
Last fall, Yale University introduced a second round of open courses that included Donald Kagan’s Introduction to Ancient Greek History. A major figure in the field, Kagan takes students from the Greek Dark Ages, through the rise of Sparta and Athens, The Peloponnesian War, and beyond. You’ll cover more than a millennium in 24 lectures. Above, we start with [...]
≡ Category: Random | ≅ Leave a Comment
Want to see every post that we have written since 2006? Then look back through our Archive. We just created it and added it to the site, partly in response to a reader request. You can permanently find the Archive in the second column, between “Essentials” and “Categories.” Enjoy.
≡ Category: Education, Harvard, Philosophy | ≅ Leave a Comment
That’s the question that The Ethicist asks in The New York Times. Below, I present the issue and part of the answer. Read through it all and tell us where you stand on the issue.
The Issue
The fiscal year for major university endowments ended June 30, and schools have been reporting their results: not good. In [...]
≡ Category: Books | ≅ Leave a Comment
This week, This American Life aired an episode that tells “stories of people who believe a book changed their life.” (Click here, scroll down the page a little, and then click on “Full Episode.”) It’s a good program for book lovers, but don’t expect to hear about Shakespeare, Dostoevsky, or Salinger. This American Life doesn’t quite [...]
≡ Category: Stanford | ≅ Leave a Comment
Put a bunch of Stanford graduate students together. Give them 10 weeks to build a model airplaine, and what do you get? A world record at 7,000 feet — something it might cost NASA millions to do.
≡ Category: History, YouTube | ≅ Leave a Comment
The Berlin Wall and the Iron Curtain collapsed a little more than 20 years ago (August 1989). And even though I watched the events on TV, my memory of it all has already started to fade. But that’s where YouTube comes in. Above, a quick refresher that makes my day. This clip comes from a [...]
≡ Category: Philosophy | ≅ 2 Comments
Harvard has rolled out Week 2 of Michael Sandel’s course on Justice. Courtesy of the course web site, here’s a synopsis of what you can expect from Episode 2. New lectures are getting rolled out weekly. Check the Harvard web site for new additions.
Part 1 — PUTTING A PRICE TAG ON LIFE: Sandel presents some [...]
≡ Category: Amazon Kindle, Education, e-books | ≅ Leave a Comment
Earlier this year, Amazon rolled out the Kindle DX. This new, supersized e-book reader had one basic goal: to give readers digital access to textbooks, newspapers and other larger format publications. This fall, the rubber has started to hit the road, and the Kindle DX has been getting tepid reviews, at least at Princeton University. [...]
≡ Category: Literature | ≅ Leave a Comment
Vladimir Nabokov admired Franz Kafka’s novella, “The Metamorphosis.” Hence the lecture that Nabokov dedicated to the work here. But he also saw some small ways to improve the story, or at least the English translation of it. Below, we have some edits that Nabokov penned himself. And, just as an fyi, you can download a free audio [...]
≡ Category: Film | ≅ Leave a Comment
A little bit of breaking news coming out of Zurich, Switzerland. More coverage in The New York Times here.
≡ Category: Physics, Science | ≅ 2 Comments
It’s rare that a video trending on YouTube actually fits the mission of this blog. But here you have one. As the producer of this video writes, this is a “musical tribute to two great men of science. Carl Sagan and his cosmologist companion Stephen Hawking present: A Glorious Dawn — Cosmos remixed. Almost all [...]
≡ Category: Online Courses, Philosophy | ≅ 4 Comments
We happened to mention Michael Sandel last week, and then I came across this…
Harvard University and WGBH Boston have posted online Sandel’s very popular course, “Justice: What’s the Right Thing to Do?” How popular is it? Over 14,000 Harvard students have taken this course over the past 30 years. The course takes a close look [...]
≡ Category: Business, Math, Physics, Science | ≅ 5 Comments
This comes to us via a tip from Twitter. The Khan Academy has now posted on YouTube over 800 videos (find a complete list here) that will teach students the ins-and-outs of algebra, geometry, trigonometry, calculus, statistics, finance, physics, economics and more. The clips have been recorded by Salman Khan, a Harvard Business School and MIT grad. [...]
≡ Category: Religion | ≅ Leave a Comment
In recent years, we have seen a number of books published that have made the case for atheism: Richard Dawkin’s The God Delusion, Christopher Hitchens’ God Is Not Great, Sam Harris’ Letter to a Christian Nation, and Daniel Dennett’s Breaking the Spell: Religion as a Natural Phenomenon. It was almost as if a dam had broken, [...]
≡ Category: Television | ≅ 1 Comment
Thanks to Duke University, you can now access a digital archive of vintage television commercials dating from the 1950s to the 1980s. Eventually, this collection will feature close to 12,000 digitized commercials, and it will let you see how America’s traditional brands (IBM, Maxwell House, American Express, Avis, etc) evolved through the medium of mainstream commercial [...]
≡ Category: Science | ≅ Leave a Comment
Smithsonian.com is featuring a series of photos taken by spacecraft that have traveled across our solar system, reaching other planets and approaching the sun. To see these images, you can enter the photo gallery here, and to view more photos, make sure that you click on the small dots located on the right-hand side of [...]
≡ Category: Music | ≅ 2 Comments
Here’s a sneak preview of Bob Dylan’s forthcoming Christmas album. It will hit the streets in October, and you can pre-order now. A safe assumption: this will be a “love it” or “hate it” album.
≡ Category: Film, Literature | ≅ 2 Comments
In 1999, Aleksandr Petrov won the Academy Award for Short Film (among other awards) for a film that follows the plot line of Ernest Hemingway’s classic novella, The Old Man and the Sea (1952). As noted here, Petrov’s technique involves painting pastels on glass, and he and his son painted a total of 29,000 [...]
≡ Category: Music | ≅ Leave a Comment
On September 9th, EMI released a remastered version of the entire Beatles catalogue — the first remix since 1987. And now the Beatles are once again back on top of the charts. If you’re wondering whether to buy the remastered versions at all, or whether to buy the stereo or mono box sets (or some combination [...]
≡ Category: Google, e-books | ≅ Leave a Comment
The US Justice Department officially weighed in today on the Google Books settlement with publishers and authors. On the plus side for Google, the government wants to see the project continue because it has clear social benefits. On the downside, the DOJ has concerns about antitrust and copyright issues, and it’s looking for the deal [...]
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