Michael Pollan’s best-selling book, Botany of Desire, is now a film, and you can watch it online, courtesy of PBS. (Click to watch complete film.

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Nina Paley, a self-taught animator, released in 2008 an 82-minute animated film, Sita Sings the Blues, that mingles the classic Indian myth, The Ramayana, with contemporary autobiographical events, and it’s all set to the 1920’s jazz vocals of Annette Hanshaw.

A quick note: Amazon will let you download a Philip Glass sampler that contains 21 tracks. You can get them as mp3s, and they’re all free. But the deal ends (it seems) by the end of the day. So act quickly.

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When the global financial system collapsed last year, This American Life and its sister program, Planet Money (iTunes - RSS Feed - Web Site) began doing something that few others could pull off.

Stanford students head to the Galapagos Islands, then rap about what they’ve learned. Evolutionary rap. What a concept…
Meanwhile, the professor whose voice you hear at the outset, Bill Durham, taught a course in Stanford Continuing Studies (my day job) last year, and we have made it available as a free podcast.

Back when Richard Dawkins (Oxford University) published The God Delusion in 2007, he made a fairly unexpected appearance on Bill O’Reilly’s show. Quite the contrast in characters. Now that he has published his latest book, The Greatest Show on Earth, it was time for Dawkins to meet up with the bumptious one again. Here it goes.

A quick update for you. Yale University has added its third batch of courses to its open education initiative, bringing the total number of courses to 25. (Find the complete list here.) The latest round is slightly bigger than previous ones, which bucks the trend that we’re generally seeing.

The marketing around the Nook, Barnes & Noble’s Answer to the Kindle, has begun, even though the product won’t be sold (for $259) until November. Above, you’ll find a B&N video that demos the features of the new e-book reader. Gizmodo is already giving the Nook some nice reviews.

Since 1995, Ira Glass has hosted and produced This American Life (iTunes - Feed - Web Site), the award-winning radio show that presents masterfully-crafted stories to almost 2 million listeners each week. What’s the secret sauce that goes into making a great story, particularly one primed for radio or TV? Glass spells it out in four parts.