I had to give this at least a mention. Martin Scorsese’s Taxi Driver (1976) is now free to watch on YouTube. If you live in the US, you can watch the classic film starring Robert DeNiro, Jodie Foster, and Harvey Keitel here. If you live outside the US, you’re unfortunately out of luck, at least for now.

James Ellroy’s new crime fiction novel, Blood’s a Rover, takes you back to the tumultuous summer of 1968, to a world inhabited by J. Edgar Hoover, Howard Hughes, the Black Panthers, and the mob running their rackets in the Dominican Republic.

This morning, the Nobel Prize for Literature was awarded to the Romanian author, Herta Muller. There’s a good chance that you’re not familiar with her work. So let me steer you to this profile in the Telegraph. You can also read this excerpted interview that goes back to 1999.

Richard Dawkins, the prominent Oxford University biologist, has followed up The God Delusion (2006) with The Greatest Show on Earth (September, 2009). After having made the case for atheism, Dawkins now looks to debunk “Intelligent Design” and lay out the sheer volume of evidence supporting evolution.

Mark Frauenfelder, over at BoingBoing, has flagged a nice film noir collection housed at Archive. org. All films are public domain and free. Among the 43 films you’ll find Beat the Devil (1953), a John Huston film starring Humphrey Bogart. (Watch it here.) Archive.

As we mentioned last week, Karen Armstrong’s new book, The Case for God, is out. And now you can read the first chapter for free. Just click on this link, and then the book viewer on the left side of the page. It will expand, and from there you can start flipping through the pages. Be warned, the viewer/reader is a little clunky.

Lecture 3 of Michael Sandel’s ever popular course on Justice is now online. Here’s the summary of material covered by the newly added lecture.

News from the Wired Campus Blog:
PBS and NPR are now posting taped interviews and videos of lectures by academics, adding to the growing number of free lectures online.

Last Friday marked the 50th anniversary of The Twilight Zone’s debut on American television, a big occasion for fans of sci-fi, horror and suspense. To celebrate the anniversary, TV Squad pulled together a list of the 10 best episodes of Rod Serling’s show.

Taryn Simon photographs the hidden and unfamiliar in America (see book here).