The best free cultural & educational media on the web
The best free cultural & educational media on the web
≡ Category: Web/Tech | ≅ 2 Comments
Last week, Jaron Lanier, the father of virtual reality, published his new book (You Are Not a Gadget) and an accompanying op-ed in The Wall Street Journal. The WSJ piece begins: All too many of today’s Internet buzzwords— including “Web 2.0,” “Open Culture,” “Free Software” and the “Long Tail”—are terms for a new kind of collectivism [...]
≡ Category: Business, Current Affairs, Online Courses, Yale | ≅ 3 Comments
Robert Shiller, who predicted the stock market crash earlier this decade and the bursting of the housing bubble in 2008, has a unique understanding of the financial markets and behavioral economics. In this free course provided by Yale University, Shiller demystifies the financial markets and explains “the theory of finance and its relation to the [...]
≡ Category: Business, Current Affairs, Economics | ≅ 3 Comments
Peter Singer, an Australian-born philosopher who teaches at Princeton, created the animal rights movement back in the 1970s, and, more recently, launched a campaign to end world poverty. One can’t contemplate poverty without also considering greed, and that brings us to the clip above. Interviewed in 2009, Singer suggests that greed drives us biologically (as [...]
≡ Category: Life, Religion | ≅ Leave a Comment
The lines below are taken from Voltaire’s “Poème sur le désastre de Lisbonne,” written in response to the Lisbon earthquake of 1755. Then, as now, there’s a little wisdom here for those (hint: Pat Robertson) inclined to infer moral superiority from the suffering of others. What crime, what sin, had those young hearts conceived That lie, [...]
≡ Category: History | ≅ 1 Comment
For MLK’s birthday, we bring back the full “I Have a Dream” speech, delivered at The Lincoln Memorial on August 28, 1963. Seventeen eloquent and brave minutes that changed the world and made it a better place.
≡ Category: Literature, Television | ≅ 2 Comments
Rod Serling, the American screenwriter & television producer best known for The Twilight Zone (watch full episodes here), fielded questions from students about the whole art of writing for television. In the clip above, he gives a rather dramatic response to the question, “Where do ideas come from?” (They come from the Earth… They’re in [...]
≡ Category: Music | ≅ 1 Comment
We take you back to The Beatles (who were still The Quarrymen) in 1957. George Harrison is 14, John Lennon is 16, and Paul McCartney is 15. Ringo is not yet in the picture. Then, on a rather related note, check out Jimmy Page, 13, Playing Guitar on a BBC Talent Show in 1957.
≡ Category: Current Affairs, History, Stanford | ≅ Leave a Comment
What would Martin Luther King Jr. think about America in 2010? Few would know better than Clayborne Carson, the Stanford historian who directs the Martin Luther King, Jr. Research and Education Institute. In this talk, Carson describes MLK’s likely thoughts about America during the Great Recession. King cared deeply about economic justice, and it’s clear [...]
≡ Category: Film | ≅ Leave a Comment
If you get your kicks from uber kitschy B- films, then we’ve got a little something for you. AMC has launched a new site called B- Minus Classics, which we have added to our growing collection of Free Movies Online. (Our list now contains 125 free classic movies, and numerous sites where you can watch [...]
≡ Category: Music | ≅ 3 Comments
Vladimir Horowitz, one of the great pianists of the 20th century, left Russia to settle in the United States in 1939. But, once the Cold War thawed, he famously returned home and played before rapt audiences. What we have here, I believe, is Horowitz playing Mozart’s Sonata in C Major during a 1986 recital Moscow. [...]
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