The best free cultural & educational media on the web
The best free cultural & educational media on the web
≡ Category: Education | ≅ 1 Comment
Do schools kill creativity? Sir Ken Robinson asked that question at the 2006 TED conference. And the talk resonated widely. His short presentation remains one of the most watched and “favorited” videos in TED’s large catalogue of inspiring videos. Quite an accomplishment. Now, with the latest RSA video, Sir Ken returns to delve deeper into [...]
≡ Category: Film, Music, Psychology | ≅ Leave a Comment
David Lynch has been practicing Transcendental Meditation for decades, and, last year, he interviewed another longtime TM practitioner – Sir Paul McCartney. The interview (find Part 1 above and Part 2 here) turned quickly to The Beatles, their involvement with the Maharishi Mahesh Yogi (guru of the TM movement), and their famous trip to his [...]
≡ Category: Education, Video - Arts & Culture, Video - Science | ≅ Leave a Comment
Readers of Open Culture will appreciate how video has become, in many ways, our newest vernacular—growing in popularity every day, and estimated to reach 90 percent of worldwide web traffic by 2013. Yet so little of our moving image heritage is actually online. As of October 2010, just single percentage points of the great collections [...]
≡ Category: Music | ≅ 1 Comment
Richard Grayson, an American composer and pianist, has a knack for improvising on the piano. Ask him to play Darth Vader’s theme from Star Wars in the style of Beethoven, and he has it covered. (Watch above.) The same goes for The Muppets’ Theme in the style of a Bach fugue; “Singin’ in the Rain” [...]
≡ Category: Books, e-books, Literature | ≅ 1 Comment
The Autobiography of Mark Twain (Vol. 1) hit the stands just yesterday, and already it stands atop the Amazon bestseller list, leapfrogging past Stieg Larsson, Bill Bryson, Jon Stewart, and even the latest, supposedly greatest American novelist, Jonathan Franzen. Although he died a century again, Twain has still got it. The 766 page autobiography published [...]
≡ Category: Math, Sci Fi, Science | ≅ 2 Comments
As you may have heard, mathematician Benoît B. Mandelbrot, the father of fractal geometry, died on Thursday in Cambridge, Mass. He was 85. You can read the full obit in The New York Times, and if you want to learn more about his work, let me resurface this documentary we featured not too long ago. [...]
≡ Category: Film, Life | ≅ 7 Comments
The Last Farm, a short Icelandic film directed by Rúnar Rúnarsson and starring Jón Sigurbjörnsson, is now being featured in the YouTube Screening Room. Nominated for an Academy Award for Live Action Short Film in 2006, the 20-minute production gets into some sobering yet inescapably universal issues – love, aging, family and death. And I’ll [...]
≡ Category: Media | ≅ Leave a Comment
The Internet has brought about a sea change in the way societies organize and operate. Few scholars anticipated the trend sooner, or articulated it with greater force and optimism, than Clay Shirky. In his 2008 book, Here Comes Everybody: The Power of Organizing without Organizations, Shirky described how new social structures were being created spontaneously as [...]
≡ Category: Art, Comedy | ≅ 3 Comments
Earlier this month, Jonathan McIntosh released a parody cartoon called “Donald Duck Meets Glenn Beck in Right Wing Radio Duck,” which artfully remixed 50 classic Disney cartoons from the 1930s to 1960s. And now comes the inevitable remixed response: “Mickey Mouse Discovers the Government Cartoon Conspiracy Against Glenn Beck.” The video ups the ante in [...]
≡ Category: Art, History | ≅ 1 Comment
The Astronomical Clock Tower, situated in Prague’s Old Town Square, just celebrated its 600th anniversary. And to help mark the occasion, artists projected visuals mappings onto the facade – ones that illuminated the history and symbolic significance of the tower for the crowd. These light shows are getting a little en vogue. Cambridge University recently [...]
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