The best free cultural & educational media on the web
The best free cultural & educational media on the web
≡ Category: History, Life | ≅ Leave a Comment
Martin Luther King Jr. delivered his last speech, known colloquially as his “I’ve Been to the Mountaintop” speech, in Memphis, Tennessee on April 3, 1968. The next day, he would be assassinated. The full address (Part 1 &Â Part 2) ranges widely. It sweeps through European and American history, eventually bringing us into 1960s America, a [...]
≡ Category: History, Literature, Physics | ≅ 1 Comment
This coming fall, Mark Peterson, a physics professor at Mount Holyoke College, will publish a new book where he makes a rather curious argument: Back in 1588, a young Galileo presented two lectures before the Florentine Academy. And there he laid the groundwork for his theoretical physics when he called into question the accepted measurements of [...]
≡ Category: History, Politics | ≅ 3 Comments
So much for the Golden Age of Civility in America – but at least it was said with a little smile and the ensuing debate had some substance… Note: A reader suggests in our comments that Buckley was jokingly alluding here to a previous confrontational moment with Gore Vidal, and it sounds about right. (“I’ll sock [...]
Shinichi Maruyama, a Japanese photographer now living in New York, uses simply his hands, glasses of water and a Phase One P45 camera to create elegant water sculptures. “No matter how many times I repeat the same process of throwing [water] in the air, I never achieve the same result. And I am so fascinated [...]
≡ Category: Film | ≅ 2 Comments
In the late 1930s, RKO Radio Pictures offered Orson Welles, still an untried movie director, a very hefty two-picture deal. And he didn’t disappoint, at least not artistically. His first movie out of the gate, Citizen Kane (1941), fared neither well nor poorly at the box office. But today you will find it topping nearly every list [...]
≡ Category: Film, Literature, Sci Fi | ≅ Leave a Comment
This short trailer will give you a little taste of Lovecraft: Fear of the Unknown – the 2008 documentary that’s now fully available online. Named the Best Documentary at the 2008 Comic-Con International Independent Film Festival, the film revisits the life and writings of H.P. Lovecraft, the father of modern horror fiction. And it features important contemporary artists (from [...]
≡ Category: MIT, Online Courses | ≅ 2 Comments
This week, MIT’s OpenCourseWare project launched OCW Scholar, a new series of courses “designed for independent learners who have few additional resources available to them.” To date, MIT has given students access to isolated materials from MIT courses. Now, with this new initiative, lifelong learners can work with a more rounded set of resources. OWC Scholar [...]
≡ Category: Music | ≅ 2 Comments
Are you blessed with a musical brain? If you care to find out, the BBC is now running an experiment – How Musical Are You? – that assesses your overall relationship with music. It includes questionnaires and tests designed to see whether you can group together different musical styles, memorize tunes and recognize the beat [...]
≡ Category: Media | ≅ Leave a Comment
This question ran through my mind just yesterday. No, not how does Malcolm Gladwell see the world? But, rather, what does it feel like to inhabit the mind of people who think and see the world in entirely different ways? The question can be a big existential thought experiment. Or, it turns out, it can [...]
≡ Category: Books, Literature | ≅ Leave a Comment
We take you back to 1958 when Ian Fleming, creator of the great spymaster character James Bond, meets up with Raymond Chandler, America’s foremost writer of hard-boiled detective fiction. The two authors, who read and admired each other’s work, sat down for drinks one day and got down to talking about villains (real and imagined) [...]
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