The best free cultural & educational media on the web
The best free cultural & educational media on the web
≡ Category: Music | ≅ Leave a Comment
Somehow this flew below my radar. Back in November, James Wood, the Harvard lit professor and New Yorker staff writer, revisited his childhood idol – Keith Moon, the longtime (though now departed) drummer for The Who. In “The New Yorker Out Loud” podcast, Wood demonstrates – using his fingers – what makes Moon’s style so [...]
≡ Category: Comedy, Math, Video - Science | ≅ 2 Comments
Yesterday’s lackluster Academy Awards ceremony may have afforded you some unexpected time for contemplating life’s more urgent questions, such as the one British comedian Alan Davies pursues above:  How long is a piece of string? Watch Davies, who is also a frequent panelist on the popular Stephen Fry-hosted quiz show Quite Interesting, explore the riddle’s philosophical implications [...]
≡ Category: Life, Media, Television | ≅ 1 Comment
Mad Men brings us back to a bygone era, the early 60s, when alcohol flowed freely throughout the working day. (Watch this montage to get up to speed.) An act of historical revisionism, many might think. But, apparently not so. According to a piece in The New York Times, the show basically gets it right. [...]
≡ Category: Technology, Video - Science | ≅ 2 Comments
A rather different angle on the Discovery’s final launch. The view from 35,000 feet…. via BoingBoing
≡ Category: Art, Film | ≅ 1 Comment
Right in time for the Oscars. Gary Hecker is what you’d call a “Foley artist,” someone who specializes in creating everyday sounds for movies – the sound of horses galloping, swords being unsheathed, dirt crunching beneath cowboy boots. In short, the big and small sounds you hear (and take for granted) whenever you see a [...]
≡ Category: Life, Technology | ≅ Leave a Comment
Are we obsessed with Facebook? It’s hard to argue with the numbers presented visually in this artistic little video by Alex Trimpe. One data point that struck me (if true): 48% of young Americans learn about the news, about what’s happening in the world, through Facebook. A big shift in the way information gets into [...]
≡ Category: Art, Video - Arts & Culture | ≅ 2 Comments
Pete Eckert is blind, totally blind. But his disability (if you can call it that) hasn’t stopped him from expressing himself visually. As Pete explains in the video above, he has always been a visual person. And photography has become more than a creative outlet for Pete. It’s a personal form of artistic expression, the [...]
≡ Category: Film, Television | ≅ Leave a Comment
Bruce Lee’s acting career began on television in 1966, when he landed a part in The Green Hornet. (Watch his amazing audition here). But it took another five years before he gave his first (and only) television interview. For 25 minutes in December 1971, the martial arts star sat down with Pierre Berton, a Canadian [...]
≡ Category: Art, Video - Arts & Culture | ≅ Leave a Comment
In 1953, Willem De Kooning was one of the world’s most revered living painters, and Robert Rauschenberg was a talented rising star, just a year out of art school. In this clip, Rauschenberg tells of how, armed with nothing but chutzpah and a bottle of Jack Daniels, he knocked on De Kooning’s door and flat-out asked [...]
≡ Category: Google, Technology | ≅ 1 Comment
Garry Kasparov, still the highest-rated player in the history of chess, pulled through Google late last year and fielded questions from the Googlers. (Don’t miss Conan O’Brien’s hilarious riff on that term.) As you might expect, the questions often drifted back to Kasparov’s famous 1996-97 matches against IBM’s Deep Blue (a precursor to Watson) and [...]
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