The best free cultural & educational media on the web
The best free cultural & educational media on the web
≡ Category: Film | ≅ 1 Comment
Over at Escape Into Life, Luke Grundy directs us to a marvelous short film that is as deceptively simple as its title would suggest.  At first viewing we thought the effect of LA filmmaker Douglas Burgoff’s “Animals” should be credited mostly to the haunting music by famed British composer Michael Nyman. But then we watched it [...]
≡ Category: Literature | ≅ Leave a Comment
Martin Amis will never win a popularity contest. Nor did Norman Mailer. Back in 1960, Mailer famously stabbed his wife after a dinner party in New York City, and even when things weren’t so extreme, he was often behaving badly. Take for example this appearance on The Dick Cavett Show with Gore Vidal in 1971. It’s [...]
≡ Category: Life, Literature | ≅ 69 Comments
A few days ago, The Guardian published its list of the 100 Greatest Non-Fiction Books of all time. The collection spans biography, art, philosophy, history and several other hefty categories, and, for the most part, there’s not much for anyone seeking light summer reading, unless you’re the sort who regularly brings Kant, Hume, Herodotus, and [...]
≡ Category: Life, Television | ≅ Leave a Comment
Conan O’Brien’s speech at Dartmouth’s graduation last weekend — that’s a hard act to follow. But Stephen Colbert put on a very good show Friday at Northwestern University, his alma mater (Class of 1986). Best Joke: We didn’t have cell phones [during my days at Northwestern]. If you made plans to meet someone in a [...]
≡ Category: Music | ≅ 1 Comment
Clarence Clemons, the saxophonist who played alongside Bruce Springsteen for four decades, passed away today at 69. The Big Man and his sound will be missed. Above, a simple mournful reminder of what we’ll be going without: First up, a soulful solo from “Jungleland,” performed in Milwaukee back in March 2008. And then a return [...]
≡ Category: Film, Literature | ≅ 2 Comments
It’s hard to do cinematic justice to any good novel, let alone the greatest of Russia’s many great novels, Leo Tolstoy’s War & Peace. But Soviet director Sergei Bondarchuk somehow managed to pull it off. Reviewing Bondarchuk’s film back in 1969, a young Roger Ebert wrote: “War and Peace” is the definitive epic of all time. It [...]
≡ Category: Art, TED Talks | ≅ 2 Comments
Arkansas-born artist Shea Hembrey kicks off his TED talk by confessing to a hick childhood in which he and his sister “would compete to see who could eat the most squirrel brains.” That modest joke sets the stage for his introduction of Seek, a project Hembrey conceived in response to his disappointment with several exhibits of [...]
≡ Category: Poetry, Video - Arts & Culture | ≅ Leave a Comment
What do you get for the father who has everything? How about a healthy dose of canonical resentment, in the form of Sylvia Plath’s most famous poem, read by Plath herself, from our list of Cultural Icons? Or, if you’d prefer something that says “I love you” with a little less rancor, you might want to go [...]
≡ Category: Current Affairs, Video - Science | ≅ Leave a Comment
In 2005, Vice President Dick Cheney personally engineered a loophole in the U.S. energy bill exempting companies that use an oil- and gas-drilling procedure known as hydraulic fracturing, or “fracking,” from regulation under the Safe Drinking Water Act. As a result, tons of diesel fuel and assorted chemicals–some of them toxic, like benzyne–are injected at [...]
≡ Category: Beat & Tweets | ≅ 1 Comment
These cultural goodies (and others) flowed through our Twitter stream during the past week. Find us at @openculture … or Like us on Facebook. Being Ernest: John Walsh unravels the mystery behind Hemingway’s suicide. Listening to free jazz music online. A guide by the jazz critic for NPR’s Fresh Air. 230 Cultural Icons: Great thinkers, artists, writers, musicians [...]
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