The best free cultural & educational media on the web
The best free cultural & educational media on the web
≡ Category: Film, Literature | ≅ Leave a Comment
In 1932, as America slipped deeper into the Great Depression, Raymond Chandler lost his job as an oil company executive. Drinking and absenteeism didn’t help. So it was time to improvise. Soon enough, the 45 year old reinvented himself, becoming America’s foremost writer of hard-boiled detective fiction. During the 30s, he wrote 20 stories for pulp magazines [...]
≡ Category: Animation, Film, Literature | ≅ 1 Comment
E.B. White, beloved author of Charlotte’s Web, Stuart Little, and the classic English writing guide The Elements of Style (with William Strunk), would have been 102 today. He passed away in 1985, after a nearly sixty-year career writing for The New Yorker, and winning several literary awards, including a Pulitzer prize, a Presidential Medal of Honor, and the prestigious [...]
≡ Category: Comedy, Current Affairs, Education | ≅ 3 Comments
Garry Trudeau has taken on creationism before. He’s doing it again, this time commenting on the oxymoronic “Louisiana Science Education Act,” which allows the teaching of creationism in the public classroom. You can view Trudeau’s cartoon in full, and in high res here.
≡ Category: Film | ≅ Leave a Comment
Back in 1915, John Buchan published his gripping adventure novel The Thirty-Nine Steps (find free ebook here). Two decades later, in 1935, Alfred Hitchcock directed the first of four film adaptations based on the book, and it’s by far the best. We won’t revisit the plot. But we will tell you that Hitchcock’s classic, starring Robert [...]
≡ Category: Beat & Tweets | ≅ 3 Comments
What cultural goodies did we tweet (and re-tweet) on our Twitter stream during the past week? Here are some highlights. Follow us on Twitter at @openculture … or Like us on Facebook. We’ll keep you plugged in… A Fresh Look at Flannery O’Connor. You may know her prose, but have you seen her cartoons? Kafka’s “A Message From [...]
≡ Category: Film, Video - Arts & Culture | ≅ Leave a Comment
Almost 35 years ago, sometime in the late 70s, the filmmakers Errol Morris and Werner Herzog made a bet. Correction: At the time, Herzog was a filmmaker, and already a star, but Errol Morris was just a guy obsessed with the idea of making a film about a pet cemetery. ‘I don’t believe you have [...]
≡ Category: Music, Science, TED Talks | ≅ Leave a Comment
Canadian “geek rapper” Baba Brinkman first garnered popular attention with a well-received, well-reviewed rap adaptation of Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival. (To get a sense of the project, check out this brief scene from “The Pardoner’s Tale.”) And we also previously featured his brilliant work on Macmillan’s What’s Your English? campaign. Brinkman has [...]
≡ Category: Film, Television | ≅ Leave a Comment
The Dziga Vertov Group (1968-1972) was a film collective co-founded by Jean-Luc Godard and Jean-Pierre Gorin, named after the pioneering documentary filmmaker Dziga Vertov. Anti-auteur, anti-verité, anti-bourgeois and anti-capitalist, the DVG was also the most radical of the French film collectives, and so, of course, it managed to land a great advertising gig. But don’t call it [...]
≡ Category: Online Courses, Philosophy, Politics | ≅ 1 Comment
Stephen B. Smith, a political science professor at Yale University since 1984, has made available a 24-lecture course, Introduction to Political Philosophy, which covers Plato, Aristotle, Machiavelli, Hobbes, Locke, Rousseau, and Tocqueville. His approach is highly literary. In his Republic lectures, for instance, he spends a good chunk of the time discussing the metaphors and [...]
≡ Category: Life, Music | ≅ 2 Comments
What can I say? I’m a sucker for these feel-good moments. This past weekend, Adam Bevell, who lost his sight more than two decades ago, attended his 20th U2 concert in Nashville. Throughout the show, he held up a sign that read “Blind Guitar Player: Bring Me Up!” And eventually Bono took him up on [...]
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