The best free cultural & educational media on the web
The best free cultural & educational media on the web
≡ Category: Philosophy | ≅ 1 Comment
Alan Watts moved from his native London to New York in 1938, then eventually headed west, to San Francisco in the early 1950s. On the left coast, he started teaching at the Academy of Asian Studies, wrote his bestseller Way of Zen (among many other books), and began delivering a long-running series of talks about [...]
≡ Category: Animation, Music | ≅ Leave a Comment
Later this year, Barry JC Purves will debut a puppet animation film that interprets the life and work of Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky, the great Russian composer. You can’t watch any final footage quite yet. But you can enjoy a timelapse video that brings you inside the actual animation process. Here’s a quick description of what you’re [...]
≡ Category: Online Courses | ≅ 1 Comment
You have got to hand it to The Great Courses (sometimes also called The Teaching Company). Based in Chantilly, VA, the company has traveled across America, recording professors lecturing on great topics. They have roughly 350 courses in their catalog, market them aggressively with millions of print materials and emails, and generate $110 million in annual [...]
During the early 1960s, Andy Warhol became an international celebrity when he produced his iconic Pop Art works – 32 Campbell’s Soup Cans, the Marilyn Monroe Diptych, Green Coca Cola Bottles and all of the rest. The provocative artist had achieved more than 15 minutes of fame — he coined that phrase too — and it was time for something new. [...]
≡ Category: History, Life, Media | ≅ 7 Comments
The first day was all smoke, debris, organized mayhem, and pure disbelief. The next day, reality hit home. That’s when you walked out in the streets (in my case, Brooklyn), and saw your first missing person sign, one of hundreds you’d see over the coming months in Manhattan and the outer boroughs. The numbers you [...]
≡ Category: Audio Books, e-books, Film, Online Courses | ≅ 3 Comments
With Labor Day behind us, it’s officially time to head back to school. That applies not just to kids, but to you. No matter what your age, no matter where you live, no matter what your prior level of education, you can continue deepening your knowledge in areas old and new. And it has never [...]
≡ Category: Books, Literature | ≅ 1 Comment
In the winter of 2010, Ian Ruschel paid homage to the Argentinian writer Jorge Luis Borges, shooting Buenos Aires: Las Calles de Borges in the streets of Argentina’s capital. This evocative little film, shot with a Canon 5D, weaves in footage of Borges talking about “the task of art,” which comes from the 1998 documentary, [...]
≡ Category: Animation, Film, History | ≅ Leave a Comment
During World War II, Walt Disney entered into a contract with the US government to develop 32 animated shorts. Nearly bankrupted by Fantasia (1940), Disney needed to refill its coffers, and making American propaganda films didn’t seem like a bad way to do it. On numerous occasions, Donald Duck was called upon to deliver moral [...]
≡ Category: Audio Books, Books, Literature | ≅ 1 Comment
Six years before he published his breakthrough novel, Naked Lunch (1959), William S. Burroughs broke into the literary scene with Junky (sometimes also called Junkie), a candid, semi-autobiographical account of an “unredeemed drug addict.” It’s safe to say that the book wouldn’t have seen the light of day if Allen Ginsberg hadn’t taken Burroughs under [...]
≡ Category: Film | ≅ 1 Comment
Frankie — he’s only 15 and already getting ready for fatherhood. He has the best of intentions, that’s for sure. But everything around him — the lack of a father in his own life, institutions that shut him out, the gravitational pull of wayward friends, the folly of youth — make it unlikely that this story turns [...]
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