The best free cultural & educational media on the web
The best free cultural & educational media on the web
≡ Category: Film, Music | ≅ 1 Comment
In 1981, film producer Bruce Ricker had a chance encounter with director and cinematographer Christian Blackwood on the streets of New York. Ricker had just released a documentary on Kansas City jazz, called The Last of the Blue Devils, and Blackwood told him that he too had done a little work on jazz. When Ricker went to [...]
≡ Category: Film, Literature, Poetry | ≅ 1 Comment
Look what the vintage video gods have delivered today. Filmed in 1965, the black and white documentary Ladies and Gentlemen… Mr. Leonard Cohen introduces viewers to a young Leonard Cohen. Then only 30 years old (and looking a little like Dustin Hoffman), Cohen had already established himself as a poet and novelist. But his legendary [...]
≡ Category: Music | ≅ 1 Comment
“Time Hurries on,” sings Paul Simon in this early Simon and Garfunkel performance, “and the leaves that are green turn to brown.” The clip is from a 1966 Dutch television program, “Twien.” Â The duo were performing songs from their second album, Sounds of Silence. “The Leaves That Are Green” is one you don’t hear much [...]
≡ Category: Astronomy, Physics | ≅ Leave a Comment
Sean Carroll, a physics professor at Caltech, has a knack for making science publicly accessible. He writes regularly for the blog Cosmic Variance, and you have perhaps seen him on the History Channel, Science Channel, or The Colbert Report. Yesterday, he announced that five lectures he gave at CERN now appear online, and it all begins [...]
≡ Category: History, Music, Politics, Television | ≅ Leave a Comment
In September 1976, Jimmy Carter and Gerald Ford squared off in a presidential debate (watch here), and the following day, the legendary communication theorist Marshall McLuhan appeared on the TODAY show, then hosted by Tom Brokaw, to offer some almost real-time analysis of the debate. The first televised presidential debate was famously held in 1960, [...]
≡ Category: Film, Television | ≅ 3 Comments
Sir Ian McKellen shows why he has been nominated for an Academy Award not once, but two times. The actor (Lord of the Rings, King Lear) reads a tire repair manual in dramatic voice  … and, of course, pulls it off — shades of Peter Sellers performing The Beatles in Shakespearean mode and Richard Dreyfuss giving a dramatic reading [...]
≡ Category: Business, Current Affairs, Economics | ≅ 4 Comments
Joseph Stiglitz teaches at the Columbia Business School and Columbia’s Department of Economics and, of course, won the Nobel Prize in Economics in 2001. The money quote from his appearance had less to do with economics per se and more with democracy: “We have too many regulations stopping democracy, and not enough regulations stopping Wall Street from misbehaving.” [...]
≡ Category: Art | ≅ 2 Comments
In the state-controlled propaganda art of revolutionary China, sunflowers carried a blunt symbolism: Mao Zedong was the sun and the Chinese people were the sunflowers, all facing one direction to receive the nourishing rays. A generation later, in the work of Chinese artist Ai Weiwei, the symbolism is a bit more subversive. In 2010 Ai launched a [...]
≡ Category: Books, Google | ≅ 1 Comment
Last Wednesday, Liberian peace activist Leymah Gbowee paid a visit to Google to talk about her memoir, Mighty Be Our Powers: How Sisterhood, Prayer, and Sex Changed a Nation at War. Two days later, she was awarded the 2011 Nobel Peace Prize along with Ellen Johnson Sirleaf and Tawakkol Karman. The Googlers provide a quick introduction to her [...]
≡ Category: Psychology | ≅ Leave a Comment
This vintage stunt from a 1962 episode of Candid Camera makes for a good laugh. But it also captures something important about human psychology — something that social psychologist Philip Zimbardo, famous for his Stanford Prison Experiment, describes on a website related to his 2007 book The Lucifer Effect: Understanding How Good People Turn Evil. He [...]
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