The best free cultural & educational media on the web
The best free cultural & educational media on the web
≡ Category: Music | ≅ 3 Comments
The gifted guitarist, singer and songwriter Jeff Buckley would have turned 45 years old today. As a young boy growing up in Southern California, Buckley’s first musical obsession was Led Zeppelin’s Physical Graffiti. His mother remembers him playing the record so often the grooves wore out. The tables were turned in 1994 when Buckley released his [...]
≡ Category: Language Lessons, Yale | ≅ 4 Comments
During the 1980s, Pierre Capretz, a Yale professor, developed French in Action, a French immersion program that featured textbooks, workbooks, and a 52-episode television series. Aired on PBS, the television series gained a devoted following and, years later, a 25th anniversary celebration at Yale asked the question: Is it fair to say that French in Action [...]
≡ Category: Art, Video - Science | ≅ 3 Comments
Alexander Tsiaras has made a career of using advances in visualization technology to offer vivid tours of the human body. His books have taken readers inside the human heart, the kidneys and vascular system, and also human reproduction. Back in 2002, Tsiaras published From Conception to Birth: A Life Unfolds, a book that offers a “visual diary of fetal [...]
≡ Category: Music | ≅ 2 Comments
The Copenhagen Philharmonic Orchestra dates all the way back to 1843, making it one of the oldest professional symphony orchestras around. But it’s not so old that it can’t partake in the contemporary flash mob trend. Earlier this year, they broke out some Ravel’s Bolero at Copenhagen’s Central Station. Feel free to add it to a playlist [...]
≡ Category: Music | ≅ Leave a Comment
Charles Mingus, the innovative jazz musician, was known for having a bad temper. He once got so irritated with a heckler that he ended up trashing his $20,000 bass. Another time, when a pianist didn’t get things right, Mingus reached right inside the piano and ripped the strings out with his bare hands — a true [...]
≡ Category: Current Affairs, Film | ≅ 1 Comment
Werner Herzog doesn’t work under any illusions. In this Studio Q interview, the filmmaker tells Jian Ghomeshi that “movies don’t change things.” “Even influential documentaries like Inside Job “do not really change the course of our lives.” And that applies to his latest film, Into the Abyss, which takes a Dostoyevskian look at a triple [...]
≡ Category: Comedy, Music, Television | ≅ Leave a Comment
Here’s a time capsule from a parallel universe: Tom Waits in 1977, performing “The Piano Has Been Drinking” on Fernwood Tonight (otherwise called Fernwood 2Night). The short-lived TV series, set in a fictional Fernwood, Ohio, was created by Norman Lear as a spin-off of the mock soap opera Mary Hartman, Mary Hartman. Martin Mull played Barth Gimble, [...]
≡ Category: Film, Music | ≅ Leave a Comment
In 1958, jazz’s place in American culture was changing. It was climbing out of the smokey nightclubs and into the sunny embrace of the bourgeoisie. A younger force, rock and roll, was starting to push it aside. That sense of transition is preserved in Jazz on a Summer’s Day, photographer Bert Stern‘s film of the [...]
≡ Category: Apple, iPad, iPhone, Stanford | ≅ 4 Comments
Back in 2009, Stanford University started recording lectures given in its iPhone Application Development course and then placing them on iTunes, making them free for anyone to view. The course hit a million downloads in a matter of weeks, and now, two years later, here’s where we stand. The course remains the most popular item on [...]
≡ Category: History | ≅ 15 Comments
It all started as a thought experiment on Reddit.com when a user posed the question: “Could I destroy the entire Roman Empire during the reign of Augustus if I traveled back in time with a modern U.S. Marine infantry battalion or MEU?” Then the Reddit user offered a more precise scenario: Let’s say we go [...]
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