The best free cultural & educational media on the web
The best free cultural & educational media on the web
≡ Category: Apple, Education | ≅ 3 Comments
In late October, Computerworld unearthed a lengthy interview with Steve Jobs originally recorded back in 1995, when Jobs was at NeXT Computer, and still two years away from his triumphant return to Apple. Filmed as part of an oral history project, the wide-ranging interview begins with Jobs’ childhood and his early school days, and it [...]
≡ Category: Music, Television | ≅ Leave a Comment
Kellogg’s first started marketing Rice Krispies way back in 1928, and, ever since, we’ve grown accustomed to wholesome advertising campaigns that feature the cartoon mascots Snap, Crackle and Pop. (See ad from 1939.) For a brief moment in 1964, all of this wholesomeness was put aside when the J. Walter Thompson ad agency worked with [...]
≡ Category: Life, Literature, Philosophy | ≅ 2 Comments
Death masks — they have been around since the days of King Tut in Ancient Egypt, and (perhaps) Agamemnon and Cassandra in Ancient Greece. A way to remember the character and expressions of the dead, this memorial practice continued right down through the Middle Ages when wax and plaster became the materials of choice. Today, we’re left with [...]
≡ Category: Music | ≅ 1 Comment
Cellist Yo-Yo Ma is famous for his eclecticism. From Baroque chamber music to traditional Chinese melodies, Ma delights in dissolving barriers. His latest genre-hopping project is The Goat Rodeo Sessions, an inventive bluegrass collaboration with bassist Edgar Meyer, fiddler Stuart Duncan and Mandolinist Chris Thile. Vocalist Aoife O’Donovan joins the group on two songs. The expression “goat [...]
≡ Category: Current Affairs, Music | ≅ 1 Comment
First came Willie Nelson, Pete Seeger, and Arlo Guthrie, and now Crosby & Nash (sans Stills). Playing yesterday at Occupy Wall Street, their short set included Military Madness, What Are Their Names, They Want It All, Teach Your Children (above), and Long Time Gone, which they sang during their heyday at Woodstock more than 40 [...]
≡ Category: Animation, Math, Music | ≅ Leave a Comment
“Music,” Gottfried Leibniz famously said, “is the pleasure the human mind experiences from counting without being aware that it is counting.” Computer artist Alexander Chen makes this pleasure visible with Baroque.Me, his geometric computer animation of the Prelude to Johann Sebastian Bach’s Cello Suite No. 1 in G major. Chen visualized the piece by imagining [...]
≡ Category: History, Stanford, Technology | ≅ Leave a Comment
As the French like to say, plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose. The more things change, the more they stay the same. Before there was Twitter, Facebook and Google+ (click to follow us), Europeans living in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries had to deal with their own version of information overload. Emerging postal [...]
≡ Category: Film | ≅ Leave a Comment
Speaking at an AFI Seminar in 1970, Alfred Hitchcock revealed the essential ingredients that went into making his films. When he stripped everything away, what Hitchcock really cared about was creating suspense films (not mystery films) and getting the suspense element right. In the famous clip above, the director explains why suspenseful scenes have to simmer for [...]
≡ Category: Google | ≅ Leave a Comment
Just a very quick fyi: Today, we launched an official Google+ page for Open Culture. It’s another way to get intelligent media delivered to your digital doorstep each day, and to share it with friends. If you don’t have a Google+ account, you can create one here, and Wired has a nice little primer on using the [...]
≡ Category: Music | ≅ Leave a Comment
1959. It was a pivotal year for jazz. Musicians started breaking away from bebop, exploring new, experimental forms. And four absolutely canonical LPs were recorded that year: Kind of Blue by Miles Davis; Time Out by Dave Brubeck; Mingus Ah Um by Charles Mingus; and The Shape of Jazz to Come by Ornette Coleman. 1959 also found America on [...]
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