The best free cultural & educational media on the web
The best free cultural & educational media on the web
≡ Category: Audio Books, e-books, Film, Language Lessons, Online Courses | ≅ 8 Comments
Santa left a new Kindle, iPad or other media player under your tree. He did his job. Now we’ll do ours. We’ll tell you how to fill those devices with free intelligent media — great books, movies, courses, and all of the rest. And if you didn’t get a new gadget, fear not. You can [...]
≡ Category: Audio Books, e-books, Literature | ≅ Leave a Comment
Neil Gaiman is one of the handful of writers who has made comics respectable over the past several decades. He has written some classic children’s stories, plus a novel that will be adapted by HBO. A great deal of his output, though, has been in the form of short stories, and we have pulled together some free [...]
≡ Category: Music, Television | ≅ 2 Comments
In 1952, John Cage composed his most controversial piece, 4′33,″ a four-and-a-half minute reflection on the sound of silence. Now fast forward eight years. It’s February, 1960, and we find the composer teaching his famous Experimental Composition courses at The New School in NYC, and paying a visit to the CBS game show “I’ve Got a Secret.” The TV show [...]
≡ Category: Life, Music | ≅ 2 Comments
In 1976 a youthful fan named Stuart sent John Lennon a six-page list of questions. The former Beatle responded with answers, along with a child-like drawing of a lamb standing on a cloud, saying, “Hi Stuart.” Stuart wanted to know a few things, like what sort of album Lennon was working on. “Until it’s been [...]
≡ Category: Literature | ≅ 1 Comment
“Civilization begins with distillation,” William Faulkner once said, and like many of the great writers of the 20th century — Ernest Hemingway, F. Scott Fitzgerald, James Joyce — the bard of Oxford, Mississippi certainly had a fondness for alcohol. Unlike many of the others, though, Faulkner liked to drink while he was writing. [...]
≡ Category: Art, Film, Video - Arts & Culture | ≅ Leave a Comment
In this video created by the Guardian, writer and award-winning documentary filmmaker Errol Morris talks about the nature of truth, art, and propaganda in photography. He draws examples from the photographs of Abu Ghraib and the Crimean War, both cited in his book Believing is Seeing, and he asks the viewer to consider a most fundamental [...]
≡ Category: Art, Books, Film | ≅ Leave a Comment
Coinciding with the release of Blade Runner in 1982, David Scroggy published the Blade Runner Sketchbook, a book with 100+ production drawings and artwork for Ridley Scott’s classic sci-fi film. The sketchbook features visual work by Scott himself, artist Mentor Huebner, and costume designer Charles Knode, but most notably a slew of drawings by artist, futurist, and illustrator Syd [...]
≡ Category: Sci Fi, Television | ≅ Leave a Comment
Let’s do the time warp today and revisit the Not-S0-Golden Age of American Television. The year was 1978. Star Wars fever still gripped America, and the Variety Show TV format wouldn’t say die. So, producing The Star Wars Holiday Special was a no-brainer. The two-hour show takes you inside the domestic world of Chewbacca and his [...]
≡ Category: Art, Literature | ≅ Leave a Comment
Like the children in his books, Maurice Sendak, at age 83, is doing the best he can to navigate a frightening and bewildering world. “We all have to find our way,” Sendak says in this revealing little film from the Tate museums. “If I could find my way through picture-making and book illustration, or whatever [...]
≡ Category: Animation, Film | ≅ 2 Comments
Orson Welles. A brilliant director. A talented actor. And not a bad narrator of animated films. We know one thing. The whole is often greater than the sum of the parts. So, today, we’re serving up three animated films narrated by Welles, plus some classic radio broadcasts. We start with an animated version of Plato’s [...]
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