The best free cultural & educational media on the web
The best free cultural & educational media on the web
≡ Category: Music | ≅ 1 Comment
In 1977, just a short month before Bing Crosby died, the 40s crooner hosted David Bowie, the glam rocker, on his Christmas show. The awkwardness of the meeting is palpable. An older, crusty Crosby had no real familiarity with the younger, androgynous Bowie, and Bowie wasn’t crazy about singing The Little Drummer Boy. So, shortly before the [...]
≡ Category: Music | ≅ 4 Comments
[Editor's note: Before you do anything else, start the video, mouse over it, and click the little snowflake icon along the bottom right. YouTube has introduced this feature for the holiday season. Slowly falling snow seems to fit the mood of the song.] The jazz trumpeter and singer Chet Baker was born on this day [...]
≡ Category: Music, Physics, Random | ≅ Leave a Comment
Last week, the reports about Higgs Boson, otherwise called the God particle, put CERN and the Large Hadron Collider back into the news, leading some to ask: What exactly are Higgs and the Collider all about? We’re glad you asked. And what better way to answer that question than with a fly, little rap by Kate McAlpine (aka Alpinekat) [...]
≡ Category: Audio Books, Books, e-books, Physics | ≅ 101 Comments
A Reddit.com user posed the question to Neil deGrasse Tyson: “Which books should be read by every single intelligent person on the planet?” Below, you will find the book list offered up by the astrophysicist, director of the Hayden Planetarium, and popularizer of science. Where possible, we have included links to free versions of the books, all [...]
≡ Category: Film, Literature | ≅ 1 Comment
F. Scott Fitzgerald died on this day in 1940. It was a Saturday afternoon in Hollywood. Fitzgerald was eating a chocolate bar and reading the Princeton Alumni Weekly, which had just arrived in the mail, when suddenly he rose from his armchair, reached out for a marble mantelpiece, and collapsed onto the floor in a [...]
≡ Category: Online Courses, Physics | ≅ Leave a Comment
As The New York Times noted in a 2007 profile, Walter Lewin long had a cult following at MIT. But when his free courses went viral on the web (find them in the Physics section of our big collection of Free Online Courses), the physics prof became an “international Internet guru,” the first star of the [...]
≡ Category: Film | ≅ Leave a Comment
Ding, dong, Kim Jong-il is dead. Reading The New York Times obit, one little piece of the dictator’s insane world stood out for us: Short and round, he wore elevator shoes, oversize sunglasses and a bouffant hairdo — a Hollywood stereotype of the wacky post-cold-war dictator. Mr. Kim himself was fascinated by film. He orchestrated [...]
≡ Category: Film | ≅ Leave a Comment
Ingmar Bergman is usually remembered for the intensely serious nature of his films. Death, anguish, the absence of God–his themes can be pretty gloomy. So it might come as a surprise to learn that Bergman once directed a series of rather silly commercials for a soap company. In 1951 the Swedish film industry went on [...]
≡ Category: MIT, Online Courses, Stanford | ≅ 5 Comments
It happens at least a few times a day. Students look through our list of 400Â Free Online Courses, and ask us whether they can get a certificate for taking a class. And, unfortunately, our answer has been no — no, you can’t. But that may be about to change. Earlier this fall, Stanford launched a [...]
≡ Category: Music | ≅ 11 Comments
You could call it the magical mystery chord. The opening clang of the Beatles’ 1964 hit, “A Hard Day’s Night,” is one of the most famous and distinctive sounds in rock and roll history, and yet for a long time no one could quite figure out what it was. In this fascinating clip from the [...]
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