George Orwell: Blogger

≡ Category: Literature |Comments

What makes a diary like a blog? The Orwell Prize is offering up a new answer to that familiar question in August when it fires up the Orwell Diaries, a blog that will post each entry from George Orwell’s private musings exactly 70 years after it was written. I like this idea because it combines [...]

Will Google Kill Science?

≡ Category: Google, Science |Comments

Not an obvious conclusion, I’ll agree. However, Chris Anderson, editor of Wired, presents the argument like this: as all sorts of data accumulate into a vast ocean of petabytes, our ability to synthesize it all into elegant theories and laws will disappear. The story is the cover of this month’s issue of Wired but I [...]

The Automated Publishing House

≡ Category: Books, Business, Foreign Language, Media, Technology |Comments

The New York Times has a great article on a professor of management science who has founded an almost completely automated publishing company. The 200,000 books he’s published sound, well, terrible, and terribly overpriced: “Among the books published under his name are ‘The Official Patient’s Sourcebook on Acne Rosacea’ ($24.95 and 168 pages long); ‘Stickler [...]

In Search of TV 2.0

≡ Category: Film, Media, Television, Video - Arts & Culture, Web/Tech |Comments

One of the things they promised us in the heyday of the 1990s Internet boom was the end of television and a brave new world of high quality video online, on demand. Well, we’re still waiting. Youtube is great for short clips, but not designed for the technical (or legal) challenge of serving up whole [...]

Happy St. Patrick’s Day!

≡ Category: Comedy, YouTube |Comments

A merry, musical St. Pat’s greeting to you from your Irish-American correspondent, presented by his three favorite muppets:

via BoingBoing

A New Media Scholar’s Dilemma

≡ Category: Literature, MIT, Media, Weblogs |Comments

For a graduate student in an English Ph.D. program, one of the big milestones on the road to the dissertation is the Oral Exam. In my case this involves five professors, a list of 60-80 books, and two hours in a (rhetorically) smoke-filled room. Since I’m working on contemporary literature and new media, one of [...]

Don’t Forget to Vote

≡ Category: Politics, Video - Politics/Society, YouTube |Comments

If you’re a resident of a Super Tuesday state, we hope you can find some time to pull the lever tomorrow. Also, we hope you’ll forgive (at least) one more political post before Super Tuesday. Whatever your political affiliations, the video below is a compelling example of new media at work. According to the New [...]

Open Sourcing Congress

≡ Category: Current Affairs, Politics, Web/Tech |Comments

The truism goes that laws and sausages are the two things you don’t want to see being made. Nevertheless, if more of us paid attention to what our congressional representatives are really up to (and let them know when they screw up), we’d probably be a little happier with how the system works overall. Two [...]

One Laptop Per Child vs. Intel

≡ Category: Business, MIT, Technology, Web/Tech |Comments

The New York Times ran a fascinating article today about the feud between Intel and the One Latop Per Child program run by MIT’s Nicholas Negroponte. If you haven’t heard about it, the initiative is intended to develop a reasonably priced ($200) laptop for primary school children in the third world. The model they’re selling [...]

The Future of Print

≡ Category: Literature, Media |Comments

WNYC’s latest On The Media (iTunes – Feed – Site) covers the crisis of traditional book publishing in a new media age. While Amazon rolls out the Kindle and more and more content comes out in pure digital form, we’re still publishing more books than ever before. One interesting note from the program is that [...]

Not The Daily Show

≡ Category: Television, Video - Politics/Society |Comments

As the weeks go on, more and more of us are starting to notice that Hollywood’s writers are on strike. One by one new television shows are running out of fresh material. But if you’re a fan of The Daily Show, (and, well, we are) you were hit practically on day one, since the topical [...]

Essential Books for the Critic’s Library

≡ Category: Blogs, Books |Comments

The National Book Critics Circle has a blog and they’ve asked some of the country’s best literary critics to list the “five books a critic believes reviewers should have in their libraries.” The series provides a new list every week, and so far the choices are interesting not just for the books picked (and some [...]

One Formula Thinking

≡ Category: Art, Philosophy, Science |Comments

Speaking of Einstein–have you ever wanted to explain the world on a napkin? The Edge, self-described as “an online collective of deep thinkers,” has teamed up with the Serpentine Gallery in London to participate in a month-long Experiment Marathon. The Serpentine has been asking leading scientists and thinkers “What Is Your Formula?” and the Edge [...]

A New Model for Investigative Journalism

≡ Category: Business, Current Affairs, Media |Comments

As we’ve discussed before on this blog, one of the major casualties in the shifting new media landscape is the traditional investigative journalist–someone with the time and resources to research in-depth stories. In response to this problem a new group called Pro Publica is proposing a novel economic model: hire the journalists into a foundation [...]

The Future of Collaborative Culture?

≡ Category: Media, Stanford, Technology |Comments

I just heard Jimmy Wales, founder of Wikipedia, speaking at Stanford Law School today. Wales is working on some new projects that he hopes will harness the community-driven collaboration of Wikipedia. He’s already had some success in branching out from the encyclopedia idea with Wikia, which is a “wiki farm” compiling information on a variety [...]

The World Without Us: Author Interview

≡ Category: Books, Current Affairs, Media, Science |Comments

Earlier this week I spoke on the phone with Alan Weisman, the author of The World Without Us. (See our initial piece on his book.) Alan was gracious enough to take some time out of his publicity schedule to share his thoughts on the book, the world, his writing process, and more. What follows is [...]

Newly Minted Genius: 2007 MacArthur Fellows

≡ Category: Current Affairs |Comments

The MacArthur Foundation recently announced its latest crop of “genius grant” recipients. Each winner receives $500,000 “with no strings attached” and they can use the money to live, to fund research, or to buy a very modest condo in the Bay Area. As usual, the recipients come from a wide range of fields and [...]

Halberstam’s The Coldest Winter

≡ Category: Books |Comments

David Halberstam’s no stranger to writing big books about big wars, and he reportedly thought of his final work, The Coldest Winter: America and the Korean War, as a “bookend” to his classic on Vietnam, The Best and the Brightest. The book comes out this week with a very unusual publicity blitz.
Halberstam died in a [...]

NBC Leaves the iTunes Fold

≡ Category: Apple, Television |Comments

Apple took the world of digital entertainment by storm when it started offering new television shows on iTunes in 2005. The big networks signed on (eventually) and it was suddenly possible to catch an episode of The Office or Lost for $1.99 on a video iPod or a PC.
NBC was one of the early adopters, [...]

A Blogging Scholarship

≡ Category: Blogs |Comments

An organization called College Scholarships is offering a $10,000 scholarship this year for a college student who blogs about “unique and interesting information about you and/or things you are passionate about.” We’re not shilling for a nomination here, but perhaps you know an aspiring blogger somewhere who could use the extra cash.
This contest raises an [...]

The Return of Dr. Strangelove?

≡ Category: Books, Current Affairs, Film |Comments

The Stanley Kubrick classic Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb centers around a Soviet doomsday device. If Russia is attacked by nuclear weapons, the device will set off countless nuclear bombs automatically, thereby rendering the Earth uninhabitable. It was dark humor when Peter Sellers brought it to life [...]

America’s Bloggiest Cities and Neighborhoods

≡ Category: Blogs, Weblogs |Comments

Steven Berlin Johnson, of Everything Bad Is Good For You fame, has been at work recently crunching numbers to come up with America’s most blog-tastic locales. The results may surprise you–based on “placeblogs,” Boston leads the cities chart and Clinton Hill, Brooklyn tops neighborhoods.
One aspect of Web 2.0 that seems to be just taking off [...]

The Rich Get Busy and the Poor Get Poorer

≡ Category: Books, Business, History |Comments

Gregory Clarke, an economic historian at UC Davis, offers an unusual take on the Industrial Revolution in his upcoming book, A Farewell to Alms. Most scholars argue that the changing institutions of industrialization–factories, corporations, cities–worked together to drag us humans into the modern world. Clarke turns that idea on its head.
As the New York Times [...]

The Fifteen Minute Book Machine

≡ Category: Books, Business, Media |Comments

A couple of years ago I met Jason Epstein in passing and he excitedly described his new project: a machine to print On Demand Books. The plan is finally bearing fruit: the Espresso Book Machine was demonstrated at the New York Public Library on Wednesday. Three of the machines are out in the wild, and [...]

The Worst Sentence Awards

≡ Category: Literature |Comments

Every year the folks at the Bulwer-Lytton Fiction Contest celebrate their love for bad prose by running “a whimsical literary competition that challenges entrants to compose the opening sentence to the worst of all possible novels.” They’ve just announced this year’s champion sentences and they’re well worth a read. The contest accepts entries year-round, [...]

Wolf Brother: Serial Literary Entertainment

≡ Category: Audio Books, Books, Literature |Comments

The Guardian Books Podcast has started offering an audiobook version of the young adult novel Wolf Brother as a serial podcast. The story is the first in a series of books by Michelle Paver called Chronicles of Ancient Darkness. It makes good audio since it’s gripping and not hard to follow (or get back into [...]

The Rise of the Cultureboxes, Part III: The iPhone

≡ Category: Apple, Media, Technology, Web/Tech |Comments

(Continued from Part II)
The most recent major foray into the world of cultureboxes comes in an entirely different size and market niche: the Apple iPhone. It may look different, but it has all the hallmarks of a culturebox. The iPhone wants to deliver video, audio and the best of the Web; it hopes to revolutionize [...]

The Rise of the Cultureboxes, Part 2: Tivo

≡ Category: Media, Technology, Television, Web/Tech |Comments

The online magazine Slate runs most of its arts and culture stories in a section called “Culturebox.” Ironically, it’s taken the consumer electronics industry several years to catch up, but now it seems like every new gadget is marketed as a culturebox, from the shiny iPhone to the pioneering Tivo to the hot-running Xbox 360. [...]

The Rise of the Cultureboxes, Part 1: The Xbox

≡ Category: Business, Media, Technology, Web/Tech |Comments

The online magazine Slate runs most of its arts and culture stories in a section called “Culturebox.” Ironically, it’s taken the consumer electronics industry several years to catch up, but now it seems like every new gadget is marketed as a culturebox, from the shiny iPhone to the pioneering Tivo to the hot-running Xbox 360. [...]

Radio Lab: A Great Science Podcast

≡ Category: Podcast Articles and Resources, Science |Comments

RadioLab, a science radio show created by WNYC in New York, is a little unusual for a public radio show. It comes out in short seasons of about five episodes. Each episode addresses a particular question in science through a wide lens–I found their most recently podcast show, on Morality, to be particularly fascinating. We’re [...]

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    Open Culture editor Dan Colman scours the web for the best cultural and educational media. He finds the books you want, the classes you need, and plenty of enlightenment in between.