This post comes to us via Wes Alwan, an occasional contributor to Open Culture.
A year-and-a-half ago, an old friend found me on Facebook and offered me a writing job and participation in a podcast. I took him up on both.

This week, The New York Times began a philosophy blog called The Stone, moderated by Simon Critchley. The series will address “issues both timely and timeless – art, war, ethics, gender, popular culture and more.

Recently a friend of John Meroney at The Atlantic discovered this 1954 episode of General Electric Theater featuring Ronald Reagan and James Dean.

Discovery Channel’s Life series has been receiving a lot of rave reviews for its stunning footage of plants and animals.  This excerpt showing creeper plants climbing trees lives up to the hype. Leave it to a little time-lapse video–not to mention a voice-over by Oprah Winfrey–to blur the line between plant and animal.

I had no idea that Marlon Brando was much of a writer, but this 1955 letter to Tennessee Williams is superb. Perhaps I just can’t help identifying him with Stanley Kowalski of the “Napoleonic code,” Stella!” and “Hoity-toity, describin’ me like a ape.

Since 2007, Apple has offered universities around the world a way to distribute educational media via iTunes U.

A recent Frontline documentary, Digital Nation: A Life on the Virtual Frontier, asks just this question–particularly with regard to education. Subjects include attention span, multi-tasking, and the doubts of one-time technology evangelist Douglas Rushkoff.

For three years, English teacher Jerome Burg has been using Google Earth to teach literature. Each “Lit Trip” involves mapping the movements of characters over a plot’s timeline and providing excerpts, pictures, and links at each location.

Google Earth’s historical imagery feature now includes aerial footage of the aftermath of World War II, allowing users to comprehend the extent of post-war destruction by comparing photos of cities as they are today to those of bombed out cities immediately after the war.
Here’s Warsaw in 1935, devastated in 1943, and restored today.