The best free cultural & educational media on the web
The best free cultural & educational media on the web
≡ Category: Business, Current Affairs, Economics | ≅ Leave a Comment
Loudon Wainwright III has released a new album, Songs for the New Depression, that fittingly features “The Krugman Blues,” an homage to the Princeton, Nobel Prize-winning economist, Paul Krugman, who has documented America’s economic spiral in The New York Times. You can watch the Krugman Blues above, and get the full album at Wainwright’s web [...]
≡ Category: Current Affairs, Science, TED Talks | ≅ 3 Comments
The major TED conference wrapped up late last week. And now the videos start to roll out. Above Bill Gates (to quote TED) “unveils his vision for the world’s energy future, describing the need for miracles to avoid planetary catastrophe and explaining why he’s backing a dramatically different type of nuclear reactor. The necessary goal? [...]
≡ Category: Current Affairs, Law, Politics | ≅ Leave a Comment
Public confidence in the U.S. House and Senate is at an all-time low, and, after last week’s Supreme Court decision, it’s bound to sink even lower. On January 19th (the day before the decision), Harvard law professor Lawrence Lessig returned to Stanford and highlighted the degree to which “institutional corruption” — in the form of [...]
≡ Category: Current Affairs, History | ≅ Leave a Comment
Jared Diamond, the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Guns, Germs & Steel (and Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed), offers some timely thoughts on why Haiti, once a fairly prosperous country, has sunk into enduring poverty — a condition not comparatively shared by its neighbor on the same island, the Dominican Republic. According to Diamond, Haiti’s [...]
≡ Category: Business, Current Affairs, Online Courses, Yale | ≅ 1 Comment
Robert Shiller, who predicted the stock market crash earlier this decade and the bursting of the housing bubble in 2008, has a unique understanding of the financial markets and behavioral economics. In this free course provided by Yale University, Shiller demystifies the financial markets and explains “the theory of finance and its relation to the [...]
≡ Category: Business, Current Affairs, Economics | ≅ 2 Comments
Peter Singer, an Australian-born philosopher who teaches at Princeton, created the animal rights movement back in the 1970s, and, more recently, launched a campaign to end world poverty. One can’t contemplate poverty without also considering greed, and that brings us to the clip above. Interviewed in 2009, Singer suggests that greed drives us biologically (as [...]
≡ Category: Current Affairs, History, Stanford | ≅ Leave a Comment
What would Martin Luther King Jr. think about America in 2010? Few would know better than Clayborne Carson, the Stanford historian who directs the Martin Luther King, Jr. Research and Education Institute. In this talk, Carson describes MLK’s likely thoughts about America during the Great Recession. King cared deeply about economic justice, and it’s clear [...]
≡ Category: Current Affairs, Politics, Religion, Yale | ≅ 4 Comments
After he left office in 2007, Tony Blair went across the pond and spent time teaching at Yale. Exit Prime Minister Blair. Enter Professor Blair. During the 2008-09 academic year, Blair and Miroslav Volf co-taught “Faith and Globalization,” a course designed to help students understand the two intertwined forces shaping our world. In some ways, religion [...]
≡ Category: Business, Current Affairs, Economics | ≅ 2 Comments
What if people behaved like banks? Or, more precisely, what if individuals holding “underwater” mortgages stopped following the social norms of ‘personal responsibility’ and ‘promise-keeping’ and instead acted like capitalist players in a free market? Most would dump their sinking mortgages and walk away. That’s the finding of Brent White, a law professor at the University of [...]
≡ Category: Current Affairs, Life, Television | ≅ 7 Comments
David Simon once called his HBO series, The Wire, “a political tract masquerading as a cop show.” Think of it as a five season, 3600 minute, artistic depiction of the escalating breakdown of urban society. The show is art. But it is also life in the biggest sense. And it’s why some thinkers have likened [...]
≡ Category: Business, Current Affairs, Politics | ≅ Leave a Comment
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When the global financial system collapsed last year, This American Life and its sister program, Planet Money (iTunes - RSS Feed - Web Site) began doing something that few others could pull off. They took very complex problems and made them understandable, often demystifying difficult concepts in a reliably engaging way. Now, they’re at it [...]
≡ Category: Current Affairs, Economics | ≅ Leave a Comment
Here we are. One year after the fall of Lehman Brothers. And here we have Michael Lewis, the author of Liar’s Poker, talking about his next book – The Big Short: Inside the Doomsday Machine (2010) — that looks at those people who actually understood that Wall Street was going to blow up. Most of the banking [...]
≡ Category: Comedy, Current Affairs | ≅ Leave a Comment
Al Franken, the former SNL comedian, the Harvard graduate, and now US Senator, has a special talent. He can draw the map of America, state-by-state, while chatting up a crowd. Almost makes me feel the 4th of July spirit…
Thanks for Eric for this one.
≡ Category: Current Affairs, Music | ≅ 35 Comments
Yes, Jacko had undeniable talent. And, yes, Thriller drove more sales than any other album ever. But, Jacko released Thriller back in 1982 — roughly 27 years ago. And, what has he accomplished since? Creatively very little, and the personal story is very mixed. Despite that, his death is the big news story everywhere, both in [...]
≡ Category: Current Affairs | ≅ 2 Comments
Bernard-Henri Lévy, one of France’s leading intellectuals (you can tell by the way he buttons his shirt) pays dramatic homage to the uprising in Iran. The rhythm of the speech is vaguely MLK’esque. But the content is distinctly French intello. (Somehow Michel Foucault gets worked into an analysis of what’s happening on the streets of [...]
≡ Category: Current Affairs | ≅ 2 Comments
Another helpful primer that does a good job of explaining what’s happening with the Iranian protests, who the cast of characters are, and where things might be headed. Produced by NPR’s Fresh Air, the interview features Karim Sadjadpour, a political analyst from the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. The conversation gets quite informative, especially during the second [...]
≡ Category: Current Affairs | ≅ Leave a Comment
Steve Carson, one of the senior members of MIT’s OpenCourseWare team, has put together a handy list of educational materials that contextualizes what’s happening in Iran right now. The materials come from various opencourseware collections (actually the bulk are from MIT’s collection) and they’re organized by the following headings — Iranian History, Democracy & Political [...]
≡ Category: Current Affairs | ≅ Leave a Comment
Andrew Sullivan continues to provide the most up-to-the-minute coverage of what’s happening inside Iran. Today, this page offers a running account of the Iranian government’s crackdown on the democratic movement . The details — the tactics of the government — are simply sickening. (If you can stomach it, here’s footage of two cold-blooded murders by [...]
≡ Category: Current Affairs | ≅ Leave a Comment
If you’re looking to get more context for what’s happening right now in Iran, let me direct you to two pieces of media. First, you’ll find above a talk by Abbas Milani, the director of the Iranian Studies Program at Stanford University. It was given last August at Google’s HQ in Mountain View, CA, and it [...]
≡ Category: Current Affairs | ≅ Leave a Comment
Andrew Sullivan has been embarrassing America’s traditional mass media. With his one man blog, he has provided richer and more immediate insight into what’s happening on the ground in Iran than even The New York Times. (I ask, somewhat facetiously, would we really miss the beleaguered newspaper industry if it went away? Not this week, we [...]
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