The best free cultural & educational media on the web
The best free cultural & educational media on the web
≡ Category: Current Affairs, Film, Math, Politics | ≅ 5 Comments
This week the British Government once again refused to pardon Alan Turing. One of the greatest mathematicians of the 20th century, Turing laid the foundations for computer science and played a key role in breaking the Nazi Enigma code during World War II. In 1952 he was convicted of homosexuality. He killed himself two years later, after [...]
≡ Category: Comedy, Current Affairs, Politics | ≅ Leave a Comment
When the Supreme Court, in its infinite wisdom, decided that corporations enjoy the free speech rights of individuals, it took a bad campaign finance system and made it worse. Suddenly, free-spending PACs, representing powerful business interests, could flood our campaign finance system with unprecedented amounts of money and distort the way we elect leaders in [...]
≡ Category: Current Affairs | ≅ Leave a Comment
The search for survivors still goes on near the Tuscan island of Giglio, where the Costa Concordia hit rocks and listed helplessly to the side. The helplessness of the cruise ship has been captured in a remarkable image taken by Digital Globe from outer space. Click here (or above) to see the image in a [...]
≡ Category: Current Affairs, Media, Politics, Technology | ≅ 1 Comment
Some of the big websites are going black today to protest SOPA, the Stop Online Piracy Act, that has been winding its way through Congress. We’re going to handle things in our own way — by illuminating the matter with a little intelligent media. Backed by the Motion Picture Association of America, SOPA is designed [...]
≡ Category: Current Affairs, Harvard, Science, Video - Science | ≅ 1 Comment
On December 8th, six “all-star environmental professors” came together at an event called “Harvard Thinks Green” and presented short, TED-style talks about the environment and strategies for reversing climate change. The event started with James McCarthy (Professor of Biological Oceanography) asking the question (see above), “Is it too late to avoid serious impacts of climate change?” A good question to [...]
≡ Category: Current Affairs, Economics, Harvard | ≅ Leave a Comment
Last Wednesday, the Occupy movement gained a little more intellectual momentum when eight faculty members from Harvard, Boston College, and N.Y.U. gathered in Cambridge to present a daylong Teach-In. In one talk, Archon Fung (Ford Foundation Professor of Democracy and Citizenship and Co-Director of Transparency Policy Project at Harvard) took a vague thesis of the Occupy movement — [...]
≡ Category: Current Affairs, Music | ≅ Leave a Comment
Last week, composer Philip Glass and rock legend Lou Reed embraced the Occupy Wall Street movement. Initial video & audio clips capturing their appearances were shoddy at best. Now Jean Thevenin (who joined the protest at Lincoln Center Plaza) has given us a better view, producing a short, elegant film simply called Visible Shape. The accompanying music is [...]
≡ Category: Current Affairs, History, Video - Politics/Society | ≅ Leave a Comment
This fall, the world’s population reached seven billion. A sobering thought. How did we get to this point? Producer Adam Cole and photographer Maggie Starbard of National Public Radio have put the world’s accelerating population growth in perspective in a two-and-a-half minute video, above. In those two and a half minutes, 638 babies will be [...]
≡ Category: Art, Current Affairs, Video - Arts & Culture | ≅ 2 Comments
In early October of 2009, Malcolm McLaren was nearing death but didn’t know it yet. He showed up at the 2009 Handheld Learning conference feeling fatigued, but managed to deliver a provocative and heartfelt speech titled, “Never Mind the Bullocks, Here’s the Txt Pistols,” in which he reflects on his life growing up in post-World [...]
≡ Category: Current Affairs, Music | ≅ Leave a Comment
Last night, two American icons lent support to the Occupy Wall Street movement, speaking at a protest held outside of Lincoln Center in New York City. After a performance of Satyagraha at the Met, Philip Glass spoke to demonstrators. According to Alex Ross, the music critic for the New Yorker, Glass recited the closing lines of Satyagraha (see around 3:00 [...]
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