This week, the Supreme Court is hearing arguments about gay rights in America. And, no matter how the court decides, these cases will enter the history books.

What entered the public domain in the US in 2013? It’s not a long answer, because the answer is …. nothing.
Now here’s a question that yields a longer answer.

Just in time to celebrate Open Education Week, here comes a new initiative, the School of Open, a learning environment focused on increasing our understanding of “openness” and the benefits it brings to creativity and education in the digital age.

Back in 2009, Harvard political philosopher Michael Sandel made his course, Justice: What’s the Right Thing to Do?, available on the web for free (YouTube - iTunes - Web). Suddenly lifelong learners around the world had access to a popular course enjoyed by more than 14,000 Harvard students over 30 years.

Jon Stewart and company can make pretty much anyone look like an imbecile. Some nights they have to put a lot of elbow grease into it. Some nights less. And, some nights, they can just leave the elbow grease on the workroom shelf.

Last year, key works by James Joyce and Virginia Woolf finally entered the public domain, at least in Europe. (Find them in our collections of Free eBooks and Free Audio Books.) This year, we got pretty much bupkis, especially if we’re talking about the United States.

Internet trolls are very touchy people. Sometimes their rage is targeted at public figures, institutions, or groups who do and say horrible things (the Westboro Baptist Church comes to mind). More often, the phenomenon of “trolling” is a free-for-all of absurdist online pranks or verbal abuse directed at anyone and everyone.

Last summer, Samuel L. Jackson delighted listeners when he narrated the audio version of Adam Mansbach’s twisted little children’s bedtime story, Go the F**k to Sleep. Now, Jackson returns with Wake the F**ck Up for Obama. According to the New York Post (if they say it, it must be true!), Mansbach wrote the Dr.

“Truman Capote didn’t study to become expert in capital crime and its punishment,” says William F.

While an undergraduate at Vanderbilt University in Tennessee, writer Robert Penn Warren began writing about the south and its turbulent racial history.