≡ Category: Current Affairs, Life, Television | ≅ 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: Life, Philosophy | ≅ Comments
News broke today that Claude Lévi-Strauss, one of France’s towering intellectuals, has died. He was 100 years old. The New York Times has a lengthy obit that covers the career of the anthropologist who brought us “structuralism” and helped us look at diverse cultures in new ways. NPR has also aired a short piece (in [...]
≡ Category: History, Life | ≅ Comments
There’s no sound, and the clip only runs 20 seconds. But this is the only known footage of Anne Frank, and it’s now online. The Anne Frank House does a good job of setting the scene for the video taken on July 22, 1941. “The girl next door is getting married. Anne Frank is leaning [...]
Want to attend the 2010 TED Conference and hang with some of the world’s greatest minds? Here’s your chance. Apply to the TED Fellows program. Organizers of the TED Conference are looking for 25 promising Fellows from around the world to participate in TED 2010, and they’re accepting applications through September 25, 2009. Fellowships include conference [...]
≡ Category: Life, Music | ≅ Comments
For good measure, I’m adding Ted Kennedy’s eulogy for his brother, Robert Kennedy, back in 1968. Get the audio here. And, in turn, you can also watch President Obama’s eulogy of Senator Kennedy, plus Ted Kennedy Jr.’s remembrances, from earlier in the day. Some moving words and some ideas to live by…
≡ Category: Film, Life | ≅ Comments
A memorable scene from The Graduate (1967). But, as the New York Times tells us today, plastics is out; statistics is now in.
On the lighter side. Thanks Rachel for sending this along…
Find the link to the original video here.
Ira Glass, host of the beloved radio show This American Life, offers a helpful reminder that excellence doesn’t come automatically. It takes effort, years of it. And he revisits some of his early radio work in order to prove it. A good reminder for anyone with serious artistic or creative ambitions.
≡ Category: Life, Psychology | ≅ Comments
Pico Iyer, the British-born essayist, has a nice reality check in today’s New York Times, and it’s now the most emailed article of the day. Here are a few key passages:
“I’m not sure how much outward details or accomplishments ever really make us happy deep down. The millionaires I know seem desperate to become multimillionaires, and [...]
Google co-founder Larry Page spoke at commencement this weekend at the University of Michigan. While the talk may not rise to the level of Steve Jobs’ masterful presentation at Stanford back in 2005 (the graduation speech that really stays with me), it does have a nice personal touch, particularly at the beginning and end. And there [...]
≡ Category: Comedy, Life | ≅ Comments
Take Malcolm Gladwell’s new book, Outliers: The Story of Success. Boil it down. Make it funny. And here you have our next video produced by Kirby Ferguson. NB that there are a few words sprinkled in that won’t be safe for work (unless you work in a special kind of place).
≡ Category: Current Affairs, Life | ≅ Comments
It’s time to put a human face on the disheartening economic statistics that we’re hearing almost daily. This video features students from a Southern California high school talking candidly (and without scripts) about how the economic collapse has affected their day-to-day lives. Unemployment, parents leaving the family, homelessness, scarce food — it’s all part of the [...]
≡ Category: History, Life, Literature, Philosophy | ≅ Comments
Writing in The New Republic, Leon Wieseltier offers a response to the Feb 25 piece in the NYTimes: In Tough Times, the Humanities Must Justify Their Worth. His argument is worth a read, and here is one lengthy money quote:
The complaint against the humanities is that they are impractical. This is true. They will not change the [...]
≡ Category: Comedy, Life | ≅ Comments
Ricky Gervais, the comedian and brains behind The Office, talks here about the difference between British and American humor, and it really gets down to deep cultural differences. Optimism, the belief that anything is possible, versus an ingrained pessimism and penchant for the underdog. I wonder whether UK readers would agree with this characterization. And, [...]
≡ Category: Life, Philosophy | ≅ Comments
If you’re not familiar with him, Peter Singer is an Australian-born philosopher who teaches at Princeton and who wrote Animal Liberation in 1975, helping to launch the animal rights movement. A practitioner of applied ethics, he has also taken controversial positions on euthanasia. Nowadays, he’s working on less sensitive issues. His latest book is called [...]
≡ Category: History, Life | ≅ Comments
Appearing at the TED Conference in 2008, Pulitzer-Prize Winning historian Doris Kearns Goodwin talks about what we can all learn from American presidents, including particularly Abraham Lincoln and Lyndon Johnson. This is not another talk about what makes presidents great. It’s more about the balance between work, love, and play, and how we can generally be [...]
Randy Pausch, the computer science professor from Carnegie Mellon University whose “Last Lecture” caught the public imagination, has died of pancreatic cancer. Thanks partly to a Wall Street Journal article written last September, the public discovered the remarkably upbeat and uplifting lecture Pausch gave soon after getting diagnosed. Titled “Really Achieving Your Childhood Dreams” (see [...]
≡ Category: Life, Uncategorized | ≅ Comments
Ira Glass, host of the beloved radio show This American Life, offers a helpful reminder that excellence doesn’t come automatically. (See video below.) It takes work, years of it. And he revisits some of his early radio work in order to prove it.
The Glass video has been added to our YouTube playlist. (Thanks to Kottke.org [...]
By now, many of you have probably seen (or at least heard about) the last lecture by Randy Pausch, a computer science professor from Carnegie Mellon University, who is dying from pancreatic cancer. Entitled “Really Achieving Your Childhood Dreams,” the lecture (see video below) is upbeat and uplifting without being the slightest bit morose. And [...]
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