Bryan Magee comes from a tradition that produced some of the twentieth century’s most impressive media personalities: that of the scholarship-educated, Oxbridge-refined, intellectually omnivorous, occasionally office-holding, radio- and television-savvy man of letters.

“The world is a marvelous system of wiggles,” says Alan Watts in a series of lectures I keep on my iPod at all times. He means that the world, as it really exists, does not comprise all the lines, angles, and hard edges that our various systems of words, symbols, and numbers do.

I’ve spent four years writing Podthoughts, a podcast review column, for Maximumfun.org. At one podcast a week, this means I’ve listened to and written up well over 200 different podcasts.

The Beatles were so much a part of the youth movement that blossomed in the 1960s that it’s amusing to think that one of the main issues that energized the movement–peace–came to the Beatles through a 92-year-old man.

We could call Alain de Botton, in the classical sense, a philosophical amateur: that is, one who loves philosophy. But not everybody loves the way he approaches the field.

Although HBO’s critically-acclaimed series, The Wire, ended its run in 2008, the show keeps getting back into the headlines.

The Philosophy section of our big Free Courses collection just went through a major update, and it now lists more than 50 courses — 55 to be precise. Enough to give you a soup-to-nuts introduction to a timeless discipline. You can start with one of several introductory courses.

“Everybody knows that Einstein did something astonishing,” writes Bertrand Russell in the opening passage of ABC of Relativity, “but very few people know exactly what it was.

“Three passions, simple but overwhelmingly strong, have governed my life,” wrote Bertrand Russell in the prologue to his autobiography: “the longing for love, the search for knowledge, and unbearable pity for the suffering of mankind.

Last summer Alain de Botton, one of the better popularizers of philosophy, appeared at TEDGlobal and called for a new kind of atheism. An Atheism 2.0.