Oliver Sacks Talks Music with Jon Stewart


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Oliv­er Sacks
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This con­ver­sa­tion, both fun­ny and a lit­tle infor­ma­tive, is worth your time. This will hope­ful­ly whet your appetite, and give you good rea­son to watch Oliv­er Sack­’s new pro­gram on NOVA. It’s called Musi­cal Minds and you can watch it here start­ing on July 1.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Cen­tral Intel­li­gence: From Ants to the Web

If you have prob­lems watch­ing the clip above, you can find a link to the video here.

Ben Folds Presents: University A Cappella

“In 2009 Ben Folds released a great­est hits record, of sorts, sung entire­ly in a cap­pel­la. The album, Ben Folds Presents: Uni­ver­si­ty A Cap­pel­la! fea­tures two tracks per­formed by Ben him­self, but the bulk of the mate­r­i­al was per­formed by var­i­ous uni­ver­si­ty a cap­pel­la groups.” You can catch a doc­u­men­tary ver­sion above.

Cosmology Online

Leonard Susskind, a Stan­ford physi­cist who helped con­cep­tu­al­ize string the­o­ry and has waged a long-run­ning “Black Hole War” with Stephen Hawk­ing (see his newish book on that sub­ject) offers a course on Cos­mol­o­gy, which stud­ies the ori­gin and devel­op­ment of the uni­verse. It’s actu­al­ly the fifth course in a larg­er six-course intro­duc­tion to Mod­ern Physics (find them in our col­lec­tion of Free Uni­ver­si­ty Cours­es). But the course stands on its own, and, along the way, it takes a close look at the Big Bang, the geom­e­try of space-time, infla­tion­ary cos­mol­o­gy, dark mat­ter, dark ener­gy, the string the­o­ry land­scape and more. You can access the full course on YouTube here, and also on iTunes here. Final­ly, the course comes out of Stan­ford’s Con­tin­u­ing Stud­ies pro­gram, which brings engag­ing class­es to the broad­er pub­lic. If you hap­pen to live in the San Fran­cis­co Bay Area (0r want to take top-notch writ­ing cours­es online), give the pro­gram a look.

PS We’ve got a new cus­tom url for our Face­book page. Check us out at facebook.com/openculture.

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The 50 Greatest Trailers of All Time

IFC.com (the web site of the Inde­pen­dent Film Chan­nel) has worked up a list of the all-time best movie trail­ers — or, as they put it, the films that pro­mote the actu­al films. The list cuts across dif­fer­ent eras and fea­tures many old­er clas­sics (Psy­choCit­i­zen Kane, Dr. Strangelove, etc.) as well as more recent films. Above, we’ve includ­ed their num­ber one pick, Rid­ley Scot­t’s Alien. And below, we’ve added IFC’s descrip­tion, which sets the stage for view­ing the trail­er:

Mas­ter­ful­ly cut and art­ful to boot, the first glimpse of Rid­ley Scot­t’s 1979 sci-hor­ror clas­sic fea­tures not a sin­gle word of dia­logue and begins in abstract: a ride through a star field, a hov­er above some sort of moon rock, blocky shapes that slow­ly mate­ri­al­ize into the let­ters of the title, crag­gy land­scape tra­versed with a macro lens before pulling back to clar­i­fy what lies on that cratered sur­face — the egg of an alien life form. It cracks open, releas­ing an ill-omened white light and the high-pitched alarm (an ani­mal­is­tic squeal?) that unnerves through­out the rest of the trail­er.

Streaming Movies Online: The Future is Almost Now

Accord­ing to Net­flix’s CEO, the DVD is done, and the future is all about stream­ing movies online. (Read the Wall Street Jour­nal piece on that.) This segues nice­ly to a list that we have com­piled that con­tains 1) over 100 high qual­i­ty films that you can watch online for free, and 2) 35 web sites where you can watch free movies online. The col­lec­tion is called Free Movies Online: Great Clas­sics, Indies, Film Noir, Doc­u­men­taries & More.

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Philip Roth on Aging

File under Lit­er­a­ture & Life…

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Bernard-Henri LĂ©vy on the Streets of Tehran

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 Tehran.)

via TELOS

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A Master List of Free Language Learning Resources

Look­ing to learn a new lan­guage this sum­mer? Then give this list a good look. The folks at Universitiesandcolleges.org have cre­at­ed “The Mas­ter List of Free Lan­guage Learn­ing Resources,” which pulls togeth­er mate­ri­als found across a range of dif­fer­ent media. Here, you’ll find pod­casts, open cours­es, iphone apps, and more. And the list notably includes our ever-pop­u­lar col­lec­tion How to Learn Lan­guages for Free: Span­ish, Eng­lish, Chi­nese & 37 Oth­er Lan­guages, which will teach you about 40 dif­fer­ent lan­guages. Just down­load the audio lessons to your com­put­er or mp3 play­er and you’ll be learn­ing new lan­guages on the go, at no cost.

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