Barnes & Noble’s Answer to the Kindle

The mar­ket­ing around the Nook, Barnes & Noble’s Answer to the Kin­dle, has begun, even though the prod­uct won’t be sold (for $259) until Novem­ber. Above, you’ll find a B&N video that demos the fea­tures of the new e‑book read­er. Giz­mo­do is already giv­ing the Nook some nice reviews. See 8 Rea­sons You Can Final­ly Love Ebook Read­ers (Thanks to Nook). And you can learn more about the Nook’s fea­tures over at Engad­get.

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Ira Glass on the Art of Story Telling

Since 1995, Ira Glass has host­ed and pro­duced This Amer­i­can Life (iTunes — Feed — Web Site), the award-win­ning radio show that presents mas­ter­ful­ly-craft­ed sto­ries to almost 2 mil­lion lis­ten­ers each week. What’s the secret sauce that goes into mak­ing a great sto­ry, par­tic­u­lar­ly one primed for radio or TV? Glass spells it out in four parts. Part 1 (above) gets into the build­ing blocks of a good sto­ry. Part 2 talks about the impor­tance of find­ing the right sto­ry. Part 3 reas­sures you that cre­ative excel­lence takes time to devel­op. It also comes with hard work. And Part 4 flags com­mon errors to avoid. Give Glass 17 min­utes, and you will be a bet­ter sto­ry­teller for it…

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Wallace Stevens Reads His Own Poetry

This lit­tle col­lec­tion gives you access to Wal­lace Stevens (1879–1955), one of Amer­i­ca’s great poets, read­ing his own poet­ry. Among the poems, you will hear “The Idea of Order at Key West,” “The Poem that Took the Place of a Moun­tain,” “Vacan­cy in the Park,” and “To an Old Philoso­pher in Rome.” For more, you should see our pre­vi­ous post, Lis­ten­ing to Famous Poets Read­ing Their Own Work, and then below watch the clip below of ever-pro­lif­ic Yale lit­er­a­ture pro­fes­sor Harold Bloom recit­ing Stevens’ “Tea at the Palace of Hoon.”

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Reader Podcast Picks

Ear­li­er this week, one of our read­ers, Scott Dumont, offered up some excel­lent thoughts on a few pod­casts that we’ve pre­vi­ous­ly over­looked. Since he put things so well, I fig­ured why not pass along his thoughts direct­ly to you. Here they go, and thanks Scott …

I’d like to make three sug­ges­tions for addi­tions to your library. Two polit­i­cal pod­casts and one his­tor­i­cal one. For the polit­i­cal ones, you’re lack­ing in the more inde­pen­dent depart­ment; you’ve got Democ­ra­cy Now, which is good enough but I’d sug­gest adding Com­mon Sense with Dan Car­lin (iTunesFeedWeb Site) and My His­to­ry Can Beat Up Your Pol­i­tics (iTunesFeedWeb Site). Com­mon Sense with Dan Car­lin is a true inde­pen­dent news show, putting the cur­rent pol­i­tics in per­spec­tive and ana­lyz­ing the dis­con­nect between what is pro­pa­gan­da and what is truth. His descrip­tion is:

Com­mon Sense with Dan Car­lin is a blend of audio com­men­tary and news analy­sis by one of the lead­ing thinkers among today’s polit­i­cal­ly inde­pen­dent crowd. Author, reporter and talk show host Dan Car­lin takes a look at the issues in the news through the prism of his tra­di­tion­al Amer­i­can “for­ward-think­ing prag­ma­tism” while push­ing a fis­cal­ly con­ser­v­a­tive, social­ly lib­er­al approach to solv­ing prob­lems. Whether he’s rail­ing against the “Fat Police”, explain­ing the exis­tence of “The Chick­en Lit­tle Gene” or con­tin­u­al­ly bring­ing up his­tor­i­cal events no one has ever heard of, Car­lin man­ages to be enter­tain­ing and infor­ma­tive in a unique­ly non-par­ti­san way. His style has been com­pared to Sein­feld’s George Costan­za on steroids. Whether that’s true or not, he does often talk real­ly fast. You’ll have to keep up.

If I had to rec­om­mend a few from the ones cur­rent­ly in his feed, I’d say take a lis­ten to the fol­low­ing shows before you decide: “137- A Vote For None”, “143- The Black Dog”, “146- The Con­ti­nu­ity Of Errors”“154- A Con­flict of Inter­est”, “157- Read It and Weep”, “161- Shhh!”. I know it’s a lot, feel free to pick any of those, but those are prob­a­bly var­ied enough for you to get a taste of what he means.

My His­to­ry Can Beat Up Your Pol­i­tics is exact­ly what it sounds like; it puts cur­rent polit­i­cal events in a his­tor­i­cal per­spec­tive and ana­lyzes the his­to­ry to allow us to under­stand our pol­i­tics. For a good sam­pling, just take a look at this most recent stuff. He’s not schiz­o­phrenic like Dan Car­lin and his show is fair­ly for­mu­la­ic, but that’s not to say it’s not infor­ma­tive. (more…)

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50 Intelligent Video Sites

Back in June, we first post­ed a handy list of web sites where you will find free intel­li­gent videos — doc­u­men­taries, clas­sic films, pub­lic tele­vi­sion pro­grams, uni­ver­si­ty cours­es & lec­tures, inter­views with big thinkers, etc. The col­lec­tion has now grown to 50 sites. Below, you can find the first ten sites on the list, and you can check out the com­plete col­lec­tion here. Feel free to share it with friends and, of course, tell us if we’re miss­ing some­thing valu­able by using the com­ments sec­tion below.

1) ABC Doc­u­men­taries: This site pulls togeth­er some of the best doc­u­men­taries aired on ABC tele­vi­sion in Aus­tralia.

2 ) Aca­d­e­m­ic Earth: Some call this “the Hulu for edu­ca­tion.” The idea is to take aca­d­e­m­ic videos from top-notch uni­ver­si­ties and let users watch them with a very user-friend­ly inter­face. Though a young site, many users are giv­ing it high marks.

3) Arkive.org: The site gath­ers togeth­er “the very best films and pho­tographs of the world’s species into one cen­tralised dig­i­tal library, to cre­ate a unique audio-visu­al record of life on Earth.” A great site for nat­u­ral­ists and nature lovers.

4) Aus­tralian Screen Archive: The Aus­tralian Nation­al Film and Sound Archive pro­vides free and world­wide access to over 1,000 film and tele­vi­sion titles – a trea­sury of down-under video 100 years in the mak­ing.

5) Babel­gum: Babel­gum’s goal is to act as an inter­na­tion­al ‘glue’, bring­ing a huge range of pro­fes­sion­al and semi-pro­fes­sion­al con­tent to a glob­al audi­ence – like a mod­ern-day Tow­er of Babel. They’re also mak­ing an effort to get their con­tent to smart­phones. They have an iPhone app now, and apps for oth­er phones on the hori­zon.

8) BigIdeas: This show, which comes out of Cana­da, “offers a vari­ety of thought-pro­vok­ing top­ics which range across pol­i­tics, cul­ture, eco­nom­ics, art his­to­ry, sci­ence.… The pro­gram has intro­duced Ontario view­ers to the impres­sive brain­pow­er of peo­ple like Niall Fer­gu­son on Amer­i­can empire, Daniel Libe­skind on archi­tec­ture, Robert Fisk on the Mid­dle East, George Stein­er on the demise of lit­er­a­cy, Camille Paglia on aes­thet­ic edu­ca­tion, Tariq Ramadan on being a West­ern Mus­lim, Noam Chom­sky on U.S. pol­i­tics, Leon Kass on dying, Jan­ice Stein on account­abil­i­ty and gov­er­nance.” See the full list of videos here.

9) Big­Think: “Offers high qual­i­ty video inter­views and insight from the world’s most influ­en­tial experts in busi­ness, enter­tain­ment, edu­ca­tion, reli­gion and media.” Big­Think was found­ed part­ly with the help of Lar­ry Sum­mers, for­mer­ly the pres­i­dent of Har­vard, now Oba­ma’s right hand eco­nom­ic man.

9) Bloggingheads.TV: We had sev­er­al read­ers high­ly rec­om­mend bloggingheads.tv. Here is how blog­ging­heads has been described else­where: “a polit­i­cal, world events, phi­los­o­phy, and sci­ence video blog dis­cus­sion site in which the par­tic­i­pants take part in an active back and forth con­ver­sa­tion via web­cam which is then broad­cast online to view­ers.”

9) Cul­ture­Catch: CultureCatch.com has over 160 half-hour inter­views with today’s sem­i­nal artists in film, the­ater, music and lit­er­a­ture.  Here you’ll find in-depth inter­views with smart cul­ture indi­vid­u­als dis­sect­ing art, com­e­dy, fash­ion, film, music, pol­i­tics, tele­vi­sion, the­ater, even cook­ing.

10) Edge.org Video:  Edge.org is run by John Brock­man, lit­er­ary agent to some of the most impor­tant sci­ence writ­ers in the US and beyond. You’ll find videos fea­tur­ing these thinkers on the Edge’s web site.

See the full col­lec­tion of Intel­li­gent Video Sites here

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Big Canadian Film Archive Online

A nice tip from Life­hack­er. Canada’s Nation­al Film Board makes 1000s of films (includ­ing doc­u­men­taries, ani­mat­ed films, trail­ers and some Oscar win­ners) freely avail­able via the web and now the iPhone. Vis­it the NFB col­lec­tion here, and get the free iPhone app here.

via Life­hack­er

U2 to Webcast Sunday’s Rose Bowl Concert

Accord­ing to the LA Times, U2 will live stream its con­cert this com­ing Sun­day night on YouTube. Some 95,000 peo­ple have tick­ets for the Rose Bowl show in LA. If you’re not one of them, then you can watch the YouTube stream start­ing at 8:30 pm Pacif­ic time. The footage will also be archived for any­one who miss­es it. More details here and here.

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Calculus Lifesaver: A Free Online Course

Updat­ed post: It’s rare that we get to cov­er math here. So here it goes: Adri­an Ban­ner, a lec­tur­er at Prince­ton, has put togeth­er a lec­ture series (in video) that will help stu­dents mas­ter cal­cu­lus, a sub­ject that has tra­di­tion­al­ly frus­trat­ed many stu­dents. The 24 lec­tures (get them on iTunes) were orig­i­nal­ly pre­sent­ed as review ses­sions for Prince­ton intro­duc­to­ry cal­cu­lus cours­es offered in 2006, and each runs about two hours. It’s worth not­ing that Ban­ner has used the lec­tures to devel­op a handy book, The Cal­cu­lus Life­saver: All the Tools You Need to Excel at Cal­cu­lus. To find this course (and many oth­ers like it), look in our col­lec­tion of Free Online Cours­es from Great Uni­ver­si­ties. Here you will also find MIT’s course, Sin­gle Vari­able Cal­cu­lus, which now appears on YouTube and iTune­sU.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Math and Sci­ence Tutor­ing on YouTube

Math Mag­ic

Learn­ing Chem­istry on Youtube

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Open Culture was founded by Dan Colman.