Junot Díaz Reads From “Drown”

in Audio Books, Books, Literature | August 5th, 2009

Junot_Díaz

Image by Christo­pher Peter­son, via Wiki­me­dia Com­mons

I first heard about Junot Díaz in the ear­ly 90s. He was only in his 20s, already pub­lish­ing in The New York­er, and get­ting a lot of wun­derkind talk. By 1996, he pub­lished, Drown, a best­selling col­lec­tion of short sto­ries that earned high praise. And then, things slowed down. It took a good eleven years for him to pub­lish The Brief Won­drous Life of Oscar Wao. But the patience paid off. The nov­el won him a Pulitzer in fact. And it’s an excel­lent read. Real­ly.

Hav­ing said this, I want to high­light Díaz read­ing one of his ear­ly New York­er sto­ries that also found its way into Drown. It’s called How to Date a Brown Girl (Black Girl, White Girl, or Hal­fie). The free audio clip, which is list­ed in our col­lec­tion of Free Audio Books (and pro­duced by The New York­er), has some col­or­ful lan­guage, but it’s not gra­tu­itous.

Look­ing for free, pro­fes­sion­al­ly-read audio books from Audible.com? Here’s a great, no-strings-attached deal. If you start a 30 day free tri­al with Audible.com, you can down­load two free audio books of your choice. Get more details on the offer here.

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Martin Sheen’s Senior Moment

in Life | August 5th, 2009

On the lighter side. Thanks Rachel for send­ing this along…

Find the link to the orig­i­nal video here.

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Chris Anderson @ Google

in Audio Books, Books, Google | August 4th, 2009

Chris Ander­son, the author of Free: The Future of a Rad­i­cal Price (down­load a free audio file of the book here) is mak­ing the rounds, pro­mot­ing his new book. Of course, it was only nat­ur­al that Ander­son (also the author of The Long Tail and edi­tor-in-chief of Wired) should pay a vis­it to Google, a com­pa­ny that gen­er­ates bil­lions of dol­lars by serv­ing free con­tent and ser­vices. With the talk above, you get an intro­duc­tion to Ander­son­’s take on “free” and some good Q&A. The pre­sen­ta­tion runs about 53 min­utes in total.

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New Pynchon Book Out Today: Watch the Trailer

in Books | August 4th, 2009

Thomas Pyn­chon’s new book, Inher­ent Vice, is on sale today. Check it out. Below we have, yes, a video trail­er for the new book, and it sounds like Pyn­chon (who has famous­ly stayed out of the pub­lic eye) is actu­al­ly nar­rat­ing the thing.

Become of a Fan of Open Cul­ture on Face­Book here or fol­low us on Twit­ter

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Math Magic

in Math, TED Talks | August 3rd, 2009

Arthur Ben­jamin is a self-pro­claimed “math­ema­gi­cian.” He’s also a pro­fes­sor of math­e­mat­ics at Har­vey Mudd Col­lege. No need to say more. Watch him go. We’re adding this one to our list of YouTube favorites.

via The Teach­ing Com­pa­ny’s Face­book Page.

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Big Ideas

in Video - Arts & Culture | August 2nd, 2009

A new addi­tion to our pop­u­lar and still grow­ing col­lec­tion: Intel­li­gent Video: The Top Cul­tur­al & Edu­ca­tion­al Video Sites … (The list now has close to 50 intel­li­gent video sites.)

Big Ideas, a pro­gram that comes out of Cana­da, fea­tures 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, George Stein­er on the demise of lit­er­a­cy, Camille Paglia on aes­thet­ic edu­ca­tion, and Noam Chom­sky on U.S. pol­i­tics.” You will also find talks here by Umber­to Eco, Mar­garet Atwood, Richard Flori­da, Steven Pinker, Lewis Lapham. See the full list of videos here.

via Metafil­ter

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Oliver Sacks on the iPod

in Music | August 1st, 2009

Oliv­er Sacks, the famous neu­rol­o­gist and author of Musi­cophil­ia, a study that looks at the human brain and music, speaks in Harpers about the land­scape alter­ing iPod:

As Daniel Lev­itin has point­ed out, pas­sive lis­ten­ing has large­ly replaced active music-mak­ing. Now that we can lis­ten to any­thing we like on our iPods, we have less moti­va­tion to go to con­certs or church­es or syn­a­gogues, less occa­sion to sing togeth­er. This is unfor­tu­nate, because music-mak­ing engages much more of our brains than sim­ply lis­ten­ing. Part­ly for this rea­son, to cel­e­brate my 75th birth­day last year, I start­ed tak­ing piano lessons (after a gap of more than six­ty years). I still have my iPod (it con­tains the com­plete works of Bach), but I also need to make music.

via The Dai­ly Dish

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Another Godfather “What If”

in Film | July 30th, 2009

What if The God­fa­ther had been shot with­out Mar­lon Bran­do? (It almost hap­pened.) Or with­out Al Paci­no? (It almost hap­pened too .) Or with­out Fran­cis Ford Cop­po­la? (Yup, even that almost hap­pened as well.) Then, what if Robert De Niro had played the role of Son­ny, which even­tu­al­ly went to James Caan? Here’s what it would have looked like (and, by the way, we’ve added this clip to our list of YouTube favorites):

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