After 17 years of climbing the ladder, Dan Baum finally landed his dream job at The New Yorker. But things didn’t work out quite as he planned. On Twitter this week, Baum tells the story of his rise and fall. You can read a consolidated Twitter-style transcript here. A pretty intriguing look at what happens inside the magazine world.
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Above, we feature Frank Lloyd Wright, who appeared on What’s My Line?, America’s longest-running game show, back in June 1956. During its eighteen seasons, the show featured many cultural VIPs, including Alfred Hitchcock, Salvador Dali, Groucho Marx, Carl Sandburg and others.
Along similar lines, it’s worth noting that YouTube now hosts a series of old-time television shows. Within this archive, you’ll find the complete episodes of The Lone Ranger, Bonanza, You Bet Your Life, Burns and Allen, and Star Trek.
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From Berlin, two initiatives from the Deutsche Kinemathek/Museum for Film and Television.
The first is a collection of private photos and home movies of the Berlin Wall, its eventual collapse, and the reunification that followed. It’s a timely collection, especially given that the 20th anniversary of the Wall’s fall is coming in November. Not only do the images and films encourage the viewer to reflect on freedom, but the items found in the collection are open to tagging, most carry Creative Commons licenses, and the online exhibit is built on innovative open source software from Collective Access. Some of the most popular images in the collection can be found here.
The second is a new portal that the Kinemathek has built with Austrian, Czech, and French partners listing information about more than 3,500 films–including classics from Charlie Chaplin and Frank Capra–that were presumed to be lost forever. The Germans have seeded the list with information about the 37 most sought-after German films, featuring several from Fritz Lang, Ernst Lubitsch, and F.W. Murnau. All that’s missing is a poster with a picture: “Have you seen this film?”
Peter B. Kaufman comes to us from Intelligent Television.
The last sentence is the clincher…
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From The Internet Archive: “Recorded here is the complete, original story The Curious Case of Benjamin Button as penned by Fitzgerald in the early 1920s, published originally in Colliers and finally collected in the popular Tales of the Jazz Age.” You can download and listen to this Fitzgerald story here. Multiple formats are available. We’ve also added this work to our Free Audio Book collection, along with some other good works: Nikolai Gogol’s The Overcoat, Walt Whitman’s Song of Myself and Other Poems, and Lu Xun’s “A Madman’s Diary.
Last week, we flagged for you a list called the 100 Best iPhone Apps for Serious Self-Learners. What the list missed is another nice app that puts the complete works of Shakespeare on your iPhone. And, the best part, it’s all free. As you’ll see, the app comes with some handy functionality: you can search the text by keyword and also increase/decrease the fonts. Plus the app automatically remembers the last page you read. Not bad. And, again, you can find the Bard app here.
During the past couple of days, fans from our Facebook page have recommended two math videos for us. Here they go: “D” offers up a piece called “The New Math” (above), which talks, yes, about the revolution in teaching mathematics. As you’ll see, the piece breaks into comic song, and it all kind of has an Arlo Guthrie, Alice’s Restaurant feel to it. A bit of a strange combo, to be sure.
Next up, Heather gives us Mathmaticious (get it here), which is a mathematical parody of Fergie’s “Fergalicious,” although sadly or, maybe actually happily, I’m not familiar with it. Snooty, snarky me…
Think back to the office hours you attended in college. Now put a Web 2.0 slant on it. On Facebook, Stanford faculty members are now holding public office hours. This week, you can watch an introductory video (view here or below) by Philip Zimbardo, the psychology professor best known for the Stanford Prison Experiment, which explains why good people can commit unthinkable acts. His more recent research does a 180 and looks at how ordinary people commit heroic acts. And, separately, he’s trying to understand how our attitudes toward time affect our overall happiness (more on that here). Once you watch the initial video, you can pose questions to Prof Zimbardo in the comment thread beneath the clip. (You can do this through Tuesday afternoon). In the coming days, Prof. Zimbardo will respond to your questions in a follow-up video.
To participate, you will need to join Facebook and become a “fan” of Stanford’s Facebook page, And you’ll perhaps want to read over the ground rules for the Open Office Hours. Lastly, if you’re not a Fan of Open Culture’s Facebook Page, it’s time to get on board.
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