Slavoj Žižek & Pres. Obama Give Their Take on The Wire (and More Culture Around the Web)

Although HBO’s crit­i­cal­ly-acclaimed series, The Wire, end­ed its run in 2008, the show keeps get­ting back into the head­lines. Just last week Pres­i­dent Oba­ma, an acknowl­edged fan of The Wire, was asked dur­ing an audio inter­view with ESPN to name his favorite char­ac­ter on the show, to which he replied “It’s got to be Omar, right? I mean, that guy is unbe­liev­able, right?” And then this oth­er piece of audio sur­faced online — Slavoj Žižek, your favorite Sloven­ian philosopher/cultural crit­ic, pre­sent­ed a talk at The Uni­ver­si­ty of Lon­don (2/24/2012) called The Wire or The Clash of Civil­i­sa­tions in One Coun­try. And it takes the show seri­ous­ly as a work of trag­ic, real­ist art. Lis­ten here.

More Cul­ture Around the Web:

How Do You Cite a Tweet in an Aca­d­e­m­ic Paper? The MLA Weighs In.

The Cen­tral Phi­los­o­phy of Tibet by famed Bud­dhism Schol­ar Robert Thur­man (father of Uma). Added to our col­lec­tion of Free Cours­es.

William Car­los Williams Reads His Poems at 92nd St. Y in NYC  in 1954.

Rev­e­la­tions: Mes­si­aen’s Quar­tet for the End of Time. Writ­ten & pre­miered in a Nazi prison camp, 1941.

Lawrence Lessig’s Free Cul­ture as a Free Audio book.

Louis Menand on What Dr. Seuss Real­ly Taught Us. (2002)

The Guardian Rec­om­mends Silent Films

Tougher Than Leather, 1988. Run-DMC stars in cross between blax­ploita­tion film & spaghet­ti west­ern.

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