Tony Judt, one of our lead­ing pub­lic intel­lec­tu­als, died ear­li­er this month of ALS, a.k.a. Lou Gehrig’s Dis­ease. Judt was no stranger to con­tro­ver­sy, and he had his crit­ics. But he lived out his final years in a way that few could feel divid­ed about. He kept writ­ing and pub­lish­ing. The pace picked up instead of slow­ing down. And he stayed in the pub­lic light, when most would have backed away from it. The video above – a short trib­ute to his life – isn’t entire­ly fun to watch. I’ll admit that. But it says some­thing impor­tant about how we live, endure ill­ness, and die with our human­i­ty intact. Need­less to say, this makes the video even­tu­al­ly 100% rel­e­vant to you. Hence why we’re post­ing. Thanks Mike for anoth­er great clip.

PS You can find Tony Judt’s recent writ­ings in The New York Review of Books here. I would also encour­age you to read Tim­o­thy Gar­ton Ash’s intel­lec­tu­al obit of Judt here.

Venice, the “Queen of the Adri­at­ic,” in HD and sat­u­rat­ed col­or. A lit­tle thing of beau­ty. You can watch a big­ger ver­sion of “Around Venezia,” filmed by “Icam,” on Vimeo here. It’s well worth it.

Meryl Streep has been nom­i­nat­ed for 16 Acad­e­my Awards, and won two, over her bril­liant act­ing career. She’s one of Amer­i­ca’s greats. But it has­n’t gone to her head. Above, we have Streep giv­ing the grad­u­a­tion speech last month at Barnard (the wom­en’s lib­er­al arts col­lege affil­i­at­ed with Colum­bia Uni­ver­si­ty). And what comes across is some­one who does­n’t take her­self or act­ing too seri­ous­ly. Some­one who still gets a lit­tle charm­ing­ly ner­vous speak­ing in front of crowds. And some­one who rec­og­nizes that we glob­al­ly – and women par­tic­u­lar­ly – have major chal­lenges to con­tend with. It’s worth a watch, along with one of my favorite com­mence­ment speech­es: Steve Jobs at Stan­ford, 2005.

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