See Open Cul­ture’s Pod­cast Col­lec­tions:

Arts & Cul­ture — Audio Books — For­eign Lan­guage Lessons — News & Infor­ma­tion — Sci­ence — Tech­nol­o­gy — Uni­ver­si­ty (Gen­er­al) — Uni­ver­si­ty (B‑School)

Here’s a dif­fer­ent kind of pod­cast: You can now find on iTunes a new video pod­cast that fea­tures ani­mat­ed ver­sions of The New York­er’s famous car­toons. A ven­ture called Ring­Tales has appar­ent­ly been giv­en an exclu­sive license to ani­mate and dis­trib­ute The New York­er’s library of over 70,000 car­toons. Each week, they’ll issue three new video ani­ma­tions, which you can access on iTunes as well as by rss feed. They’ll also be avail­able on The New York­er web­site. For more details, see this press release.

Even if you don’t agree with its Euro con­ser­v­a­tive pos­ture, The
Econ­o­mist always comes off as

emi­nent­ly ratio­nal and sen­si­ble when
grap­pling with polit­i­cal issues, and cer­tain­ly unwill­ing to put spin
ahead of good report­ing, which sep­a­rates it from many of its Amer­i­can
coun­ter­parts. This judi­cious­ness comes across in a talk giv­en last week
by John Mick­leth­wait, the mag­a­zine’s new­ly appoint­ed Edi­tor-in-Chief. (Access audio ver­sions here.) Inter­viewed by Orville Schell, Dean of the Grad­u­ate School of Jour­nal­ism at
UC-Berke­ley,
Mick­leth­wait cov­ers a lot of ground, but spends a good deal of time
con­tem­plat­ing Amer­i­ca’s role in the world, and par­tic­u­lar­ly whether
Amer­i­ca’s inter­na­tion­al lead­er­ship is now irre­triev­ably bro­ken. His com­mon sense answers pro­vide no red
meat for any­one on the left or right. But they’re thought­ful, and worth your time. (Just as an fyi, his talk does­n’t get start­ed until about 10 min­utes in, and he does­n’t get to inter­na­tion­al affairs until about the 29th minute.) Final­ly, on a relat­ed note, you may want to explore The Econ­o­mist’s rel­a­tive­ly new series of pod­casts: iTunes  Feed

For more pod­casts like it, see Open Cul­ture’s col­lec­tion of News & Infor­ma­tion Pod­casts and our Uni­ver­si­ty Pod­cast Col­lec­tion.

A quick fyi: As of this week, Fresh Air, the pop­u­lar pro­gram host­ed by Ter­ry Gross, is now avail­able as a free pod­cast on iTunes or via feed. Along with Fresh Air, NPR has just issued many oth­er new pod­cast offer­ings, includ­ing Xeni Tech, a dai­ly pro­gram fea­tur­ing Boing­Bo­ing blog­ger Xeni Jardin, who explores the inter­sec­tion between tech­nol­o­gy and con­tem­po­rary cul­ture (iTunes — Feed). For the com­plete list­ing of NPR pod­casts, see this web page or vis­it NPR’s main page on iTunes.

This past week, TIME Mag­a­zine named “you” — the one of many mil­lions of web users — the per­son of the year. TIME’s cur­rent cov­er sto­ry
explains why the sto­ry of 2006 was­n’t one shaped by a “great man,” as
it usu­al­ly is, but by a com­mu­ni­ty of web users “on a scale nev­er seen
before.” It’s a sto­ry, TIME says, “about the cos­mic com­pendi­um of
knowl­edge Wikipedia and the mil­lion-chan­nel peo­ple’s net­work YouTube
and the online metrop­o­lis MySpace. It’s about the many wrest­ing pow­er
from the few and help­ing one anoth­er for noth­ing and how that will not
only change the world, but also change the way the world changes.”

If these grand dec­la­ra­tions hap­pen to move you, or if you’re look­ing
for some more elab­o­ra­tion on how TIME gave you this hon­or, you can
always lis­ten to TIME’s lat­est piece on iTunes which fea­tures a round­table dis­cus­sion of their annu­al edi­tion.

Here’s a quick lit­tle tip for you. Salon.com has a nice col­lec­tion of audio con­ver­sa­tions with fig­ures from the high­er ech­e­lons of the pop cul­ture world. David Lynch, Pedro Almod­ó­var, Amy Sedaris, the list goes on. You can access these talks from the Salon.com site, and, along the way, be forced to look at umpteen ads before you get what you want. Or you can take a very quick short cut, go straight to iTunes by click­ing here, and get the talks with no pain, no wait, no ads. It’s your choice, of course.