Uni­ver­si­ties pump out knowl­edge every day, and thank­ful­ly, many of the best uni­ver­si­ties and col­leges are now start­ing to tape impor­tant lec­tures, if not full cours­es, and make them avail­able as pod­casts. We’ve spent the past few weeks find­ing the best pod­cast col­lec­tions, both on iTunes and off. If you vis­it the Uni­ver­si­ty iTunes/Podcasts Col­lec­tion (which can always be found in the Free Learn­ing Por­tal on the right side of the page), you’ll find sets of pod­casts from 25 lead­ing edu­ca­tion­al insti­tu­tions, most in the US, but some out­side. As the uni­verse of edu­ca­tion­al pod­casts grows, so will our list. So pay us a vis­it here and there, and keep your iPod poised to add new con­tent.

There’s a lot of free, high qual­i­ty edu­ca­tion­al mate­ri­als float­ing around the ether. It’s just a ques­tion of know­ing where to find them, and what’s wheat and what’s chaff. On the left hand side of this page, you will find care­ful­ly-select­ed col­lec­tions of free uni­ver­si­ty pod­casts, free online cours­es and media, and free edu­ca­tion­al web resources. These pages will stay under active devel­op­ment. So book­mark them, watch them grow, and prof­it well from them.

Mil­ton Fried­man, a Nobel Prize win­ner, archi­tect and lead­ing advo­cate of free mar­kets, and one of the most impor­tant econ­o­mists of the 20th cen­tu­ry, died this past week at 94.

The Uni­ver­si­ty of Chica­go, where Fried­man taught since 1946, has col­lect­ed a series of arti­cles review­ing his life and accom­plish­ments. Along sim­i­lar lines, Stan­ford’s Hoover Insti­tu­tion, with which Fried­man was affil­i­at­ed from 1977 until his death, has post­ed a page that includes links to videos fea­tur­ing the econ­o­mist. (Look for the videos under the area called “Pub­li­ca­tions.”)

Final­ly, from the Youtube archives, you can see a short clip from 1980, where we find a younger Mil­ton Fried­man and Don Rums­feld in con­ver­sa­tion.

Thomas Pyn­chon has made a career milk­ing elu­sive­ness for all its worth. His writ­ing is noto­ri­ous­ly hard to pin down. Pub­lish­ers nev­er know when to expect some­thing new. (He has only put out 6 books since 1963.) And, phys­i­cal­ly, Pyn­chon is nowhere, ever, to be found.

But this much we know right now. Against the Day, his next nov­el and the first since 1997, is set to be pub­lished on Novem­ber 21, 2006.

This big book (1120 pages) is a big deal with­in Pyn­chon cir­cles, so much so that Pyn­chon’s pub­lish­er, Pen­guin, has­n’t both­ered pro­mot­ing the book, oth­er than casu­al­ly list­ing it on Ama­zon. Admist the hoopla, one of the cool­er things to emerge is the Against the Day Wiki. Using the same soft­ware as Wikipedia, the Pyn­chon wiki will let Pyn­chon enthu­si­asts devel­op entries that tease out the nov­el­’s char­ac­ters and events. Oh, can’t you taste the min­u­taie?!

When we wake up tomor­row morn­ing, a new polit­i­cal era will have begun. The Democ­rats will have tak­en con­trol of the House of Rep­re­sen­ta­tives and per­haps amaz­ing­ly the Sen­ate, sud­den­ly find­ing them­selves polit­i­cal­ly rel­e­vant for the first time in six very long years. And they’ll have the unusu­al lux­u­ry of decid­ing how they will exer­cise polit­i­cal pow­er. The Pres­i­dent, on the oth­er hand, will now find him­self oper­at­ing in a dif­fi­cult polit­i­cal envi­ron­ment. At best, he can no longer expect Con­gress to rub­ber stamp his poli­cies. At worst, by Wednes­day after­noon, after his post-elec­tion news con­fer­ence, he might find him­self a full-blown lame duck.

How the Pres­i­dent and the Democ­rats move for­ward is a the­o­ret­i­cal­ly open ques­tion. How­ev­er, in prac­tice, the ques­tion of what the Democ­rats will do is a far more inter­est­ing one, part­ly because Bush will real­is­ti­cal­ly be con­strained by a dif­fi­cult war and his gen­er­al inabil­i­ty to adapt, and part­ly because the Demo­c­rat slate is clean, and the pos­si­bil­i­ties for defin­ing their direc­tion are very real.

Mov­ing into pow­er, the Democ­rats will have three choic­es before them. Obstruct­ing reflex­ive­ly (a very real pos­si­bil­i­ty); accom­mo­dat­ing (a very unlike­ly pos­si­bil­i­ty); and devel­op­ing a well rea­soned, defined and pos­i­tive posi­tion some­where in between obstruc­tion and accom­mo­da­tion (a smart but not nec­es­sar­i­ly inevitable pos­si­bil­i­ty). Obstruc­tion seems most like­ly because it’s the eas­i­est thing to do, and because the Bush admin­is­tra­tion’s style of rul­ing invites thoughts of revenge. But it’s not the best way to go. The Democ­rats came back to rel­e­vance not on the strength of their ideas, but on the weak­ness of their oppo­nents. And if they hope to con­vince Amer­i­ca that they gen­uine­ly deserve this pow­er, they’ll need to devel­op a sub­stan­tive plat­form and a smart approach to gov­er­nance in gen­er­al, and the Iraq war in par­tic­u­lar.

Barack Oba­ma is emerg­ing as a very real­is­tic can­di­date for the pres­i­den­cy because, unlike so many of oth­ers, he’s devel­op­ing a con­vinc­ing argu­ment that our nation should come before pol­i­tics, and ideas before par­ty. Right now, his new book, The Audac­i­ty of Hope: Thoughts on Reclaim­ing the Amer­i­can Dream, is #5 on the Ama­zon top sell­er list, when most politi­cians’ books come and go with very lit­tle notice. (The New York Times actu­al­ly just ran a sto­ry on this.) And what makes Oba­ma stand out, beyond his charis­ma, is his will­ing­ness to find a think­ing cen­ter. When asked “How do you make peo­ple pas­sion­ate about mod­er­ate and com­plex ideas?” Oba­ma answers:

I think the coun­try rec­og­nizes that the chal­lenges we face aren’t amenable to sound-bite solu­tions. Peo­ple are look­ing for seri­ous solu­tions to com­plex prob­lems. I don’t think we need more mod­er­a­tion per se… We just need to under­stand that actu­al­ly solv­ing these prob­lems won’t be easy, and that what­ev­er solu­tions we come up with will require con­sen­sus among groups with diver­gent inter­ests. That means every­body has to lis­ten, and every­body has to give a lit­tle. That’s not easy to do.

That kind of mod­er­ate, prag­mat­ic, and not reflex­ive­ly ide­o­log­i­cal approach is more of what the Democ­rats need. They need more sub­stance and, even more than that, some more mag­na­nim­i­ty. It gets back, I think, to how Richard Rorty, one of Amer­i­ca’s lead­ing philoso­phers, starts out his short book, Achiev­ing Our Coun­try. There, he talks about how “nation­al pride,” an “emo­tion­al involve­ment with one’s coun­try,” is “nec­es­sary if polit­i­cal delib­er­a­tion is to be imag­i­na­tive and pro­duc­tive.” At this point, the Democ­rats bad­ly need to put the coun­try before par­ti­san­ship and gen­uine­ly deal with the impor­tant issues that face it. That’s the only way that they will take this oppor­tu­ni­ty — one that is per­haps unde­served — and do some­thing with it that will build a sus­tain­able future for the par­ty and our nation.

Lis­ten here to New York­er edi­tor, David Rem­nick, recent­ly inter­view­ing Barak Oba­ma

Please vis­it this page at the fol­low­ing url:

https://www.openculture.com/weblog/2007/02/science_podcast.html

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