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The money quote from his appearance had less to do with economics per se and more with democracy: “We have too many regulations stopping democracy, and not enough regulations stopping Wall Street from misbehaving.” No bullhorns, are you serious?
You probably know Lawrence Lessig because of his work founding Creative Commons and promoting “Free Culture.” (Watch his final speech on Free Culture here.) Several years ago, Lessig moved from Stanford to Harvard, where he took up a new focus — government corruption. That’s what he grapples with in his new book, Republic, Lostand this related video. Given Lessig’s focus on how corporate money corrupts our political system, it’s not surprising that he would have something to say about the potential of the Wall Street protests.
In the state-controlled propaganda art of revolutionary China, sunflowers carried a blunt symbolism: Mao Zedong was the sun and the Chinese people were the sunflowers, all facing one direction to receive the nourishing rays.
A generation later, in the work of Chinese artist Ai Weiwei, the symbolism is a bit more subversive. In 2010 Ai launched a show called Sunflower Seeds, where a riot of individual porcelain seeds–more than a hundred million of them, all hand-painted–were spread across the floor of a large hall at the Tate Modern in London. Ai wanted visitors to move freely across the installation, picking the seeds up, moving them around, doing whatever they wanted — all shown in the video above.
As a champion of freedom and an outspoken critic of China’s human rights record, Ai has come under heavy pressure from the Chinese regime. Early this year his Shanghai studio was demolished and he was later arrested and detained at secret locations for 81 days. Now he is forbidden from giving interviews or using the Internet. But before he was arrested, Ai was able to send a videotaped speech to the TED conference, outlining his views. You can watch it below. To learn more about the extraordinary Sunflower Seeds 2010 exhibit, you can watch the “TateShots” film above.
One of the most popular scenarios in the long history of Alan Funt’s ingenious Candid Camera programs is “Face The Rear.” An elevator is rigged so that after an unsuspecting person enters, four Candid Camera staff enter, and one by one they all face the rear. The doors close and then reopen; now revealing that the passenger had conformed and is now also facing the rear. Doors close and reopen, and everyone is facing sideways, and then face the other way. We laugh that these people are manipulated like puppets on invisible strings, but this scenario makes us aware of the number of situations in which we mindlessly follow the dictates of group norms and situational forces.
Often times, the mindless submission to group norms has entirely innocuous results. But, in other cases, it can lead to “good people engaging in evil actions.” Witness what happened within the controlled environment of the Stanford Prison Experiment. Or, worse, the devastating abuses at Abu Ghraib, which brought otherwise average people to commit atrocious acts. For more read The Lucifer Effect.
When director David Hillman Curtis and cinematographer Ben Wolf paid a visit recently to composer Philip Glass to film a promotional piece for the Brooklyn Academy of Music, they were granted just 30 minutes. “He was booked solid the day we visited his offices and actually was being followed by a minder who sat on the couch just out of the frame checking his watch,” said Curtis. “I’ve become a pretty good interviewer and was able to loosen Mr. Glass up a bit and he took it from there, giving a great interview, and we were done in 30 minutes.” In the resulting two-minute film, Glass expresses amusement over his recent fascination with classical music. “Where are my frontiers,” asks the composer, whose work is frequently described as avant-garde? “My frontiers are actually not in front of me. They’re behind me.”
You can learn more about Philip Glass and hear free samples of his music at PhilipGlass.com.
Now it’s time for something a little more modern — Mike McCubbins offers an animated adaptation of Albert Camus’ classic, The Fall, published in 1957, the same year that Camus won the Nobel Prize for Literature for his work that “illuminates the problems of the human conscience in our times.” Give McCubbins five minutes and he’ll give you the visual essence of the philosophical novel. You can watch it here.
When Slovenia’s hip Marxist/Lacanian critical theorist takes center stage at a Wall Street protest, it’s news for a culture site. No doubt. How can we not observe a rare moment of praxis? But, what it all means for the Occupy Wall Street movement, we’ll let you wrestle with that. Part 2 appears here. H/T Biblioklept.
Most of these “crazy ones, misfits, rebels and rule breakers” have been featured on Open Culture throughout the years (click the links above), and what make this ad special is that Steve Jobs narrates it himself. The original TV ad — the one that made it on air — had Richard Dreyfuss doing the voiceover…
This year marks the 400th anniversary of the King James Bible, a translation that influenced the development of the English language as much as it did the Christian faith. Right alongside many other anniversary celebrations taking place this year, Glen Scrivener, a minister in the Church of England, has started a blog about the linguistic impact of the text, focusing on 365 phrases that have passed in common parlance. A lot of this gets artfully distilled by Scrivener’s short video, The King’s English — 100 phrases in 3 Minutes (above).
When two teams of scientists announced in 1998 that the expansion of the Universe was not slowing down due to gravity but was in fact accelerating, the worldwide scientific community was shocked. The discovery turned many of the prevailing assumptions about the universe upside down. Looking back, perhaps the only thing that wasn’t a surprise was that the Nobel Prize Committee should take notice.
Last Tuesday the Swedish Academy of Sciences announced that the 2011 Nobel Prize in Physics would go to three American-born scientists from two rival teams: physicist Saul Permutter, head of the Supernova Cosmology Project at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory and the University of California, Berkeley, would receive half of the prize, while Brian P. Schmidt, head of the High‑z Supernova Search Team and an astronomer at the Research School of Astronomy and Astrophysics at the Australian National University, Weston Creek, would share the other half with a colleague who wrote the original paper announcing the team’s findings in 1998, astronomer Adam G. Riess of Johns Hopkins University and the Space Telescope Science Institute.
Despite popular belief, the two teams did not “discover” dark energy. As Perlmutter points out in the short film above, “People are using the term ‘dark energy’ basically as a place holder to describe any explanation for why it is that we seem to be seeing the universe’s expansion getting faster and faster.” What is actually known is that the universe has been expanding for as far back as we can observe, and about 7 billion years ago–roughly half the estimated age of the universe–the expansion began to accelerate.
“Why is it speeding up?” Perlmutter asked during a press conference on the morning his Nobel Prize was announced. “It could be that most of the universe is dominated by a dark energy that pervades all of space and is causing this acceleration. It could be, perhaps even more surprising, that Einstein’s Theory of General Relativity needs a little bit of a tweak, perhaps acting slightly differently on these very large scales of the universe. But at this moment I would say that the question is wide open.”
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