You’ll get the schtick pretty quickly. The BBC’s Matthew Stadlen spends five quick minutes with celebrities, thinkers and newsmakers. And, above, he gets down to business with Richard Dawkins, with the conversation touching on religion, the afterlife, spirituality, morality, happiness, and the whole point of life. Other thinkers featured in the series include Martin Amis, AC Grayling, Alain de Botton, Brian Cox, Sir Terry Pratchett and others.
via Metafilter
It’s no secret. We love to highlight vintage video of cultural icons. This weekend, we showed you the last days of Leo Tolstoy to commemorate the centennial of the great writer’s death, and you expressed your appreciation. And it led us to think: why not dig through our archive, and revive some of the great treasures previously featured on Open Culture? And so here it goes: Below, you will find 45+ video & audio clips that record the words and actions of major figures from a bygone era. Artists, architects, filmmakers, actors, poets, novelists, composers, musicians, world-changing leaders, and those not easily categorized – they’re all here. So close, you can almost touch them. Enjoy the list, and if we’re missing some good clips, don’t hesitate to send them our way…
Video
Audio:
Here’s an amazing way to get the lay of the land in London. Photographer Jeffrey Martin has stitched together 7,886 high-res images, creating an 80 gigapixel (or 80 billion pixel) panoramic photograph of England’s great capital. The photo is also interactive, which means you can play aerial tourist. When you enter the site, click on “Show Landmarks” (lower left corner), make a selection, and then start flying around the city.
These photos were taken from a 36 floor building, using a DSLR camera and a 400mm lens. And it now stands as the world’s largest 360 photo.
via newslite
Ayn Rand — she’s often considered the intellectual darling of America’s political right. Rand’s free market thinking rubbed off on Alan Greenspan in a big way. At the Cato Institute, Stephen Moore writes, “Being conversant in Ayn Rand’s classic novel about the economic carnage caused by big government run amok [Atlas Shrugged] was practically a job requirement.” Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas acknowledges a deep debt to The Fountainhead, Rand’s celebration of the individual, and makes his law clerks watch the 1949 film adaptation of the novel. Rand Paul, the new Tea Party senator, calls himself a fan of both books. And Ayn Rand book sales surged once Obama came into office. You get the picture.
Given this love affair, it’s a little incongruous to rediscover old footage (circa 1979) that features Rand coming out “against God,” calling faith an abdication of individual responsibility (so important to her philosophy), an insult to the human intellect, and a sign of psychological weakness. If she were alive today, Rand would easily give the “new atheists” (Richard Dawkins, Christopher Hitchens, Daniel Dennett, etc.) a very good run for their money. It’s not exactly the stuff that traditionally makes you a conservative saint, but stranger things have happened. Maybe.
Related Content:
Atheism: A Rough History of Disbelief, with Jonathan Miller
Neil deGrasse Tyson Explains Why He’s Uncomfortable Being Labeled an ‘Atheist’
Atheist Ira Glass Believes Christians Get the Short End of the Media Stick
David Sedaris’ new collection of comic stories, Squirrel Seeks Chipmunk: A Modest Bestiary, was recently released with an accompanying video that features the voice of Sedaris and the artwork of Ian Falconer.
If you’re not familiar with him, Falconer has drawn over 30 covers for The New Yorker (see example here), while also creating the amazing Olivia the Pig series for children. (Be sure to watch this Olivia Goes to Venice clip for a quick primer.) If this video whets your appetite, then let me direct your attention to Sedaris reading the actual story “The Squirrel and the Chipmunk.” It originally aired on This American Life.
Or, as regular readers know, you can snag a free audio copy of Squirrel Seeks Chipmunk – Sedaris does some of the narration! – if you register for a 14-day free trial of Audible.com. Once the trial is over, you can continue your Audible subscription (as I did), or cancel it, and still keep the free book. The choice is entirely yours.
100 years ago, J. Searle Dawley wrote and directed Frankenstein. It took him three days to shoot the short, 12-minute film (when most films were actually shot in just one day). It marked the first time that Mary Shelley’s literary creation was adapted to film. And, somewhat notably, Thomas Edison had a hand (albeit it an indirect one) in making the film. The first Frankenstein was shot at Edison Studios, the production company owned by the famous inventor.
You can download the movie at the Internet Archive, or find it permanently listed in our collection of Free Movies Online. (Also, you can find Mary Shelley’s novel in our collection of Free Audio Books.) To get more information on Dawley’s short film, please visit The Frankenstein blog.
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Through next April, you can visit “Abstract Expressionist New York,” – an exhibit at the Museum of Modern Art (NYC) that looks back at the work of Jackson Pollock, Mark Rothko, David Smith, Willem de Kooning and many others. If you can’t make the trip, then you can do the next best thing. Fire up your iPad, download the free app created by MoMA, and start watching a slideshow of 60 paintings currently on display in “AB EX NY.” All images are presented in high resolution, and the app also features 20 videos created by the curators, each of which concentrates on individual painters and their techniques. And did I mention that the app is free? (via Arts Beat)
Related Content:
David Hockney’s iPad Art Goes on Display
Visit 890 UNESCO World Heritage Sites with Free iPhone/iPad App
Can they stop the train loaded with hazardous chemicals before this “missile the size of the Chrysler Building” hits a populated area and “vaporizes everything in front of it?” That’s the big question that drives along the plot of the new Denzel Washington thriller, Unstoppable. If you don’t believe me, just watch the trailer above. Now we get all academic on you and ask: Is that train really as powerful as a skyscraper-sized missile? And then we turn to Emory physics professor Sidney Perkowitz for the answer:
Perkowitz is a good person to size things up. He’s not just any physics professor. This physics prof wrote the book Hollywood Science: Movies, Science and the End of the World and he sits on the advisory board of the Science and Entertainment Exchange, a National Academy of Sciences program that tries to bring more scientific accuracy to mass market entertainment. Thanks Stephen for the good tip here …
Here you have it. Europe, evolving from medieval times until today. We start circa 1000 A.D with the Holy Roman Empire and Moorish Spanish (otherwise known as Al-Andalus). Then comes the fracturing of medieval kingdoms and the rise of the Ottoman Empire off in the East, until everything starts to unify again. And, at long last, the map we all recognize today.
Note: The maps used in this video come from the Centennia Historical Atlas, which has been required reading for all beginning students at the US Naval Academy for the past decade.
via The Map Room
Between 1982 and 2002, director Godfrey Reggio shot his well known Qatsi trilogy — Koyaanisqatsi, Powaqqatsi, and Naqoyqatsi. Somewhere between the 2nd and 3rd installment, Reggio took a little detour and directed a short eight minute film called Evidence. The main characters? Kids watching cartoons (Dumbo, actually) and looking “drugged,” “like the patients of a mental hospital,” he writes on his web site.
The villain? “Television technology,” which “is eating the subjects who sit before its gaze.” The weapon? Television again. That “radiation gun aimed at the viewer” “holds its subjects in total control.” A little house of horrors, to be sure. We have added Koyaanisqatsi (featuring the music of Philip Glass) and Evidence to our collection of Free Movies Online.
via @katciz, the director of the new interactive film Out My Window.
If you would like to sign up for Open Culture’s free email newsletter, please find it here. It’s a great way to see our new posts, all bundled in one email, each day.
If you would like to support the mission of Open Culture, consider making a donation to our site. It’s hard to rely 100% on ads, and your contributions will help us continue providing the best free cultural and educational materials to learners everywhere. You can contribute through PayPal, Patreon, and Venmo (@openculture). Thanks!
It’s the life of the great French poet, Arthur Rimbaud, in a 10 minute slideshow. The video traces the arc of Rimbaud’s short life (1854–1891), stitching together images from 19th century France, photos taken by Rimbaud himself, and manuscripts scribbled by the poet. In the background, Joan Baez reads lines from Rimbaud’s famous collection, Illuminations, which appears in the Poetry section of our Free Audio Books collection. Project Gutenberg also makes his complete works available in French. Download the free e‑text right here.
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