The story behind the artwork that defined the Obama campaign is a fascinating one. Shepard Fairey’s posters achieved prominence much in the same way that Obama did. They rose from the ground up. Everyday people supported and promoted his imaginative posters on the web, until they became something of a public phenomenon. And they turned the status quo — in this case, the tradition political poster — into something fresh and new. In this interview (iTunes — Feed — Stream), Fairey, once a self-proclaimed “outlaw street artist,” talks about how got started with his Obama pieces, and how his most celebrated work ended up in the permanent collection at the U.S. National Portrait Gallery.
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Speaking at the TED conference in 2007, Malcolm Gladwell (author of The Tipping Point, Blink, and now Outliers: The Story of Success) introduces you to the food industry’s pursuit of the perfect spaghetti sauce, which ultimately tells you something essential about human choice and happiness.
A good find over at Metafilter. Here you’ll find 22 inauguration speeches, starting with McKinley’s 1901 address. There’s some great footage in this series of videos.
Along similar lines, The New York Times has posted an interactive feature that covers every inaugural address. You can read the full text of each speech, and see which words and ideas were most widely used within each text. It’s a quick way to see what issues mattered most during a given historical moment. Start with George Washington’s address here.
Lastly, let me leave you with this. FDR’s 1933 address, which helped America move with a little more confidence through another difficult time. It’s the speech that gives us “There’s nothing to fear but fear itself,” a kind of prelude to “Yes we can.” Here’s to new beginnings.
In 2008, our attention was mostly focused on the long American presidential campaign and the dramatic crash of the global financial system. These two stories overshadowed many other important ones. And so Foreign Policy has put together a collection of the most overlooked foreign affairs stories of ’08. Russia’s move into Africa, the beginning of a new Darfur, solar panels emitting greenhouse gases — these stories and more get covered here.
The full “I Have a Dream” speech. The place: The Lincoln Memorial. The Date: August 28, 1963. The Why: To bring about many small changes in American society, which eventually and collectively bring us to Tuesday. Take it away Martin:
This week, Stanford has started to roll out a new course, Einstein’s General Theory of Relativity. Taught by Leonard Susskind, one of America’s leading physics minds, this course is the fourth of a six-part sequence — Modern Physics: The Theoretical Minimum — that traces the development of modern physics, moving from Newton to Black Holes. As the title suggests, this course (which runs 20 hours in total) focuses squarely on the groundbreaking work of Albert Einstein. And, it’s undoubtedly a plus that the course was presented in Stanford’s Continuing Studies program, which means that it’s tailored to smart non-specialists like you. You can watch the first lecture on iTunes here, or YouTube below. The remaining lectures will be rolled out on a weekly basis. If you would like to watch the longer sequence of courses, I have provided a complete list of links here. Enjoy.
Thankfully, it’s not all bad news here in Silicon Valley. Yesterday, Google and the Prado (the major art museum in Madrid) announced that you can launch Google Earth from wherever you live, travel virtually to Spain, and then take a close look at fourteen of the museum’s finest paintings. And, by “close,” I mean close. According to a Google spokesman said: “The paintings have been photographed in very high resolution and contain as many as 14,000 million pixels (14 gigapixels).” “With this high level resolution you are able to see fine details such as the tiny bee on a flower in The Three Graces (by Rubens), delicate tears on the faces of the figures in The Descent from the Cross (by Roger van der Weyden) and complex figures in The Garden of Earthly Delights (by El Bosco).” The fourteen paintings include pieces by Francisco de Goya, Diego Velázquez and Hieronymus Bosch. You can begin the tour (and get Google Earth software) from this landing page. The video below also offers a nice visual illustration of what this project is all about. (A quick tip: if you have Google Earth, make sure that you have “3D Buildings” checked off under “Layers.” Then do a search for “Prado” and click on “Museu del Prado.” From there, click on the image of the museum. Next, you should see a series of paintings that you can begin to explore.)
Imagine you’re surfing YouTube and come across a clip of Leonard Bernstein conducting Shostakovich’s Fifth. It looks and sounds great. Now imagine that you layer on top a series of YouTube comments that accompany the video. Suddenly things get a little different and bizarre. This piece comes from the YouTube Commentary Project developed by Artists Space, which we’ve added to our collection, YouTube Education: 80 Intelligent Video Collections on YouTube.
PS The YouTube comments are rated R, not PG. So watch this clip in the company of an appropriate audience.
What happens when you take Ben King’s 1961 hit, Stand By Me, and then travel around the world, having different international artists offer their own interpretations, and finally you stitch them all together in one seamless tune? The clip below starts in California, moves to New Orleans, then heads off to Amsterdam, France, Brazil, Moscow, Venezuala, South Africa and beyond. And I’m willing to bet that you’ll like how it turns out. The clip comes from the documentary, “Playing For Change: Peace Through Music.” Thanks Jillian for the heads up on this one, and, you guessed it, this one’s added to our YouTube Favorites.
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For lifelong learners, courses on Ancient Greece and Rome always remain in steady demand. While these courses are poorly represented in undergraduate programs (at least in the States), they seem be to making a comeback in continuing education programs designed for older students. Eventually, it seems, many come to the conclusion that you can’t skip over the foundations and still make sense of it all. And so they go back to basics.
The Teaching Company, a commercial provider of courses for lifelong learners, has recognized this demand and built a surprisingly rich collection of lectures dedicated to the Ancients. (See full catalogue here.) These courses are polished and well put together. But they cost money. If that’s a concern, then you should know about some of the free alternatives. Thanks to the “open course” movement, you can now find a series of free courses online, including some from top-ranked universities. Let me give you a quick overview of your options:
Last fall, Yale University introduced a new round of open courses that included Donald Kagan’s Introduction to Ancient Greek History (YouTube — iTunes Audio — iTunes Video- Download Course). A leading figure in the field, Kagan takes students from the Greek Dark Ages, through the rise of Sparta and Athens, The Peloponnesian War, and beyond. You’ll cover more than a millennium in 24 lectures. As I’ve noted elsewhere, Yale’s courses are high touch. And what’s particularly nice is that the course can be downloaded in one of five formats (text, audio, flash video, low bandwidth quicktime video, and high bandwidth quicktime video). Simply choose the format that works for you, and you’re good to go.
When you’ve completed the arc of Greek history, you can move next to the UC Berkeley course, The Roman Empire. The course taught by Isabelle Pafford moves from Julius Caesar to Constantine (roughly 40 BC to 300 AD) in 42 lectures. And the audio comes straight from the classroom, which means that you’ll get solid information but you’ll also have to endure some extraneous talk about homework assignments and exams. (It’s free, so don’t complain.) You can download this course in one of three ways: iTunes, streamed audio, or via rss feed. Lastly, I should note that Pafford has taught another related course at Berkeley — The Ancient Mediterranean World (iTunes — Feed- MP3s).
Once you have the big survey courses under your belt, you can switch to some more focused courses coming out of Stanford. Let’s start with Patrick Hunt’s course Hannibal (iTunes). As I’ve noted in a previous post, this podcasted course takes you inside the life and adventures of Hannibal, the great Carthaginian military tactician who maneuvered his way across the Alps and stunned Roman armies in 218 BC. The course also gives you glimpses into cutting-edge trends in modern archaeology. Because Hannibal still remains a figure of intense historical interest, it’s not surprising that this course has ranked as one of the more popular courses on iTunesU.
Another short course worth your time isVirgil’s Aeneid: Anatomy of a Classic. Presented by Susanna Braund (a Stanford classics professor at the time), the course teases apart the epic poem that was an instant when it was written 29–19 BC), and still endures today. Divided into 5 installments, each running about two hours, this podcast offers a good introduction to one of the central texts in the Latin tradition.
Finally, let me throw in a quick bonus course. The Historical Jesus, another Stanford course taught by Thomas Sheehan, looks inside the historical/Roman world of Jesus of Nazareth. This is a history course, not a religion course, and it uses the best literary and historical evidence to answer the questions: “Who was the historical Jesus of Nazareth? What did he actually say and do…? What did the man Jesus actually think of himself and of his mission…? In short, what are the differences — and continuities — between the Jesus who lived and died in history and the Christ who lives on in believers’ faith?
UPDATE: Thanks to a reader, I was reminded of another related course: 12 Byzantine Rulers: The History of the Byzantine Empire (iTunes — Feed — Site). These podcasts cover the legacy of the Roman Empire that emerged in the East (after it had collapsed in the West). You can read more about this course in one of my early blog posts.
All of these courses can be found in the History Section of our larger collection of Free Courses. There you will find 200 high quality online courses that you can listen to anytime, anywhere.
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The story behind the artwork that defined the Obama campaign is a fascinating one. Shepard Fairey’s posters achieved prominence much in the same way that Obama did. They rose from the ground up. Everyday people supported and promoted his imaginative posters on the web, until they became something of a public phenomenon. And they turned the status quo — in this case, the tradition political poster — into something fresh and new. In this interview (iTunes — Feed — Stream), Fairey, once a self-proclaimed “outlaw street artist,” talks about how got started with his Obama pieces, and how his most celebrated work ended up in the permanent collection at the U.S. National Portrait Gallery.
