Watch Episode 1 of Years of Living Dangerously, The New Showtime Series on Climate Change

in Environment, Television | April 12th, 2014

Ever since Al Gore’s An Inconvenient Truth came out to critical accolades, Conservative scorn and a handful of Oscars, there has been no shortage of well meaning documentaries about the perils of climate change. Most feature a Hollywood celebrity or two, a liberal amount of liberal guilt, and a distinct sense of preaching to the converted.

The new Showtime series Years of Living Dangerously might have plenty of those first two elements but none of the third. In the first episode of the series –which has been released for free on YouTube (above) – Don Cheadle asks, “Is there a way to discuss climate change without politics or religion getting in the way?” Producers James Cameron, Arnold Schwarzenegger and Jerry Weintraub try valiantly to answer that question in the affirmative.

The series features a variety of celebrities — Schwarzenegger, Matt Damon, Jessica Alba – and celebrity reporters – Lesley Stahl, Chris Hayes, Mark Bittman – who investigate different facets of the topic.

In Cheadle’s segment, he tracks down an unusual figure in the heated, tiresome climate change debate – an Evangelical climate scientist. In a fascinating scene, she talks to the devout denizens of Plainview TX, trying to convince them that the drought that caused the closing of the local meatpacking plant – the town’s biggest employer – was the result of something other than divine will.

Meanwhile, New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman traces the origins of the Syrian civil war to – you guessed it – climate change. He crosses into that war torn country (briefly) to discover that the seeds of the conflict were sown by the government’s indifferent response to a long-running drought.

But the most entertaining segment is Harrison Ford exploring the causes of Indonesia’s rapid deforestation. Apparently, palm oil – that anonymous ingredient in everything from cookies to chocolate bars – is such big business that it’s turning Borneo into a burn-scared moonscape. Who knew?

Ford’s charisma and gravelly baritone can turn the most inane line — “That’s a lot of cars” – into something with almost Talmudic profundity. It makes for some riveting viewing. The show ends with Ford chomping at the bit to interview Indonesia’s utterly corrupt Forestry Minister. That meeting, which occurs in a later episode, promises to be a 60 Minutes-style smackdown. You think Mike Wallace was daunting? Try Indiana Jones.

Years of Living Dangerously premieres on Showtime on April 13.

For a more academic introduction to this subject, see Global Warming: A Free Course from UChicago.

via Kottke

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Jonathan Crow is a Los Angeles-based writer and filmmaker whose work has appeared in Yahoo!, The Hollywood Reporter, and other publications. You can follow him at @jonccrow.

by Jonathan Crow | Permalink | Make a Comment ( None ) |

Your Body During Adolescence: A Nakedly Unashamed Sex Ed Film from 1955

in Biology, Education, Film, K-12, Life | April 11th, 2014

A straight shooting sex ed film from 1955? That’s hard to imagine. In my experience, the films of that period tend to beat around the bush. The reticence of those sharing its playing field makes Your Body During Adolescence (watch it online here) all the more remarkable. It doesn’t seem so at first. The first minute is devoted to observing a group of coed, clean cut, and unsurprisingly Caucasian teens, posing for a yearbook photo.

The narrator seems destined to soft peddle things, mildly taking note of differences in height and weight. I freely admit that I underestimated him. The teens in whose classrooms this work was screened may have audibly squirmed at the mention of certain words, but our narrator is undaunted by penises, scrota and labia… Shout out to the educational consultants, Dr. Harold S. Diehl, Dean of the University of Minnesota’s Medical School and Anita Laton, an author and professor of Health and Hygiene at San Jose State. Alfred Kinsey would’ve approved. The diagrams are less straightforward, but I kind of liked that. They look like Mid Century Dinnerware patterns, which is to say, a lot sexier than most of the sex organs one can find on the Internet. For fun and comparison, have a look at Fuzzy Bunny’s Guide to You Know What, the Simpsons’ infamous “sex eductation” film.

I’d say they both get it right.

via The Atlantic

The Story Of Menstruation: Walt Disney’s Sex Ed Film from 1946

Ayun Halliday is the author of seven books, and creator of the award winning East Village Inky zine. Follow her @AyunHalliday

by Ayun Halliday | Permalink | Make a Comment ( None ) |

Philosophize This!: The Popular, Entertaining Philosophy Podcast from an Unconventional Teacher

in Philosophy, Podcasts | April 11th, 2014

Podcasting has treated few fields of human inquiry as well as it has philosophy. You’ll already know that if you’ve subscribed to the philosophy podcasts we’ve featured before, like Philosophy Bites, The History of Philosophy Without Any Gaps, and The Partially Examined Life. Perhaps we can chalk this up to what anyone who has taken a course under an astute philosophy professor has felt (see our list of 100 Free Philosophy Courses): the subject simply lends itself better to conveyance through the spoken words of living, breathing people, especially those with an enthusiasm for the subject. And those who’ve dedicated their lives to philosophy, given the field’s famously persistent lack of both financial rewards and concrete answers, tend to have more pure enthusiasm for their subject itself than do many other intellectual professionals. Stephen West, host of the newer Philosophize This! podcast [iTunes — Web — RSS — Libsyn), doesn’t move among intellectual professionals. He never even took a philosophy course himself, with an astute professor or without one. Yet he can teach you about philosophy with greater clarity and engagement than most podcasters can muster even about their favorite television shows.

West begins the series, which has come to eighteen episodes since last June, with a two-part talk on the very origins of philosophy (Ionian and Italian), telling us what, exactly, the so-called “presocratic” thinkers thought about the human race and whether it had developed sufficiently advanced survival mechanics to begin thinking about things at all. He then continues through history and across the globe, explaining the ideas of the best-known philosophers from Socrates to Aristotle (a two-parter) to the Buddha to (most recently) Avicenna, breaking down how they came to those ideas, and connecting them to the broader philosophical experience in their historical context and ours today (which means references to, among other touchstones of modern life, The Walking Dead). And lest you doubt the un-degree’d West’s qualifications, do read his brief autobiography, which tells the story of how he rose from the worst childhood I’ve read about in quite some time, guided during his all-day shifts driving a pallet jack by the great philosophers: “Hume, Kant, Hegel — these men were my fathers. They were the people who made me ask questions and strive to constantly improve myself.” You might place West in the tradition, now somewhat withered, of the robust “blue-collar” thinking man, drawing his needed strength from ideas. But given the way he’s harnessed our era’s technology to become a philosophy teacher to thousands — hundreds of whom have left five-star reviews on iTunes, leading to an astonishing #32 ranking in its Top 100 podcast chart — I’d say he embodies a brand new type of homo philosophicus altogether.

You can listen to the first first episode of Philosophize This! above.

The History of Philosophy Without Any Gaps – Peter Adamson’s Podcast Still Going Strong

Philosophy Bites: Podcasting Ideas From Plato to Singularity Since 2007

Download 100 Free Philosophy Courses and Start Living the Examined Life

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Colin Marshall hosts and produces Notebook on Cities and Culture and writes essays on cities, language, Asia, and men’s style. He’s at work on a book about Los Angeles, A Los Angeles Primer. Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall or on Facebook.

by Colin Marshall | Permalink | Make a Comment ( 8 ) |

The Coffee Pot That Fueled Honoré de Balzac’s Coffee Addiction

in Food & Drink, Literature | April 10th, 2014

Last fall, Ayun Halliday revisited Honoré de Balzac’s Humorous Essay, “The Pleasures and Pains of Coffee,” and His Epic Coffee Addiction. Last night, one of our friends on Twitter — @thegliterati — sent this our way: A snapshot of Balzac’s coffee pot. It bears his initials and currently resides at the Maison de Balzac museum in Paris. If you ever find yourself in the 16 arrondissement, pay it a visit and pay it some thanks.

You can find Balzac’s coffee-fueled classics in our Free eBooks and Free Audio Books collections.

Honoré de Balzac Writes About “The Pleasures and Pains of Coffee,” and His Epic Coffee Addiction

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by OC | Permalink | Make a Comment ( 2 ) |

Ernest Hemingway’s Very First Published Stories, Free as an eBook

in Books, Literature | April 10th, 2014

“I like the early stuff”: the classic masculine comment to make about the work of a well-known creator, demonstrating as it does the cultural consumer’s dedication, purism, judgmental rigor, and even endurance (given the relative accessibility, in the intellectual as well as the collector’s senses, of most “early stuff”). Now you have a chance to say it about that most ostensibly masculine of all 20th-century American writers, Ernest Hemingway. Above, see the cover of a coveted edition of the then-young “Papa“ ‘s very first book, 1923’s Three Stories & Ten Poems. The print run numbered only “300 copies, put out by friend and fellow expatriate, the writer- publisher Robert McAlmon,” writes Steve King at Today in Literature. “Both had arrived in Paris in 1921, Hemingway an unpublished twenty-two-year-old journalist with a recent bride, a handful of letters of introduction provided by Sherwood Anderson, and a clear imperative: ‘All you have to do is write one true sentence.’ ”

Instead of shelling out to a rare-book dealer for Three Stories & Ten Poems — admire the sacrifice involved though a true Hemingwayite may — you can read even more of the Old Man and the Sea author’s early stuff in the free e‑book embedded just above: 1946’s The First Forty Nine Stories. It contains not just “Up in Michigan,” “Out of Season,” and “My Old Man,” those three stories of Hemingway’s bound debut, but, yes, 46 more of his earliest published pieces of short-form fiction. Today in Literature quotes one notable contemporary reaction to Three Stories & Ten Poems, from a time before Hemingway had become Hemingway, much less Papa: “I should say that Hemingway should stick to poetry and intelligence and eschew the hotter emotions and the more turgid vision. Intelligence and a great deal of it is a good thing to use when you have it, it’s all for the best.” And who could have written such an astute early assessment of the ultimate literary man’s man? A certain Gertrude Stein.

Seven Tips From Ernest Hemingway on How to Write Fiction

Ernest Hemingway Creates a Reading List for a Young Writer, 1934

Ernest Hemingway’s Favorite Hamburger Recipe

Colin Marshall hosts and produces Notebook on Cities and Culture and writes essays on cities, language, Asia, and men’s style. He’s at work on a book about Los Angeles, A Los Angeles Primer. Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall or on Facebook.

by Colin Marshall | Permalink | Make a Comment ( 9 ) |

Before The Simpsons, Matt Groening Illustrated a “Student’s Guide” for Apple Computers (1989)

in Comics/Cartoons, Technology | April 10th, 2014

A friend once told me of his older cousin who, for the freakish act of installing a computer in his college dorm room, found himself immediately and irrevocably dubbed “computer Jon.” This happened in the early 1980s, and boy, have times changed. They’d even changed by the late 1980s, by which time Apple’s college marketing efforts had become sufficiently advanced to require the talents of Matt Groening, best known as the man who created The Simpsons. But that prime-time animated sitcom wouldn’t begin its record-breaking run (still without an end in sight) until Christmas 1989, while the Groening-illustrated Who Needs a Computer Anyway? (which you can flip through above) appeared earlier that year. Back then, readers might well have known him first and foremost as the creator of the satirical alternative-weekly comic strip Life in Hell, which had debuted in 1977. One of its stars, the hapless but good-hearted young one-eared rabbit Bongo, even made his way to Apple brochure’s cover. Though computers themselves had long since come to dominate America’s campuses by the time I entered college, he and Groening’s other now-lesser-known characters did do their part to prepare me for academia.

I refer, of course, to School is Hell, his 1987 Life in Hell book offering sardonic primers on each and every phase of modern education from kindergarten to grad school (“when you haven’t had enough punishment”). Groening’s pages in Who Needs a Computer Anyway? read like a less sharp-edged version of those cartoons, following Life in Hell’s signature “The 9 Types of…” format to present the reader with their nine types of future college classmates, from “the stressed” to “the technoid” to “the unemployed.” Between these, you can read Apple’s pitch for why you’ll find a piece of equipment still somewhat outlandish and expensive so essential to every aspect of your college career. Though dated technically — the text mentions nothing of the internet, for instance, which this generation of college students would sooner drop out than do without — it nevertheless underscores the design virtues of Apple computers — an intuitive interface, application interoperability, “everything you need in one small, transportable case” — that remain design virtues today. It also displays an impressive prescience of the personal computer’s coming indispensability, a confident prediction that, if not for the slacker’s levity lent by Groening’s hand, might, at the time, actually have sounded implausible.

via Retronaut/Dangerous Minds

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Colin Marshall hosts and produces Notebook on Cities and Culture and writes essays on cities, language, Asia, and men’s style. He’s at work on a book about Los Angeles, A Los Angeles Primer. Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall or on Facebook.

by Colin Marshall | Permalink | Make a Comment ( 1 ) |

Johnny Depp Reads Hunter S. Thompson’s Famous “Wave Speech” from Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas

in Books, Film, Literature | April 10th, 2014

Hunter S. Thompson was a literary icon – a moralist, a gun nut, and the original gonzo journalist. He was the inventor of the true breakfast of champions and author of the most hilariously profane presidential obituary ever.

Of all his writing though, his book Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, a journey through bat country and into the twisted dark heart of the American soul, is his most famous and beloved. And aside from perhaps the book’s opening line – “We were somewhere around Barstow on the edge of the desert when the drugs began to take hold” – the most memorable section of the work is his “wave speech” which shows up in the eighth chapter. It is a poetic, heartfelt monologue about the idealism and the crushed dreams of the 1960s. Thompson himself said that the passage is “one of the best things I’ve ever fucking written.”

You can see Johnny Depp — who has played Thompson twice on the silver screen — read an abbreviated version of the speech above. You can read along below. And make sure you turn up your speakers a bit.

Strange memories on this nervous night in Las Vegas. Five years later? Six? It seems like a lifetime, or at least a Main Era—the kind of peak that never comes again. San Francisco in the middle sixties was a very special time and place to be a part of. Maybe it meant something. Maybe not, in the long run… but no explanation, no mix of words or music or memories can touch that sense of knowing that you were there and alive in that corner of time and the world. Whatever it meant.…

History is hard to know, because of all the hired bullshit, but even without being sure of “history” it seems entirely reasonable to think that every now and then the energy of a whole generation comes to a head in a long fine flash, for reasons that nobody really understands at the time—and which never explain, in retrospect, what actually happened.
[…]

There was madness in any direction, at any hour. If not across the Bay, then up the Golden Gate or down 101 to Los Altos or La Honda.… You could strike sparks anywhere. There was a fantastic universal sense that whatever we were doing was right, that we were winning.…

And that, I think, was the handle—that sense of inevitable victory over the forces of Old and Evil. Not in any mean or military sense; we didn’t need that. Our energy would simply prevail. There was no point in fighting—on our side or theirs. We had all the momentum; we were riding the crest of a high and beautiful wave.…

So now, less than five years later, you can go up on a steep hill in Las Vegas and look West, and with the right kind of eyes you can almost see the high-water mark—that place where the wave finally broke and rolled back.

Fear and Loathing was, of course, adapted into a 1998 film starring Depp after a very long development stage. Alex Cox – who directed the punk cult hit Repo Man – was originally slated to make the movie until he made the mistake of proposing to turn the wave speech into an animated sequence. Thompson was extremely unimpressed. Cox got canned and soon after Terry Gilliam was given the reins to the film. You can see the Gilliam’s treatment of the wave speech sequence below.

Hunter S. Thompson Interviews Keith Richards

Johnny Depp Reads Letters from Hunter S. Thompson

Hunter S. Thompson Gets Confronted by The Hell’s Angels

Jonathan Crow is a Los Angeles-based writer and filmmaker whose work has appeared in Yahoo!, The Hollywood Reporter, and other publications. You can follow him at @jonccrow.

by Jonathan Crow | Permalink | Make a Comment ( 2 ) |

Animated Video: Johnny Cash Explains Why Music Became a Religious Calling

in Animation, Music | April 9th, 2014

Blank on Blank is back with another animated video. This one animates a long lost interview with the great Johnny Cash. Interviewed by Barney Hoskyns back in 1996, Cash talked about music as a religious calling. Playing music was akin to preaching the gospel, and he knew he’d continue making music until his final days. Should we be surprised then, that seven years later, Cash completed more than 60 songs during the last four months of his life? He died with his boots on indeed.

Below we’ve highlighted for you some great Johnny Cash material from our archive.

The 1969 Bob Dylan-Johnny Cash Sessions: Twelve Rare Recordings

Johnny Cash Sings “Man in Black” for the First Time, 1971

Two Prison Concerts That Defined an Outlaw Singer: Johnny Cash at San Quentin and Folsom (1968–69)

by OC | Permalink | Make a Comment ( None ) |

Jim Carrey Sings a Pretty Damn Good Cover of The Beatles “I Am the Walrus”

in Music | April 9th, 2014

Back in 1998, the Beatles producer, George Martin, produced an album called In My Life. It’s probably not an LP that ever made it into your record collection, unless you’re a fan of middling covers of Beatles songs. (In which case, you’ll love our old post, The 15 Worst Covers of Beatles Songs: William Shatner, Bill Cosby, Tiny Tim, Sean Connery & Your Excellent Picks.) But the compilation does feature one recording that hasn’t quite faded from view — Jim Carrey’s take on “I Am the Walrus.” There’s a comedic component to his performance. But Carrey also demonstrates a “vocal elasticity” that you might not have expected. If you’ve never heard the Beatles’ original recording (God help you), you can find it here.

Peter Sellers Reads The Beatles’ “She Loves You” in Four Different Accents

Here Comes The Sun: The Lost Guitar Solo by George Harrison

The Beatles: Unplugged Collects Acoustic Demos of White Album Songs (1968)

by OC | Permalink | Make a Comment ( 6 ) |

Richard Dawkins’ Documentary The God Delusion Tackles Faith & Religious Violence (2006)

in Film, Politics, Religion | April 9th, 2014

The very title of Richard Dawkins’ 2006 book The God Delusion was intended to provoke, and the Oxford evolutionary biologist has seemingly done nothing but, since taking his stand against religions of all kinds, particularly the big monotheisms that claim most of the world’s inhabitants. Dawkins infuriates theists on the right with his self-assured claim that “there almost certainly is no God” and skeptics on the left, who charge him with sexism and racism. Even journalist and journeyman intellectual Christopher Hedges—no friend to authoritarian religions—accuses Dawkins of the same kind of intolerance as Christian, Jewish, and Islamic fundamentalists.

Meanwhile, thousands of people who may or may not follow Dawkins’ every inflammatory tweet credit him with giving them the courage and conviction to walk away from faiths they found oppressive. In that regard, he’s accomplished his goal, and his Richard Dawkins Foundation continues to advocate strenuously for “scientific education, critical thinking and evidence-based understanding of the natural world in the quest to overcome religious fundamentalism, superstition, intolerance and human suffering.”

If you’ve somehow missed Dawkins’ message amidst the furor over his method, you can get caught up rather quickly with the film above. Titled, like his book, The God Delusion, the film compiles the two 45-minute episodes of a documentary series produced for BBC 4 called Root of All Evil?, first broadcast in 2006 as a companion to the book. (The producers chose the title to create controversy—Dawkins has called the notion of any one thing being the “root of all evil” ridiculous.) In his introduction to the film, Dawkins proposes to explore “a world increasingly polarized by religion,” and to find out why faith has such a grip on the human mind.

Surveying regions from America’s Midwest to Israel, the film “takes a hard look at the very concept of faith: how it behaves like a kind of ‘brain virus,’ infecting generations of young minds, how it perpetuates outdated and dubious moral values.” Why, asks Dawkins, should religion “demand, and usually receive, our society’s respect”? It’s still a question worth asking, even if you don’t like Dawkins’ answers, or Dawkins himself.

You can find The God Delusion in our collection of Free Documentaries, part of our larger collection of 675 Free Movies Online.

The Origins Project Brings Together Neil DeGrasse Tyson, Richard Dawkins, Lawrence Krauss, Bill Nye, Ira Flatow, and More on One Stage

Growing Up in the Universe: Richard Dawkins Presents Captivating Science Lectures for Kids (1991)

Josh Jones is a writer and musician based in Durham, NC. Follow him at @jdmagness

by Josh Jones | Permalink | Make a Comment ( 1 ) |

How the CIA Turned Doctor Zhivago into a Propaganda Weapon Against the Soviet Union

in Books, History, Literature, Politics | April 9th, 2014

Humanity has long pondered the relative might of the pen and the sword. While one time-worn aphorism does grant the advantage to the pen, most of us have entertained doubts: the sword, metaphorically or literally, seems to have won out across an awfully wide swath of history. Still, the pen has scored some impressive victories, some even in living memory. Take, for example, the CIA’s recently revealed use of Boris Pasternak’s novel Doctor Zhivago as a propaganda weapon. Repressed in Pasternak’s native Russia, the book first appeared in Italy in 1957. The following year, the British suggested to America’s Central Intelligence Agency that the book stood a decent chance of winning hearts and minds behind the Iron Curtain — if, of course, they could get a few copies in there. A CIA memo sent across its own Soviet Russia Division subsequently pronounced Doctor Zhivago as possessed of “great propaganda value, not only for its intrinsic message and thought-provoking nature, but also for the circumstances of its publication. We have the opportunity to make Soviet citizens wonder what is wrong with their government, when a fine literary work by the man acknowledged to be the greatest living Russian writer is not even available in his own country in his own language for his own people to read.”

That evaluation comes from one of the over 130 declassified documents used by Peter Finn and Petra Couvée in their brand new history of this act of real-life literary espionage, The Zhivago Affair: The Kremlin, the CIA and the Battle Over a Forbidden Book. You can read an in-depth article on some of the events involved in this operation — the CIA’s printing of both hardcover and miniature paperback Russian-language editions, the not-so-clandestine distribution of copies at 1958’s Brussels Universal and International Exposition, the CIA’s unexpected alliance with the Vatican in this mission, the inept probing by Soviet “researchers” — at the Washington Post.

You can also watch a CBS This Morning clip on the book just above. Dramatic though this “Zhivago Affair” sounds, it came as neither the first nor last American use of culture as a means of destabilizing the Soviet Union. We’ve even previously featured two others: secretly-funded abstract expressionist painting, and Louis Armstrong’s 1965 East Berlin and Budapest concerts. Cold War America may have had the sword, in the form of its vast nuclear arsenal, polished and ready, but clearly it retained a certain regard for the pen — and brush, and trumpet — as well.

How the CIA Secretly Funded Abstract Expressionism During the Cold War

Colin Marshall hosts and produces Notebook on Cities and Culture and writes essays on cities, language, Asia, and men’s style. He’s at work on a book about Los Angeles, A Los Angeles Primer. Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall or on Facebook.

by Colin Marshall | Permalink | Make a Comment ( None ) |

Watch Episode 1 of Years of Living Dangerously, The New Showtime Series on Climate Change

Your Body During Adolescence: A Nakedly Unashamed Sex Ed Film from 1955

Philosophize This!: The Popular, Entertaining Philosophy Podcast from an Unconventional Teacher

The Coffee Pot That Fueled Honoré de Balzac’s Coffee Addiction

Ernest Hemingway’s Very First Published Stories, Free as an eBook

Before The Simpsons, Matt Groening Illustrated a “Student’s Guide” for Apple Computers (1989)

Johnny Depp Reads Hunter S. Thompson’s Famous “Wave Speech” from Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas

Animated Video: Johnny Cash Explains Why Music Became a Religious Calling

Jim Carrey Sings a Pretty Damn Good Cover of The Beatles “I Am the Walrus”

Richard Dawkins’ Documentary The God Delusion Tackles Faith & Religious Violence (2006)

How the CIA Turned Doctor Zhivago into a Propaganda Weapon Against the Soviet Union

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