Freakonomics Moves to The New York Times

in Uncategorized | August 8th, 2007

A quick heads up: Steven Levitt and Stephen Dub­n­er, authors of the major best­seller Freako­nom­ics, have moved the relat­ed Freako­nom­ics blogs to the New York Times. You can now catch it here, and you’ll need to cre­ate a free user account with the Times if you (inex­plic­a­bly) don’t already have one. It looks like the Freako­nom­ics guys are off to a good provoca­tive start. Today’s post asks If You Were a Ter­ror­ist, How Would You Attack?

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Bestselling Novelist Sells Story Ideas for $1

in Books, Literature | August 6th, 2007

Best­selling writer Jonathan Lethem — author of one of my favorite nov­els Moth­er­less Brook­lyn — has put togeth­er an offer that’s hard to beat. He’ll sell you a sto­ry for a book, play, or screen­play for a mere $1. Then you can take the sto­ry idea, make it your own, and move it in new and unex­pect­ed direc­tions.

This is obvi­ous­ly not a get-rich-quick scheme. It’s actu­al­ly more about bring­ing Lar­ry Lessig’s notion of free cul­ture to the lit­er­ary domain. You can get more on Lethem’s ideas here, but the upshot is that Lethem, being a fan of “adap­ta­tions, appro­pri­a­tions, col­lage, and sam­pling,” wants artists to “make mate­r­i­al free and avail­able for [cre­ative] reuse.” (Some of this think­ing informs a recent piece in Harper’s called “The ecsta­sy of influ­ence: A pla­gia­rism.”) The ini­tia­tive, which he calls The Promis­cu­ous Mate­ri­als Project, offers a step in the right direc­tion.

Relat­ed Con­tent: Give a lis­ten to this engag­ing inter­view with Lethem where he talks about this project and more. Also check out Lethem and oth­er authors speak­ing at Google.

Tell us what books have changed your life. Three days left. We have over 30 con­tri­bu­tions so far. Keep them com­ing.

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What Books Made a Difference? (Yes, We’re Talking to You)

in Books | August 2nd, 2007

We’re try­ing out some­thing a lit­tle dif­fer­ent today, and we hope that you’ll par­tic­i­pate because by giv­ing more, you’ll get more in return. (So far we have 18 peo­ple par­tic­i­pat­ing, now it is your turn.)

We want to draw on the col­lec­tive wis­dom of our read­ers and find out what great books you’ve read, and which par­tic­u­lar one made a dif­fer­ence in your life. That is, what book has led you to look dif­fer­ent­ly at lit­er­a­ture, think­ing, career, love, friend­ship, death, or what­ev­er you con­sid­er impor­tant?

At some point lat­er next week, we’ll bun­dle the sub­mis­sions and post them for you. We’re hop­ing that this will give every­one a list of great and impor­tant books to read.

If you’d like to par­tic­i­pate, please make a sub­mis­sion in the com­ments below, or **@******re.com”>via email. In what­ev­er you write, please list the name of the book and the author, and then men­tion why the book mat­tered to you. (Your expla­na­tion can be as brief or as long as you like.) When we post the replies, we won’t use your names unless you oth­er­wise con­sent. And we’ll oth­er­wise pro­tect the pri­va­cy of your email address­es.

Final­ly, we’ll ran­dom­ly select one name from all of the sub­mis­sions, and send that con­trib­u­tor a nice $50 gift cer­tifi­cate from Amazon.com.

We look for­ward to hear­ing from you, and thanks for tak­ing part.

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The War of the Worlds on Podcast: How H.G. Wells and Orson Welles Riveted A Nation

in Audio Books, Media, Sci Fi | July 31st, 2007

Today, by pop­u­lar demand, we’re run­ning an updat­ed ver­sion of one of our more pop­u­lar posts to date. Enjoy…

At has­tened speeds dur­ing the past year, we have seen book lovers record­ing home­grown audio­books and post­ing them on sites like Lib­rivox (see our col­lec­tion of free audio­books here). For obvi­ous copy­right rea­sons, these audio texts large­ly come from the pub­lic domain, and, yes, they’re some­times of uneven qual­i­ty. Some good, some okay. Among the recent releas­es, you’d expect to find great clas­si­cal works — the major plays by Shake­speare, the essen­tial trea­tis­es by Pla­to and oth­er philoso­phers, etc. — and you do get some of those. How­ev­er, far more often you get texts by more mod­ern writ­ers who wrote with­in the thriller, sci fi and adven­ture gen­res. Here, I’m talk­ing about Wash­ing­ton Irv­ing, Robert Louis Steven­son, Edgar Allen Poe, Arthur Conan Doyle, and H.G. Wells. (Find these pod­casts here.)

It seems rather fit­ting that Wells, the father of sci­ence fic­tion, would be among the first to have his writ­ings dig­i­tal­ly record­ed and dis­trib­uted. Nowa­days, you can down­load, sync and lis­ten to his major works – The New Accel­er­a­tor (mp3), The Invis­i­ble Man (iTunes — feed), The Time Machine (iTunes — feed), and The War of the Worlds (iTunes). But what’s bet­ter than all of this, at least in our minds, is this vin­tage gem …

Here you can down­load the ver­sion of The War of the Worlds that Orson Welles famous­ly adapt­ed and aired on nation­al radio in Octo­ber 1938. Pre­sent­ed so that it sound­ed like an actu­al news broad­cast, the Orson Welles ver­sion was mis­tak­en for truth by many lis­ten­ers who caught the pro­gram mid­stream (more info here), and, soon enough, they found them­selves flee­ing an unfold­ing Mar­t­ian inva­sion, run­ning down into their base­ments with guns cocked and ready to fire. You can catch the mp3 ver­sion of the famous Welles record­ing here (and also alter­na­tive­ly here). Have fun with this broad­cast. It’s a clas­sic.

Relat­ed con­tent: For more old time, sci-fi radio broad­casts, check out this nice col­lec­tion on iTunes.

Also see: Vin­tage Radio Archive: The Lone Ranger, Abbott & Costel­lo, and Bob Hope

The Digital Encyclopedia of Life

in Harvard, Science, Video - Science | July 31st, 2007

In 2003, the Har­vard biol­o­gist E.O. Wil­son wrote a wide­ly read essay that called for an “Ency­clo­pe­dia of Life.” Summed up sim­ply, Wil­son had in mind “an online ref­er­ence source and data­base” that cat­a­logued “every one of the 1.8 mil­lion species that are named and known on this plan­et,” not to men­tion the many organ­isms that aren’t yet known. When ful­ly com­piled, the web-based data­base would offer a “macro­scope” of sorts, a way to do com­par­a­tive biol­o­gy and ecol­o­gy on an unprece­dent­ed scale, allow­ing sci­en­tists to gain new insights into the immense bio­di­ver­si­ty of our plan­et.

Wil­son is still push­ing this vision, and he laid it out most recent­ly at the TED Talks con­fer­ence in Mon­terey, Cal­i­for­nia. (Watch the video below.) The envi­sioned ency­clo­pe­dia will be a col­lab­o­ra­tive enter­prise, mod­eled some­what along the lines of Wikipedia (see some demon­stra­tion pages here). And it’ll be acces­si­ble any­where, any­time, to who­ev­er could ben­e­fit from it. It’s expect­ed to take close to a decade to com­plete the project, although some key com­po­nents of the data­base will be avail­able in 2008. (See this FAQ for more details.)

For more infor­ma­tion on E.O. Wil­son, I would encour­age you to lis­ten to Bill Moy­ers’ pro­file of Wil­son (iTunes — Feed — MP3) which recent­ly aired on PBS. You may also want to give some atten­tion to Wilson’s lat­est book, The Cre­ation: An Appeal to Save Life on Earth.

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The Worst Sentence Awards

in Literature | July 30th, 2007

Every year the folks at the Bul­w­er-Lyt­ton Fic­tion Con­test cel­e­brate their love for bad prose by run­ning “a whim­si­cal lit­er­ary com­pe­ti­tion that chal­lenges entrants to com­pose the open­ing sen­tence to the worst of all pos­si­ble nov­els.” They’ve just announced this year’s cham­pi­on sen­tences and they’re well worth a read. The con­test accepts entries year-round, so if you think you’ve got what it takes to write the worst sen­tence of 2008, feel free to take your shot.

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The New Yorker Magazine Crosses the Digital Divide

in Media | July 30th, 2007

When you think of The New York­er, you don’t gen­er­al­ly think of a mag­a­zine with a sub­stan­tial dig­i­tal foot­print. But, ever so grad­u­al­ly, under David Rem­nick­’s edi­to­r­i­al direc­tion, this insti­tu­tion in Amer­i­can jour­nal­ism and cul­tur­al com­men­tary has launched a series of dig­i­tal ini­tia­tives that com­ple­ment the tra­di­tion­al print jour­nal. And when you add them all up, you real­ize the mag­a­zine is pret­ty far along the dig­i­tal curve. How else can you look at it when The New York­er now offers a fair­ly robust web­site, which com­bines full pieces from the cur­rent print edi­tion with spe­cial­ized online fea­tures (take for exam­ple the new blog by George Pack­er)? And then con­sid­er the fact that you can now buy on DVD the com­plete his­tor­i­cal archive of the mag­a­zine, going back to 1925, and then search and read through it on your com­put­er — all for a fair­ly scant $63. (Get your own copy here.)

More minor, but nonethe­less inter­est­ing, for­ays into the dig­i­tal world include some recent exper­i­ments on the pod­cast front. Not long ago, we men­tioned that The New York­er’s trade­mark car­toons have been ani­mat­ed and can be watched as video pod­casts (iTunes — Feed). Then there’s The New York­er Fic­tion (iTunes — Feed), anoth­er rel­a­tive­ly new pod­cast that fea­tures famous fic­tion writ­ers read­ing out loud select­ed short sto­ries from the magazine’s fic­tion archives. (It’s issued only month­ly.) Final­ly, to round things out, anoth­er pod­cast has recent­ly emerged, and it’s sim­ply called Com­ment (iTunes — Feed) and that’s because it lets you lis­ten to a week­ly read­ing of the mag­a­zine’s “Com­ment” essay, often writ­ten by Hen­drik Hertzberg, Nicholas Lemann, or David Rem­nick him­self. For a com­plete list of New York­er RSS feeds, click here.

You can find the pod­casts men­tioned above, and oth­ers like them, in our Arts & Cul­ture Pod­cast Col­lec­tion.

Wolf Brother: Serial Literary Entertainment

in Audio Books, Books, Literature | July 27th, 2007

The Guardian Books Pod­cast has start­ed offer­ing an audio­book ver­sion of the young adult nov­el Wolf Broth­er as a ser­i­al pod­cast. The sto­ry is the first in a series of books by Michelle Paver called Chron­i­cles of Ancient Dark­ness. It makes good audio since it’s grip­ping and not hard to fol­low (or get back into if you get dis­tract­ed). But what real­ly makes it worth­while is Ian McKel­lan’s voice, which lends the tale just the right lev­el of ancient, mag­i­cal atmos­phere. The Guardian has released 9 out of 13 episodes so far, at a rate of one a week. (Site, iTunes)

Click here for more free audio­books. 

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Straight Talk about Stem Cells: Another Stanford Course via Podcast

in Online Courses, Science, Stanford | July 25th, 2007

Last week, we men­tioned The Future of the Inter­net. This week it’s anoth­er course avail­able as a free pod­cast : Straight Talk About Stem Cells (iTunes).

The course was taught by Christo­pher Scott, the Exec­u­tive Direc­tor of Stan­ford’s Pro­gram on Stem Cells in Soci­ety and the author of Stem Cell Now: An Intro­duc­tion to the Com­ing Med­ical Rev­o­lu­tion. Orig­i­nal­ly taught with­in Stan­ford’s Con­tin­u­ing Stud­ies pro­gram, the course was designed with the gen­er­al pub­lic in mind. So it should be quite acces­si­ble. You can now down­load three of the total five lec­tures. Two more will be com­ing soon. (Get it on iTunes here.) Here is the orig­i­nal course descrip­tion for the course.

Biol­o­gy’s Brave New World: Straight Talk about Stem Cells

No area of sci­ence holds such promise for treat­ing dis­ease and improv­ing human lives as stem cell research. But no area of sci­ence caus­es such fun­da­men­tal eth­i­cal con­cern and such fero­cious polit­i­cal con­flict. In this short course, stu­dents will learn the fun­da­men­tals of stem cell biol­o­gy, and study how these pow­er­ful cells could be used to make func­tion­al organs, treat dia­betes or repair spinal cord injuries. With the sci­ence and tech­nol­o­gy firm­ly in hand, we will jour­ney into the deep reach­es of the con­tro­ver­sy and exam­ine the inter­na­tion­al explo­sion of stem cell research and how law and pol­i­cy are affect­ing long-held Amer­i­can dom­i­nance in cell biol­o­gy. New sci­ence often pro­vokes a rede­f­i­n­i­tion of eth­i­cal stan­dards. Stem cells have reignit­ed the debate about the embryo, abor­tion, and sci­ence run amok. We will leave the shrill rhetoric behind, dis­cussing the ques­tion at the heart of the debate: How, as a soci­ety, do we bal­ance our respon­si­bil­i­ties to the unborn and the sick?

Check out our larg­er col­lec­tion of free uni­ver­si­ty cours­es.

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Filling the Idea Void in Iraq

in Current Affairs, Politics | July 23rd, 2007

We have hit bot­tom in Iraq. And you know it because the debates over Iraq (whether the war was just, whether we planned it ade­quate­ly, whether we have a mean­ing­ful exist strat­e­gy, etc.) have ground to a halt. The big defend­ers of the war effort have most­ly gone silent, or they’re no longer tak­en seri­ous­ly, and what we’re left with is a deficit of ideas all around. There are those who talk about stay­ing in Iraq, but can’t artic­u­late a cred­i­ble strat­e­gy for mov­ing for­ward. And those who talk about leav­ing, but can’t out­line how we’ll leave Iraq in a moral­ly defen­si­ble posi­tion. We hear a lot in the way of plat­i­tudes, lit­tle in the way of sub­stance.

This Fresh Air inter­view (stream it here) with Thomas Ricks, author of the best­seller Fias­co: The Amer­i­can Mil­i­tary Adven­ture in Iraq, helps fill the idea void a bit. (His book, by the way, comes out in paper­back lat­er this week.) Hav­ing recent­ly returned from Iraq, Ricks talks about the real options now avail­able to the US, and what steps the Bush admin­is­tra­tion will like­ly take dur­ing its last 18 months. Also, he dis­cuss­es how the Amer­i­can mil­i­tary has changed its m.o. in Iraq. Gone are the days when pol­i­tics dic­tat­ed a sun­ny out­look and no real plans. Now, adults are run­ning the show, and they’re get­ting a good deal more real­is­tic and prag­mat­ic. But even they rec­og­nize that this new­found wis­dom is com­ing per­haps too late.

Relat­ed Note: George Pack­er, the main jour­nal­ist who cov­ered the war effort for The New York­er, has recent­ly rolled out a blog for the mag­a­zine. It’s called “Inter­est­ing Times” and it’s sure to help fill the idea void as well. Give it a look here.

Want to down­load free cours­es from top uni­ver­si­ties? Check out this new pod­cast col­lec­tion.

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