In this inter­view, John Pow­ers, NPR’s film crit­ic-at-large, gives a good, spir­it­ed debrief (iTunes — Stream) on a fes­ti­val that fea­tured, among oth­er things, sev­er­al high­ly-acclaimed Amer­i­can films, includ­ing ones by the Coen Broth­ers (No Coun­try for Old Men), Gus Van Sant (Para­noid Park), and Michael Moore (Sicko). Also, Pow­ers touch­es on the Roman­ian film that took top hon­ors at the fes­ti­val (4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days) as well as Quentin Taran­ti­no’s splen­did dis­ap­point­ment (Death Proof). You can find the full list of 2007 prize win­ners here.

For an anoth­er point of view, you can check out the New York Times pod­cast from Cannes (iTunes — mp3). Here you get A.O. Scot­t’s and Manohla Dar­gis’ final thoughts on the fes­ti­val, plus their oth­er pod­casts from the Riv­iera. And while you’re at it, you can review a col­lec­tion of their print cov­er­age.

Last­ly, here’s a French per­spec­tive on the fes­ti­val that comes from Europe 1. (Yes, it is in French.)

Relat­ed Top­ic: Check out our col­lec­tion of 100 Top Cul­ture Blogs, which includes many film blogs, and Sub­scribe to Our Feed.

As always, please **@******re.com/”>email us and let us know if we’re miss­ing some­thing essen­tial.

• Absolute Arts.com Art Blog: A sta­ble of versed blog­gers who look at a spec­trum of art-relat­ed themes.
• Alec Soth: Pho­to­graph­i­ca, mis­cel­lanea, et cetera.
• Art.Blogging.La: An art blog start­ed by Caryn Cole­man that dis­cuss­es and pro­motes the vital art scene in LA.
• Art­ByUs.com: An eclec­tic and inter­na­tion­al art news site.
• Art Forum: A good look at the art event and social scene. Some­what for insid­ers.
• Art Law Blog: Title kind of sums it up.
• Art News Blog: The blog digs up new sto­ries, reviews, guides, and arti­cles found online and shares them each day. Sto­ries have an inter­na­tion­al focus with an empha­sis on the visu­al arts.
• Art World Salon: Looks at the fast-paced trans­for­ma­tions tak­ing place in the glob­al art world. Fre­quent­ly looks at the eco­nom­ic side of things.
• Con­sci­en­tious: A weblog about fine-art pho­tog­ra­phy (and more).
• Con­tem­po­rary Pulitzer: An art blog put togeth­er joint­ly by the Con­tem­po­rary Art Muse­um St. Louis and The Pulitzer Foun­da­tion for the Arts.
• Cronaca: A com­pi­la­tion of news con­cern­ing art, arche­ol­o­gy, his­to­ry, and what­ev­er else catch­es the chronicler’s eye, with the odd bit of opin­ion and com­men­tary thrown in.
• Edward Win­kle­man: Art, pol­i­tics, gos­sip and tough love from a NYC arts deal­er. You’ll find this site list­ed on many-a-blogroll.
• Eye Lev­el: A blog pro­duced by the Smith­son­ian Amer­i­can Art Muse­um, it uses the museum’s col­lec­tion as a touch­stone and is ded­i­cat­ed to Amer­i­can art and the ways in which the nation’s art reflects its his­to­ry and cul­ture. Sur­pris­ing­ly, one of the few blogs to come out of the muse­um world.
• Fal­lon and Rosof’s Art­blog: Art reviews, deep thoughts, and gos­sip from Philadel­phia and beyond.
• Gallery Hop­per: A guide to the best of fine art pho­tog­ra­phy, gal­leries and events in New York City and beyond.
• Gram­mar Police: A well-regard art blog that Won­kette sum­ma­rizes as “local art fag par excel­lence.”
• Gravest­mor: A wide­ly-cit­ed archi­tec­ture blog com­ing out of Aus­tralia.
• Guardian Art & Archi­tec­ture Blog: A British take on the arts world. One of the few blogs cit­ed here from the main­stream press.
• Life With­out Build­ings: News and notes from an archi­tec­ture weblog with a pen­chant for giant stat­ues and post­mod­ern cul­ture.
• Look­ing Around: A blog by Richard Lacayo, who writes about books, art and archi­tec­ture at TIME Mag­a­zine.
• Mag­num Pho­tos: A mul­ti-author, aes­thet­i­cal­ly well designed pho­tog­ra­phy blog.
• Mod­ern Art Notes: Voila, Tyler Green’s blog about mod­ern and con­tem­po­rary art. The Wall Street Jour­nal has called MAN “the most influ­en­tial of all visu­al-arts blogs.”
• Pleiady — Thoughts for a New Gen­er­a­tion: A blog on the Art of Now
• smARThis­to­ry: Gen­er­al Mus­ings about using tech­nol­o­gy to teach with images by two art his­to­ri­ans, Beth Har­ris and Steven Zuck­er. Often fea­tures links to worth­while art his­to­ry pod­casts.
• The Art His­to­ry Newslet­ter: If there are aca­d­e­mics among us, this is for you.
• The Art Life: Fea­tures a lengthy art site blogroll. Look down the right hand side and you’ll see what I mean.

Relate Fea­ture: See our relat­ed arti­cle on Art Muse­um Pod­casts.

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The 60th Cannes Film Fes­ti­val is in full swing. It’s all film for ten plus days. But last night, music – or real­ly U2 – took cen­ter stage. Before the mid­night screen­ing of their new rock­u­men­tary, U23D, the Irish band played a two song set (Ver­ti­go and Where the Streets Have No Name) on the red car­pet. It was short and sweet. You can watch it below. Cheers.

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More Pod­casts:

Arts & Cul­ture — Audio Books — For­eign Lan­guage Lessons — News & Infor­ma­tion — Sci­ence — Tech­nol­o­gy — Uni­ver­si­ty (Gen­er­al) — Uni­ver­si­ty (B‑School) — Pod­cast Primer

First up, Dan Gilbert, a Har­vard psy­chol­o­gy pro­fes­sor who recent­ly wrote Stum­bling On Hap­pi­ness, a book that uses psy­chol­o­gy, cog­ni­tive neu­ro­science, phi­los­o­phy and behav­ioral eco­nom­ics to show how our imag­i­na­tion — our unique abil­i­ty to pre­dict the future — usu­al­ly inter­feres with our basic abil­i­ty to be hap­py. Here you get some ker­nels of thought from the best­selling book, and some insights into why a para­plegic is often as hap­py as a lot­tery win­ner. Good stuff here.

Next, we give you Al Gore doing a lit­tle stand-up com­e­dy (no kid­ding) and speak­ing on glob­al warm­ing, much as he does in An Incon­ve­nient Truth. No oth­er intro­duc­tion is need­ed.

Last­ly, we give you Dan Den­nett, Direc­tor
of the Cen­ter for Cog­ni­tive Stud­ies at Tufts Uni­ver­si­ty and the author
of Break­ing the Spell: Reli­gion as a Nat­ur­al Phe­nom­e­non. With this clip, Den­nett takes on Rick War­ren, author of The Pur­pose-Dri­ven Life, and makes the clever argu­ment that while the the­o­ry of intel­li­gent design may hold no water, reli­gions have them­selves been intel­li­gent­ly designed. More on that here:

Amer­i­ca’s mis­ad­ven­ture in Iraq has had mul­ti­ple costs for the US, with just one being the decline of Amer­i­can moral lead­er­ship on the inter­na­tion­al stage, and par­tic­u­lar­ly with­in the Mid­dle East. Intel­lec­tu­al­ly, we know that Amer­i­ca’s pres­tige is momen­tar­i­ly shot. But to get a feel for what this means in prac­tice, it’s worth lis­ten­ing to this inter­view (iTunes — MP3) with Lawrence Pin­tak, who directs the Adham Cen­ter for Elec­tron­ic Jour­nal­ism at The Amer­i­can Uni­ver­si­ty in Cairo. A long­time observ­er of the Mid­dle East, Pin­tak sees the evo­lu­tion of Amer­i­ca’s image going some­thing like this: Before 9/11, the prover­bial Mid­dle East­ern cab dri­ver expressed deep admi­ra­tion for Amer­i­ca and Amer­i­cans, even while dis­agree­ing with Amer­i­can lead­ers and poli­cies. When the Twin Tow­ers fell, sym­pa­thy for Amer­i­ca was nev­er greater. Now, six years lat­er, it’s all gone awry. The men­tal line that sep­a­rat­ed Amer­i­cans and Amer­i­can pol­i­cy is gone, and the antipa­thy toward Amer­i­ca is fair­ly com­plete.

What part­ly explains this shift is how the war has been refract­ed through the Mid­dle East­ern media. Ever since Al Jazeera start­ed air­ing in 1996 (you can watch it here in Eng­lish), the Mid­dle East has had its own free media and seen events through its own lens. And, in the case of the Iraq war, it has meant see­ing what we don’t see — the unsan­i­tized war, the bod­ies, the lev­eled build­ings, etc. — but also much more mun­dane things that shape over­all impres­sions. It means see­ing, for exam­ple, how tone-deaf US spokes­men in Bagh­dad show up at jour­nal­ist con­fer­ences in Abu Dhabi (a com­plete­ly non-mil­i­tary event out­side of Iraq) in army fatigues, leav­ing essen­tial­ly the impres­sion that the US sees the larg­er Mid­dle East as a mil­i­tary stage.

Pin­tak knows the region well, and he artic­u­lates Amer­i­ca’s per­cep­tion prob­lem in a bal­anced and thought­ful way. Check it out here: (iTunes — MP3) Also, on a relat­ed note, any­one who wants to digg more deeply into Mid­dle East­ern per­spec­tives may want to explore Mosa­ic: World News from the Mid­dle East (iTunes  Feed). This Peabody award-win­ning pod­cast pro­vides a dai­ly com­pi­la­tion of tele­vi­sion news reports from across the Mid­dle East. The news comes from inde­pen­dent and state-run news ser­vices, and it is all trans­lat­ed into Eng­lish.

Over the past six months, we have cre­at­ed a series of resources that let you access uni­ver­si­ty resources for free and on-the-fly. Below, we have cen­tral­ized these mate­ri­als in one place to give you quick access:

• Uni­ver­si­ty Video Col­lec­tion
  • A large trove of video con­tent from well-known uni­ver­si­ties. All video can be watched on your com­put­er.
• Uni­ver­si­ty Pod­casts  — Gen­er­al Col­lec­tion
  • This col­lec­tion fea­tures large pod­cast col­lec­tions from lead­ing uni­ver­si­ties in the US and Europe.  This col­lec­tion will def­i­nite­ly give your mind a work­out.
• Uni­ver­si­ty Pod­casts — Law School
  • A more focused col­lec­tion of pod­casts from major Amer­i­can law schools.
• Uni­ver­si­ty Pod­casts — Busi­ness School
  • Anoth­er spe­cial­ized col­lec­tion of pod­casts pro­duced by top-notch MBA pro­grams and busi­ness school pub­lish­ers (e.g. Har­vard Busi­ness Review). See relat­ed arti­cle here.
• 10 Excel­lent Uni­ver­si­ty Pod­casts
  • Title pret­ty much says it all.
• Learn 20+ Lan­guages on Your iPod
  • These pod­casts are most­ly not spon­sored by uni­ver­si­ties, but they seemed worth includ­ing in this mix of edu­ca­tion­al mate­ri­als.
• E‑learning Pro­grams from Top Amer­i­can Uni­ver­si­ties
  • There are many insti­tu­tions now offer­ing online cours­es. Many, how­ev­er, are of dubi­ous qual­i­ty. Here are some pret­ty good ones.
• 50+ Free Cours­es from UC Berke­ley on iTunes
  • Again, the title tells you pret­ty much all you need to know.
• Five Stan­ford Cours­es Avail­able as Free Pod­casts on iTunes
  • Dit­to

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