Free Science Fiction Classics on the Web: Huxley, Orwell, Asimov, Gaiman & Beyond

in Audio Books, Books, Sci Fi | March 26th, 2012

Today we’re bring­ing you a roundup of some of the great Sci­ence Fic­tion, Fan­ta­sy and Dystopi­an clas­sics avail­able on the web. And what bet­ter way to get start­ed than with Aldous Hux­ley read­ing a dra­ma­tized record­ing of his 1932 nov­el, Brave New World. The read­ing aired on the CBS Radio Work­shop in 1956. You can lis­ten to Part 1 here and Part 2 here.

(FYI: You can down­load Hux­ley’s orig­i­nal work — as opposed to the dra­ma­tized ver­sion — in audio by sign­ing up for a Free Tri­al with Audible.com, and that applies to oth­er books men­tioned here as well.)

Lit­tle known fact. Aldous Hux­ley once gave George Orwell French lessons at Eton. And, 17 years after the release of Brave New World, Hux­ley’s pupil pub­lished 1984. The sem­i­nal dystopi­an work may be one of the most influ­en­tial nov­els of the 20th cen­tu­ry, and it’s almost cer­tain­ly the most impor­tant polit­i­cal nov­el from that peri­od. You can find it avail­able on the web in three for­mats: Free eText — Free Audio Book – Free Movie.

In 1910, J. Sear­le Daw­ley wrote and direct­ed Franken­stein. It took him three days to shoot the 12-minute film (when most films were actu­al­ly shot in just one day). It marked the first time that Mary Shelley’s clas­sic mon­ster tale (text — audio) was ever adapt­ed to film. And, some­what notably, Thomas Edi­son had a hand (albeit it an indi­rect one) in mak­ing the film. The first Franken­stein film was shot at Edi­son Stu­dios, the pro­duc­tion com­pa­ny owned by the famous inven­tor.

Stephen King and Joyce Car­ol Oates — they both pay homage to H.P. Love­craft and his great tales. And you can too by spend­ing time with his col­lect­ed works, avail­able in etext for­mats here and audio for­mats here (Free Mp3 Zip File – Free Stream).

Philip K. Dick pub­lished 44 nov­els and 121 sto­ries dur­ing his short life­time, solid­i­fy­ing his posi­tion as one of Amer­i­ca’s top sci-fi writ­ers. If you’re not inti­mate­ly famil­iar with his nov­els, then you almost cer­tain­ly know major films based on Dick’s work – Blade Run­ner, Total Recall, A Scan­ner Dark­ly and  Minor­i­ty Report. To get you acquaint­ed with PKD’s writ­ing, we have culled togeth­er 14 short sto­ries for your enjoy­ment.

eTexts (find down­load instruc­tions here)

• “Beyond the Door”
  • iPad/iPhone – Kin­dle + Oth­er For­mats
• “Beyond Lies the Wub”
  • iPad/iPhone – Kin­dle + Oth­er For­mats
• “Mr. Space­ship”
  • iPad/iPhone – Kin­dle + Oth­er For­mats
• “Piper in the Woods”
  • iPad/iPhone – Kin­dle + Oth­er For­mats
• “Sec­ond Vari­ety”
  • iPad/iPhone – Kin­dle + Oth­er For­mats
• “The Crys­tal Crypt”
  • iPad/iPhone – Kin­dle + Oth­er For­mats
• “The Defend­ers”
  • iPhone/iPad – Kin­dle + Oth­er For­mats
• “The Eyes Have It”
  • iPad/iPhone – Kin­dle + Oth­er For­mats
• “The Gun”
  • iPad/iPhone – Kin­dle + Oth­er For­mats
• “The Hang­ing Stranger”
  • Kin­dle + Oth­er For­mats
• “The Skull”
  • iPad/iPhone – Kin­dle + Oth­er For­mats
• “The Vari­able Man”
  • iPad/iPhone – Kin­dle + Oth­er For­mats
• “Tony and the Bee­tles”
  • Kin­dle + Oth­er For­mats
• “We Can Remem­ber It For You Whole­sale”
  • iPad/iPhone

Audio

• “Beyond Lies the Wub” – Free MP3
• “Beyond the Door” – Free MP3
• “Sec­ond Vari­ety” – Free MP3 Zip File – Stream Online
• “The Defend­ers” — Free MP3
• “The Hang­ing Stranger” – Free MP3
• “The Vari­able Man” – Free MP3 Zip File – Stream Online
• “Tony and the Bee­tles” – MP3 Part 1 – MP3 Part II

Back in the late 1930s, Orson Welles launched The Mer­cury The­atre on the Air, a radio pro­gram ded­i­cat­ed to bring­ing dra­mat­ic, the­atri­cal pro­duc­tions to the Amer­i­can air­waves. The show had a fair­ly short run, last­ing from 1938 to 1941. But it made its mark. Dur­ing these few years, The Mer­cury The­atre aired The War of the Worlds, an episode nar­rat­ed by Welles that led many Amer­i­cans to believe their coun­try was under Mar­t­ian attack. The leg­endary pro­duc­tion, per­haps the most famous ever aired on Amer­i­can radio, was based on H.G. Wells’ ear­ly sci-fi nov­el, and you can lis­ten to the broad­cast right here.

Between 1951 and 1953, Isaac Asi­mov pub­lished three books that formed the now famous Foun­da­tion Tril­o­gy. Many con­sid­ered it a mas­ter­work in sci­ence fic­tion, and that view became offi­cial doc­trine in 1966 when the tril­o­gy received a spe­cial Hugo Award for Best All-Time Series, notably beat­ing out Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings. Even­tu­al­ly, the BBC decid­ed to adapt Asimov’s tril­o­gy to the radio, dra­ma­tiz­ing the series in eight one-hour episodes that aired between May and June 1973. Thanks to The Inter­net Archive you can down­load the full pro­gram as a zip file, or stream it online:

Part 1 |MP3| Part 2 |MP3| Part 3 |MP3| Part 4 |MP3| Part 5 |MP3| Part 6 |MP3| Part 7 |MP3| Part 8 |MP3|

Before the days of Har­ry Pot­ter, gen­er­a­tions of young read­ers let their imag­i­na­tions take flight with The Chron­i­cles of Nar­nia, a series of sev­en fan­ta­sy nov­els writ­ten by C. S. Lewis. Like his friend J.R.R. Tolkien, Lewis served on the Eng­lish fac­ul­ty at Oxford Uni­ver­si­ty and took part in the Inklings, an Oxford lit­er­ary group ded­i­cat­ed to fic­tion and fan­ta­sy. Pub­lished between 1950 and 1956, The Chron­i­cles of Nar­nia has sold over 100 mil­lion copies in 47 lan­guages, delight­ing younger and old­er read­ers world­wide.

Now, with the appar­ent bless­ing of the C.S. Lewis estate, the sev­en vol­ume series is avail­able in a free audio for­mat. There are 101 audio record­ings in total, each aver­ag­ing 30 min­utes and read by Chris­si Hart. Down­load the com­plete audio via the web or RSS Feed.

Neil Gaiman has emerged as one of today’s best fan­ta­sy writ­ers. He has made comics respectable and pub­lished nov­els, includ­ing one that will be adapt­ed by HBO. A great deal of his out­put, though, has been in the form of short sto­ries, some avail­able on the web in text for­mat, oth­ers in audio.

Audio & Video

Between 1982 and 2000, Rudy Ruck­er wrote a series of four sci-fi nov­els that formed The Ware Tetral­o­gy. The first two books in the series – Soft­ware and Wet­ware – won the Philip K. Dick Award for best nov­el. And William Gib­son has called Ruck­er “a nat­ur­al-born Amer­i­can street sur­re­al­ist” or, more sim­ply, one sui gener­is dude. And now the even bet­ter part: Ruck­er (who hap­pens to be the great-great-great-grand­son of Hegel) has released The Ware Tetral­o­gy under a Cre­ative Com­mons license, and you can down­load the full text for free in PDF and RTF for­mats. In total, the col­lec­tion runs 800+ pages.

Neil deGrasse Tyson: ‘How Much Would You Pay for the Universe?’

in Astronomy, Science | March 19th, 2012

“Nobody’s dream­ing about tomor­row any­more,” says astro­physi­cist Neil deGrasse Tyson in this com­pelling lit­tle video on the decline of the Amer­i­can space pro­gram. “After we stopped going to the moon, it all end­ed. We stopped dream­ing.” The video was put togeth­er by Evan Schurr with mate­r­i­al from var­i­ous sources. In it, Tyson asks us to imag­ine the pos­si­bil­i­ties for tomor­row if NASA’s bud­get were increased to just one pen­ny for every tax dol­lar. It’s a point he raised ear­li­er this month before a U.S. Sen­ate com­mit­tee (read the full tes­ti­mo­ny here), when he said:

The 2008 bank bailout of $750 bil­lion was greater than all the mon­ey NASA had received in its half-cen­tu­ry his­to­ry; two years’ U.S. mil­i­tary spend­ing exceeds it as well. Right now, NASA’s annu­al bud­get is half a pen­ny on your tax dol­lar. For twice that–a pen­ny on a dollar–we can trans­form the coun­try from a sullen, dispir­it­ed nation, weary of eco­nom­ic strug­gle, to one where it has reclaimed its 20th cen­tu­ry birthright to dream of tomor­row.

via The Dai­ly Beast

Charles Bukowski Reads His Poem “The Secret of My Endurance”

in | March 18th, 2012

–From Dan­gling In The Tourne­for­tia (1982)

I still get let­ters in the mail, most­ly from cracked-up
men in tiny rooms with fac­to­ry jobs or no jobs who are
liv­ing with whores or no woman at all, no hope, just
booze and mad­ness.

Most of their let­ters are on lined paper
writ­ten with an unsharp­ened pen­cil
or in ink
in tiny hand­writ­ing that slants to the
left

and the paper is often torn
usu­al­ly halfway up the mid­dle
and they say they like my stuff,
I’ve writ­ten from where it’s at, and
they rec­og­nize that. tru­ly, I’ve giv­en them a sec­ond
chance, some recog­ni­tion of where they’re at.

it’s true, I was there, worse off than most
of them.
but I won­der if they real­ize where their let­ters
arrive?
well, they are dropped into a box
behind a six-foot hedge with a long dri­ve­way lead­ing
to a two car garage, rose gar­den, fruit trees,
ani­mals, a beau­ti­ful woman, mort­gage about half
paid after a year, a new car,
fire­place and a green rug two-inch­es thick
with a young boy to write my stuff now,
I keep him in a ten-foot cage with a
type­writer, feed him whiskey and raw whores,
belt him pret­ty good three or four times
a week.
I’m 59 years old now and the crit­ics say
my stuff is get­ting bet­ter than ever.

“Sweet Home Alabama” Played on Tesla Coils (and More Culture Around the Web)

in Music, Random | March 15th, 2012

You can cre­ate music with Tes­la coils if you know how to mod­u­late their “break rate” with MIDI data and a con­trol unit. Case in point. Here we have two sol­id state musi­cal Tes­la coils, using a com­bined 24KW of pow­er, to play a ver­sion of Lynyrd Skynyrd’s 1974 clas­sic “Sweet Home Alaba­ma” (lis­ten to the orig­i­nal here). Also enjoy elec­tri­fied ver­sions of House of The Ris­ing Sun and Duel­ing Ban­jos. via @webacion

More Cul­ture from our Twit­ter Stream:

Jack Ker­ouac’s Only Full-Length Play Will Pre­miere, 55 years After It Was Writ­ten

First MITx Course Attracts 90,000 Stu­dents, Prov­ing the Pop­u­lar­i­ty of Online Learn­ing. Find more Free Cours­es here.

Kurt Von­negut: The Bomb­ing of Dres­den and the Cre­ation of Slaugh­ter­house Five

The Lady Anatomist: The Wax Sculp­tures of 18th-Cen­tu­ry Artist-Sci­en­tist Anna Moran­di Man­zoli­ni

The Ili­ad Visu­al­ized. We Helped Inspire the Project Says the Cre­ator!

Paul Ther­oux Reads The Gospel Accord­ing to Mark by Jorge Luis Borges. Added to our Free Audio Books.

“Mr. Gold­man and Mr. Sachs” Record­ed by @theharryshearer in 2009

Cool Old Sci-Fi Sto­ries for Free on Ama­zon. Tip from @Frauenfelder

Jack Ker­ouac Writes a Let­ter to Mar­lon Bran­do

Sci­en­tists Use Thore­au’s Unpub­lished Jour­nals to Track Cli­mate Change

Clas­sic Sci­ence Fic­tion Movies – in Pic­tures

Fol­low us on Face­book, Twit­ter and now Google Plus and share intel­li­gent media with your friends! They’ll thank you for it.

For 95 Minutes, the BBC Brings George Orwell to Life

in Books, History, Politics | March 9th, 2012

George Orwell occu­pies a fun­ny place in the mod­ern lit­er­ary con­scious­ness. The last few gen­er­a­tions came to know him, in Eng­lish class, as the author of the nov­els Ani­mal Farm and Nine­teen Eighty-Four. My own peers may remem­ber their teach­ers’ awk­ward inver­sion of the ear­li­er book, forced as they were to clar­i­fy Orwell’s already direct Russ­ian Rev­o­lu­tion alle­go­ry by explain­ing that, a long time ago, there lived a man named Trot­sky who was a lot like Snow­ball the pig, and so on. The lat­er book, many read­ers’ first glimpse at a real­is­tic dystopia, tends to hit us hard­er. All those tin­ny, piped-in patri­ot­ic anthems; the vari­cose veins; the saw­dusty cig­a­rettes; the defeat­ed cups of watery tea — why on Earth, we asked our­selves, did Orwell so con­fi­dent­ly fore­see a sham­bol­ic world of such simul­ta­ne­ous chintzi­ness and bru­tal­i­ty?

Apart from his six nov­els and four vol­umes of mem­oir, Orwell pro­duced an aston­ish­ing quan­ti­ty of essays. These I reg­u­lar­ly con­sult in my brick-like Everyman’s Library edi­tion, and I bought that on the strength of two par­tic­u­lar pieces: “Pol­i­tics and the Eng­lish Lan­guage” and “Why I Write.” Many of us encounter these here or there in the course of high­er edu­ca­tion, and none of us with an inter­est in read­ing, writ­ing, think­ing, and the feed­back loop between the three for­get them. Pres­sured to cite the most inci­sive pas­sage in all of Orwell, how could I decide between the for­mer essay’s descrip­tion of how “a mass of Latin words falls upon the facts like soft snow, blur­ring the out­line and cov­er­ing up all the details,” and the lat­ter essay’s con­trast of the writer’s ego against that of “the great mass of human beings” who, after thir­ty, “almost aban­don the sense of being indi­vid­u­als at all — and live chiefly for oth­ers, or are sim­ply smoth­ered under drudgery”?

Despite pass­ing at only 46, Orwell left an almost impos­ing­ly large body of writ­ten work. Read­ers who’ve savored it and want to learn, hear, and see more come up against a cer­tain dif­fi­cul­ty: we have a few pho­tographs of Orwell, but as far as sound or film, noth­ing exists. Yet that didn’t stop BBC Four from putting togeth­er George Orwell: A Life in Pic­tures, cast­ing actor Chris Lang­ham as Orwell, hav­ing him speak Orwell’s words, and insert­ing him, Zelig-like, into his­tor­i­cal footage real and recon­struct­ed of Orwell’s places and times. Doc­u­men­tary purists may balk at this, but strong choic­es make strong films. As a com­pul­sive read­er of Orwell myself, I’ll take any chance I can to expe­ri­ence more rich­ly the mind of this child of the “low­er upper-mid­dle class” whose fas­ci­na­tion with pover­ty drove him down into it; this social­ist who loathed both the trap­pings and pro­po­nents of social­ism; this wor­shiper of hard man­u­al labor who under­stood more about the impact of words than most of us do today; this famed writer who cloaked his giv­en name of Eric Arthur Blair to bet­ter retreat, alone, into his gray, qua­si-ascetic Eng­lish plea­sures.

Col­in Mar­shall hosts and pro­duces Note­book on Cities and Cul­ture. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall.

Five Free Courses from Stanford Start This Month

in Online Courses, Stanford | March 6th, 2012

Stan­ford’s big open course ini­tia­tive keeps rolling along. On March 12, three new cours­es will get under­way:

• Design and Analy­sis of Algo­rithms
• Nat­ur­al Lan­guage Pro­cess­ing
• Cryp­tog­ra­phy

Then, start­ing on March 19, two more will take flight:

• Game The­o­ry
• Prob­a­bilis­tic Graph­i­cal Mod­els

The cours­es gen­er­al­ly fea­ture inter­ac­tive video clips; short quizzes that pro­vide instant feed­back; the abil­i­ty to pose high val­ue ques­tions to Stan­ford instruc­tors; feed­back on your over­all per­for­mance in the class; and a state­ment of accom­plish­ment at the end of the course.

And, yes, the cours­es are free and now open for enroll­ment.

As always, don’t miss our big list of 425 Free Online Cours­es. It may just be the sin­gle most awe­some page on the web.

Sto­ry via Stan­ford Uni­ver­si­ty News. Algo­rithm image cour­tesy of Big­Stock.

David Foster Wallace: The Big, Uncut Interview (2003)

in Books, Politics, Television | February 20th, 2012

In 2003, an inter­view­er from Ger­man pub­lic tele­vi­sion sta­tion ZDF sat down with nov­el­ist David Fos­ter Wal­lace in a hotel room. The ensu­ing con­ver­sa­tion, whose raw, unedit­ed 84 min­utes (find links to the com­plete inter­view below) made it to the inter­net after Wal­lace’s sui­cide, remains the most direct, expan­sive, and dis­arm­ing­ly rough-hewn media treat­ment of his themes, his per­son­al­i­ty, and the fas­ci­nat­ing (if at times chill­ing) feed­back loop between them.

You can also expe­ri­ence this con­ver­sa­tion in short, the­mat­i­cal­ly orga­nized clips; above, we have “David Fos­ter Wal­lace on Polit­i­cal Think­ing in Amer­i­ca.” Wal­lace express­es his con­cerns about the strong influ­ence of tele­vi­sion ads on elec­tions, which means, he says, “we get can­di­dates who are behold­en to large donors and become, in some ways, cor­rupt, which dis­gusts the vot­ers, makes them even less inter­est­ed in pol­i­tics, less will­ing to read and do the work of cit­i­zen­ship.” This he sees cou­pled with an indi­vid­u­al­is­tic mar­ket­ing cul­ture which stokes “that feel­ing of hav­ing to obey every impulse and grat­i­fy every desire” — “a strange kind of slav­ery.”

But as his pained, self-ques­tion­ing expres­sion reveals — espe­cial­ly when it retreats into strange­ly endear­ing post-answer cringes — Wal­lace did not believe he pos­sessed the cure for, or even a pre­cise­ly accu­rate diag­no­sis of, a sick soci­ety. Offer­ing social crit­i­cism at a vast remove from the avun­cu­lar con­dem­na­tion of a Noam Chom­sky or the raised mid­dle fin­ger of a Bill Hicks, Wal­lace dis­cuss­es his fears through a nov­el­ist’s con­scious­ness that longs to, as he explains the desire else­where in the inter­view, “jump over the wall of self and inhab­it some­one else.” When the inter­view­er tells him about her peers’ frus­tra­tion at feel­ing edu­cat­ed but “not being able to do any­thing with it,” Wal­lace puts him­self in the mind of stu­dents who go from study­ing “the lib­er­al arts: phi­los­o­phy, clas­si­cal stuff, lan­guages, all very much about the nobil­i­ty of the human spir­it and broad­en­ing the mind” to “a spe­cial­ized school to learn how to sue peo­ple or to fig­ure out how to write copy that will make peo­ple buy a cer­tain kind of SUV” to “jobs that are finan­cial­ly reward­ing, but don’t have any­thing to do with what they got taught — and per­sua­sive­ly taught — was impor­tant and worth­while.”

Under­neath Wal­lace’s respons­es rush­es a cur­rent of the ques­tions his writ­ing leads read­ers to think — and think hard — about: How far has enter­tain­ment evolved toward pure anes­thet­ic? Can we still sep­a­rate our needs from our wants, if we try? Has post-Gen X irony made us not just col­lec­tive­ly inef­fec­tu­al but that much eas­i­er to sell things to? Can we ever again use terms like “cit­i­zen­ship” with­out instinc­tive­ly sneer­ing at our­selves? To the David Fos­ter Wal­lace novice, these clips make for a help­ful the­mat­ic primer, but the full record­ing (see below) will there­after become required view­ing. The inter­view brims with the kind of asides that make it feel like a page from the note­book of one of Wal­lace’s own favorite lit­er­ary crafts­men, Jorge Luis Borges. Wal­lace won­ders aloud how much of what he says will get edit­ed out, if he can dis­cuss his all-con­sum­ing sus­pi­cion that “there’s some­thing real­ly good on anoth­er chan­nel and I’m miss­ing it” while he’s actu­al­ly on tele­vi­sion, and how to talk to the media about how dif­fi­cult it is to talk to the media while pre­tend­ing you don’t know you’re talk­ing to the media. As he admits after unpack­ing one par­tic­u­lar­ly dif­fi­cult issue, “It’s all… com­pli­cat­ed.”

The com­plete inter­view can be viewed up top.

Col­in Mar­shall hosts and pro­duces Note­book on Cities and Cul­ture. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall.

Name That Movie: 26 Films in One Animated Minute

in Animation, Film | February 17th, 2012

Evan Seitz cre­at­ed this one-minute ani­ma­tion in which each let­ter of the alpha­bet rep­re­sents a famous movie. How many can you name? The answers have been shared on Buz­zfeed and The High Def­i­nite.

Don’t miss our col­lec­tion of 450 Free Movies Online, which includes many great clas­sics, indies, doc­u­men­taries, noir films and more.

By pro­fes­sion, Matthias Rasch­er teach­es Eng­lish and His­to­ry at a High School in north­ern Bavaria, Ger­many. In his free time he scours the web for good links and posts the best finds on Twit­ter.

Before Brokeback: The First Same-Sex Kiss in Cinema (1927)

in Film | January 26th, 2012

Brain­Pick­ings recent­ly high­light­ed the first kiss in cin­e­ma his­to­ry. That takes you back to 1896, to a film brought to you by Thomas Edi­son. Now we rewind the video­tape and present the first same-sex kiss in film his­to­ry (or at least one of the ear­li­est known ones). This Broke­back-before-Broke­back moment took place in the 1927 film Wings — the first and only silent film to win the Acad­e­my Award for Best Pic­ture. Bud­dy Rogers and Richard Arlen star in the film, play­ing two com­bat pilots who vie for the affec­tion of the same woman (Clara Bow). That’s the sto­ry­line. But nei­ther, as writer Kevin Ses­sums writes, “shows as much love for her … as they do for each oth­er.”

Find more clas­sics in our col­lec­tion, 4,000+ Free Movies Online: Great Clas­sics, Indies, Noir, West­erns, Doc­u­men­taries & More.

via Andrew Sul­li­van

Fol­low Open Cul­ture on Face­book and Twit­ter and share intel­li­gent media with your friends. Or bet­ter yet, sign up for our dai­ly email and get a dai­ly dose of Open Cul­ture in your inbox. And if you want to make sure that our posts def­i­nite­ly appear in your Face­book news­feed, just fol­low these sim­ple steps.

Nine PAC Ads from Stephen Colbert Spoof U.S. Election System

in Comedy, Current Affairs, Politics | January 24th, 2012

When the Supreme Court, in its infi­nite wis­dom, decid­ed that cor­po­ra­tions enjoy the free speech rights of indi­vid­u­als, it took a bad cam­paign finance sys­tem and made it worse. Sud­den­ly, free-spend­ing PACs, rep­re­sent­ing pow­er­ful busi­ness inter­ests, could flood our cam­paign finance sys­tem with unprece­dent­ed amounts of mon­ey and dis­tort the way we elect lead­ers in the Unit­ed States. In the ear­ly days of the Repub­li­can nom­i­na­tion process, we’re already see­ing the results. Super PACs, some­times receiv­ing $5 mil­lion from one indi­vid­ual, are run­ning attack ads — lots of attack ads — in pri­ma­ry states. And the real del­uge has yet to come. Just wait until next fall.

What to do about the sanc­tioned dis­tor­tion of our polit­i­cal sys­tem? It’s hard to be opti­mistic when fix­ing the prob­lem would real­is­ti­cal­ly require a con­sti­tu­tion­al amend­ment. But that’s what Lawrence Lessig (Har­vard law pro­fes­sor and founder of Cre­ative Com­mons) is try­ing to do. Appear­ing at Google (see below), Lessig describes how spe­cial inter­ests cor­rupt our polit­i­cal sys­tem, and what we can do to stop it. But even Lessig will admit that it’s an uphill bat­tle.

That leaves us with the next best solu­tion: turn a joke of an elec­tion sys­tem into a good joke. Enter Stephen Col­bert. The come­di­an has cre­at­ed his own Super PAC (run by Jon Stew­art) that comes com­plete with its own TV ads. The par­o­dy above — an attack ad on attack ads — makes its point pret­ty effec­tive­ly. You can watch eight more Col­bert PAC com­mer­cials here, and make a dona­tion to his PAC here. And, if you’re feel­ing gen­er­ous, you can show your sup­port for Open Cul­ture here.

Break­ing News: Stephen Col­bert ends qua­si-pres­i­den­tial cam­paign