Insults Shakespeare Style

in Literature | May 19th, 2010

Search­ing for a sting­ing insult that has a nice lit­er­ary qual­i­ty? Let the Shake­speare Insult Find­er be your guide. And, if you find your­self need­ing a good insult on the go, you can always down­load a free app for the iPhone.

“Your means are very slen­der, and your waste is great.”
–Hen­ry IV, part 2

(Thanks Veron­i­ca!)

Beyond Silicon Valley: Online Education in Emerging Markets

in Business, Education | May 19th, 2010

I live in Sil­i­con Val­ley where it’s easy to assume that you’re liv­ing at the cen­ter of tech­no­log­i­cal inno­va­tion. But, as Sarah Lacy reminds us today in TechCrunch, Sil­i­con Val­ley will prob­a­bly not real­ize the promise of e‑learning. Rather, it will be investors and entre­pre­neurs in Brazil, India, South Africa and oth­er emerg­ing mar­kets. Why will they get the job done? Because their edu­ca­tion­al sys­tems haven’t ful­ly matured. They’re still a work-in-progress. And this cre­ates an envi­ron­ment much more favor­able to inno­va­tion. You can get the rest of her think­ing here.

David Lynch Debuts Lady Blue Shanghai

in Film | May 17th, 2010

David Lynch is no stranger to com­mer­cials. In the past, he lent his film­mak­ing tal­ents to Calvin Klein, Gior­gio Armani and oth­ers (watch the ads here). And now it’s Dior. Shot in Shang­hai, Lynch’s inter­net movie, Lady Blue Shang­hai, runs 16 min­utes and stars the Oscar-win­ning French actress Mar­i­on Cotil­lard. Although large­ly giv­en free reign here, Lynch had to include a few basic ele­ments: images of a Dior bag, Old Shang­hai, and the Pearl Tow­er.  The short movie is the third in a series of mini-fea­tures launched on christiandior.com. You can watch the first part above, the sec­ond part here.

You can now find Lady Blue Shang­hai in our col­lec­tion of Free Movies Online, along with sev­er­al oth­er short David Lynch films.

via The Finan­cial Times

Viktor Frankl on Our Search for Meaning

in Psychology | May 17th, 2010

Vik­tor Fran­kl, a trained Aus­tri­an psy­chi­a­trist, spent five long years in Nazi con­cen­tra­tion camps dur­ing World War II, even­tu­al­ly end­ing up in Auschwitz. Dur­ing this time, he helped fel­low pris­on­ers cope with their ordeal and worked out a new approach to psy­chol­o­gy called Logother­a­py. This the­o­ry embod­ied Fran­kl’s belief that we’re all fun­da­men­tal­ly dri­ven by a “search for mean­ing.” It’s what makes us human, and we can con­tin­ue this search even in the worst of sit­u­a­tions. Not even the Nazis could take that away.  This belief sus­tained Fran­kl dur­ing his impris­on­ment, some­thing he wrote about in his epic work of sur­vival lit­er­a­ture called Man’s Search for Mean­ing. (It’s a must read.) The grainy footage above was record­ed at a con­fer­ence held in Toron­to (prob­a­bly dur­ing the 1960s). It gives you a quick intro­duc­tion to a man who, despite per­son­al­ly con­fronting the worst human­i­ty had to offer, still believed in our core good­ness and pos­si­bil­i­ties.

via TED Best of the Web

Stanford Online Writing Courses (Summer)

in Uncategorized | May 16th, 2010

Tom Waits Reads Charles Bukowski

in Literature, Music, Poetry | May 14th, 2010

Next up: Tom Waits reads Charles Bukowski’s poem, The Laugh­ing Heart. As Zoran (a read­er from Greece) observes, Waits reads the poem much like Bukows­ki would have read it him­self.

Of course, this rais­es the ques­tion: How did Bukows­ki read his poet­ry? The Secret of My Endurance holds the answer.

Thanks Zoran…

Jorge Luis Borges: The Mirror Man, A Free Documentary on the Argentine Writer

in Books, Film, Literature | May 12th, 2010

He was Argenti­na’s favorite son, one of the great South Amer­i­can writ­ers of the last cen­tu­ry (along with Gabriel Gar­cia Mar­quez, Car­los Fuentes, and Mario Var­gas Llosa), and the win­ner of 46 nation­al and inter­na­tion­al lit­er­ary prizes. We’re talk­ing about Jorge Luis Borges, the mas­ter of the post­mod­ern short sto­ry. Borges was born in 1899, and to cel­e­brate his 100th birth­day (though he died in 1986), Philippe Molins direct­ed the doc­u­men­tary, Jorge Luis Borges: The Mir­ror Man. The film’s major strength (as one review­er put it) is that it’s a “bit of every­thing – part biog­ra­phy, part lit­er­ary crit­i­cism, part hero-wor­ship, part book read­ing, and part psy­chol­o­gy.” It runs 47 min­utes and includes a fair amount of archival footage. (You can watch it in a larg­er for­mat on Vimeo here.)

A big thanks goes to Mike for send­ing The Mir­ror Man our way. If you have your own great piece of cul­tur­al media to share with us and your fel­low OC read­ers, please feel free to send it along.

The Walker Library of Human Imagination

in Art, Random, Science | May 10th, 2010

The tech/internet bil­lion­aires of the 1990s were nev­er known for their largesse. They built their mas­sive yachts. They bought their sports teams. They did­n’t give much back to the pub­lic domain, as the Rock­e­fellers, Mel­lons and the Get­tys once did (despite their many oth­er flaws).

There are some  excep­tions, of course. Bill Gates final­ly found reli­gion and got involved in phil­an­thropy in a big way. Then, on a less­er scale, there’s Jay Walk­er, the founder of Price­line and Walk­er Dig­i­tal. He plowed many of his mil­lions into cre­at­ing The Walk­er Library of Human Imag­i­na­tion. As Wired mag­a­zine has put it, the library is a kind of intel­lec­tu­al Dis­ney­land, a 3600 square foot room that dis­plays great works of human imag­i­na­tion in an imag­i­na­tive set­ting. Arti­facts on dis­play include: a com­plete Bible hand­writ­ten on sheep­skin from 1240 AD, the first illus­trat­ed med­ical book from 1499, a 1699 atlas con­tain­ing the first maps that put the sun at the cen­ter of the uni­verse, the nap­kin on which FDR sketched his plan to win WWII, and an orig­i­nal 1957 Russ­ian Sput­nik satel­lite. You can get a full list of cul­tur­al curiosi­ties here, watch the recent­ly pro­duced video tour of the library above, and spend a few min­utes watch­ing Walk­er talk about his library at TED.

Thanks Colleen for flag­ging the new video.

Listen to Brave New World for Free: Dramatized Version Read by Aldous Huxley

in Audio Books, Literature, Radio, Theatre | May 6th, 2010

The CBS Radio Work­shop was an “exper­i­men­tal dra­mat­ic radio anthol­o­gy series” that aired between 1956 and 1957. And it pre­miered with a two-part adap­ta­tion of Aldous Hux­ley’s now clas­sic 1932 nov­el, Brave New World. Hux­ley him­self intro­duced and nar­rat­ed the pro­gram, and now this clas­sic radio dra­ma has resur­faced online. You can lis­ten to Part 1 and Part 2 below. The mp3s will be per­ma­nent­ly housed in our col­lec­tion of Free Audio Books.

Part 1

Part 2

Building The Colosseum: The Icon of Rome

in History, Online Courses, Yale | May 5th, 2010

When you think Rome, you think the Colos­se­um. It’s one of the great struc­tures of the Roman Empire, and it still dom­i­nates the land­scape of the mod­ern city. But how deep does your knowl­edge of the Colos­se­um actu­al­ly go? Which emper­or built the Amphithe­atrum Flav­i­um (as it was orig­i­nal­ly called)? For what pur­pose? And how, styl­is­ti­cal­ly, was it orig­i­nal­ly built and dec­o­rat­ed? All of this gets answered in an image-packed lec­ture by Yale pro­fes­sor Diana E.E. Klein­er, which forms part of her larg­er course on Roman Archi­tec­ture. (Find it on YouTube, iTunes and Yale’s Open Course web site). I queued up the lec­ture at the 20 minute, when Klein­er starts talk­ing about the Colos­se­um itself. But you can move back to the very begin­ning if you want to get some more polit­i­cal con­text.

Final­ly, let me men­tion that Google also lets you revis­it Ancient Rome. Google Earth offers a nice 3D view of the Colos­se­um and oth­er impor­tant Roman mon­u­ments, while Google Street View you tour the ancient ruins of Pom­peii. It’s all free, of course.

Please vis­it our col­lec­tion of Free Online Cours­es to learn more about his­to­ry, lit­er­a­ture, phi­los­o­phy or what­ev­er else piques your inter­est. You’ll find a good 250 free cours­es in the col­lec­tion.