Behavioral Economics and Underwater Mortgages

in Business, Current Affairs, Economics | December 3rd, 2009

What if peo­ple behaved like banks? Or, more pre­cise­ly, what if indi­vid­u­als hold­ing “under­wa­ter” mort­gages stopped fol­low­ing the social norms of ‘per­son­al respon­si­bil­i­ty’ and ‘promise-keep­ing’ and instead act­ed like cap­i­tal­ist play­ers in a free mar­ket? Most would dump their sink­ing mort­gages and walk away. That’s the find­ing of Brent White, a law pro­fes­sor at the Uni­ver­si­ty of Ari­zona, who has pub­lished a new paper called “Under­wa­ter and Not Walk­ing Away: Shame, Fear and the Social Man­age­ment of the Hous­ing Cri­sis.” (PDF) The bot­tom line is that home­own­ers and banks play by two dif­fer­ent sets of rules. Main Street accepts the “emo­tion­al con­straints … active­ly cul­ti­vat­ed by the gov­ern­ment, the finan­cial indus­try,” and they hold the bag. Wall Street acts in its own self inter­est and gets a fresh start. The only thing they have in com­mon these days are (you guessed it) guns.

Just for the record: I’m not advo­cat­ing a posi­tion here, and I don’t hold an under­wa­ter mort­gage…

Elvis Mitchell Talks “Bad Lieutenant” with Werner Herzog

in Film | December 2nd, 2009

Wern­er Her­zog, one of Ger­many’s finest liv­ing direc­tors, has a new film out, The Bad Lieu­tenant (watch trail­ers here), which has a loose rela­tion­ship with Abel Fer­rara’s own Bad Lieu­tenant from 1992. The new film, star­ring Nico­las Cage and Eva Mendes, gets reviewed by A.O. Scott in the New York Times. And now a for­mer Times film crit­ic, Elvis Mitchell, sits down with Her­zog and talks about his “anar­chist” noir film set in New Orleans. The inter­view was aired by KCRW in LA and can be down­loaded in sev­er­al for­mats here, or streamed right below. And, film fans, don’t for­get to check out our new col­lec­tion of free movies online. (It now includes about 120 indi­vid­ual films, and lists 35 sites where you can watch free movies online.)

The Velvet Revolution Revisited: Havel at Columbia

in History | December 1st, 2009

20 years ago, the domi­noes fell in East­ern Europe. Not long after the Wall fell in Berlin, a non-vio­lent rev­o­lu­tion got under­way in Czecho­slo­va­kia. The Vel­vet Rev­o­lu­tion took just a mat­ter of six weeks (Novem­ber 17 — Decem­ber 29, 1989) to unfold. It was fast and blood­less, and it put on the world stage Václav Hav­el — the play­wright, turned anti-Sovi­et dis­si­dent, and soon demo­c­ra­t­ic pres­i­dent of Czecho­slo­va­kia (and lat­er the Czech Repub­lic).

In 2006, Hav­el arrived in New York City, to spend 8 weeks at Colum­bia Uni­ver­si­ty. To mark the occa­sion, the uni­ver­si­ty built a web site called Hav­el at Colum­bia that recon­sid­ered Hav­el and the Vel­vet Rev­o­lu­tion. Along with some intrigu­ing his­tor­i­cal footage, the site fea­tures video inter­views with George H.W. Bush, David Rem­nick (the New York­er edi­tor and author of Lenin’s Tomb), Milos For­man (the great movie direc­tor of Czech her­itage), Edward Albee (the play­wright best known for Who’s Afraid of Vir­ginia Woolf?), George Soros, and Lou Reed. Col­lec­tive­ly, these con­ver­sa­tions give you a very good feel for the man, the artist, and his his­tor­i­cal con­tri­bu­tions. You will also then find a con­ver­sa­tion between Pres­i­dents Bill Clin­ton and Václav Hav­el, and a read­ing of Havel’s play, The Gar­den Par­ty, direct­ed by Israel Horvitz fea­tur­ing Dustin Hoff­man and Robert Klein. Pod­casts of many of these won­der­ful events can be found on iTunes.

Note: The media-packed web­site, Hav­el at Colum­bia, was cre­at­ed by the Colum­bia Cen­ter for New Media for New Media Teach­ing and Learn­ing (CCNMTL) and the Colum­bia Uni­ver­si­ty Arts Ini­tia­tive (CUArts). Great work here, and I want to thank John F. for help­ing us put this post togeth­er.

Royal Society Launches Web Site Celebrating 350 Years of Science

in Science | November 30th, 2009

A quick men­tion: The Roy­al Soci­ety, the UK’s nation­al acad­e­my of sci­ence, will cel­e­brate next year its 350th anniver­sary. To mark the occa­sion, a team of sci­en­tists and his­to­ri­ans have launched a new web site called “Trail­blaz­ing,” and it essen­tial­ly lets you take a vir­tu­al tour through three and a half cen­turies of sci­en­tif­ic dis­cov­ery (1660–2010). Mov­ing at your own pace, you can review key sci­en­tif­ic dis­cov­er­ies (some of them famous, some of them less so) and read cor­re­spond­ing com­men­tary on each one. Quite nice­ly, all of the com­men­tary can be down­loaded via one big PDF file. (It runs about 110 pages long.)

Thanks to Phan­tom Engi­neer for the tip here. And thanks all for the many leads I’ve received late­ly. They’re all real­ly appre­ci­at­ed, and they frankly make the site much bet­ter. Keep ’em com­ing.

Making Money By Giving Your Movie Away (But How Much?)

in Film | November 29th, 2009

Nina Paley cre­at­ed some buzz ear­li­er this year when she decid­ed to give her award-win­ning ani­mat­ed film, Sita Sings the Blues, to the pub­lic, releas­ing it under a Cre­ative Com­mons license. This was anoth­er test of the con­cept that artists can make mon­ey by giv­ing their work away. Today, The Wall Street Jour­nal gives an account­ing of how this the­o­ry played out in prac­tice. Here’s how things break down:

• Total dona­tions from peo­ple who appre­ci­ate her giv­ing out free con­tent: $23,000
• Prof­its from her online store which sells mer­chan­dise and DVDs: $19,000
• The­atri­cal dis­tri­b­u­tion rev­enues: $3,000 (out of total box office tal­ly of $22,350)
• Addi­tion­al DVD dis­tri­b­u­tion: $3,000
• Broad­cast tele­vi­sion dis­tri­b­u­tion: $3,000
• Rev­enue from Cen­tral Cin­e­ma in Seat­tle which showed the film: $4,000
• The grand total: $55,000

As the WSJ notes, these num­bers don’t reflect the mon­ey she spent mak­ing the film . (Paley puts the num­ber at $150,000 in hard costs.) They also don’t account for the indi­rect rev­enue that she will gen­er­ate down the line. But putting Sita Sings the Blues in front of so many peo­ple, the world now knows a lot more about Nina Paley and her tal­ents. I have to believe that she can trade on that (if she wants to) when­ev­er she agrees to direct a film, or accepts a speak­ing engage­ment. The WSJ equa­tion does­n’t take this piece into account (it’s admit­ted­ly hard to mea­sure), but it’s prob­a­bly the most impor­tant part of the over­all analy­sis.

You can down­load Sita Sings the Blues here, watch it on YouTube here, or find it in our col­lec­tion of Free Movies Online.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

How I Sold My Book by Giv­ing It Away: You should all see this sep­a­rate post by Seth Har­wood. It focus­es on sim­i­lar issues, but trans­lat­ed to the book world.

Stanford Online Writing Courses – The Winter Lineup

in Stanford | November 28th, 2009

Three Free Luis Buñuel Films

in Film | November 25th, 2009

A quick note for US read­ers: Right now, you can find three films by Luis Buñuel, the great Span­ish (lat­er turned Mex­i­can) direc­tor. The films, pre­sent­ed by theauteurs.com, include Death in the Gar­den (1956) and two cin­e­mat­ic works from his ear­li­er sur­re­al peri­od: Un chien andalou (1929) and L’âge d’or (1930). These films are (some­what iron­i­cal­ly) avail­able only to a US audi­ence. But if you live out­side the US, you can find many more free films in our Free Movie Col­lec­tion. As a quick side note, this col­lec­tion was the jump­ing-off point for a short inter­view that I did with Jon Gor­don, the host of the pub­lic radio show, Future Tense. You can lis­ten to it below, or catch it here. Have a good Thanks­giv­ing.

Advertise on Open Culture

in | November 25th, 2009

Reach Savvy Education/Culture Audi­ence Online:

• 3.5 mil­lion page views / month
• 914,000 fol­low­ers and friends on Twit­ter and Face­book
• 83,000 RSS and email sub­scribers

Audi­ence Sta­tis­tics:

• Gen­der: 56% male/44% female
• Age: 72% in 18–54 brack­et.
• Edu­ca­tion: 69% with col­lege or grad school degree

Data accord­ing to Quant­cast.

Adver­tise with us Through Adwords:

You can imme­di­ate­ly place ads on Open Cul­ture by using Google’s Adwords plat­form. This will give you the abil­i­ty to tar­get the whole site or spe­cif­ic pages. Find direc­tions on how to tar­get our site here.

Your Favorite TED Talk Ever?

in TED Talks | November 25th, 2009

What’s the best TED Talk ever? That’s the lit­tle debate tak­ing place on Reddit.com, and the answer is not obvi­ous, see­ing that TED now has over 500 talks avail­able in its archive. (You can find a con­stant­ly updat­ed list of every TED Talk in a Google spread­sheet here.)

Now, what are some of the Red­dit favorites? Here are five talks that get fre­quent men­tions.

• Sir Ken Robin­son on “Do Schools Kill Cre­ativ­i­ty” (See my mea cul­pa in the com­ments.)
• Dan Gilbert on “Why are We Hap­py”
• Eliz­a­beth Gilbert (Eat, Pray, Love) on Nur­tur­ing Cre­ativ­i­ty (Not one of my per­son­al favorites.)
• Richard Dawkins on our “Queer” Uni­verse
• Dan Ariely asks “Are We in Con­trol of our Own Deci­sions?”

Mean­while, it’s worth men­tion­ing that TED keeps its own run­ning list of its 10 most pop­u­lar talks. Some good ones here. And now your turn. Tell us your favorites in the com­ments below, and don’t be shy.

The American Novel Since 1945: A Free Online Course from Yale University

in Literature, Yale | November 23rd, 2009

The video above is the first of 26 lec­tures mak­ing up a free Yale course called The Amer­i­can Nov­el Since 1945. Taught by Amy Hunger­ford, the course intro­duces you to the nov­els of Amer­i­ca’s finest post-war writ­ers — Nabokov (émi­gré), Salinger, Ker­ouac, and Pyn­chon, and also Philip Roth, Toni Mor­ri­son, Cor­mac McCarthy and Jonathan Safran Foer. You can watch all lec­tures in the fol­low­ing for­mats: YouTube – iTunes Audio – iTunes Video. Yale also offers the files as mp3s/movs here. For more full-fledged cours­es from oth­er top uni­ver­si­ties (includ­ing many oth­ers from Yale), vis­it our col­lec­tion of Free Online Lit­er­a­ture Cours­es, a sub­set of our col­lec­tion 1,700 Free Online Cours­es from Top Uni­ver­si­ties.

You can stream all of the lec­tures, from start to fin­ish, below:

If you would like to sup­port the mis­sion of Open Cul­ture, con­sid­er mak­ing a dona­tion to our site. It’s hard to rely 100% on ads, and your con­tri­bu­tions will help us con­tin­ue pro­vid­ing the best free cul­tur­al and edu­ca­tion­al mate­ri­als to learn­ers every­where. You can con­tribute through Pay­Pal, Patre­on, and Ven­mo (@openculture). Thanks!