Serving Up 25 Music Blogs

in Music | May 15th, 2007

The Portable University

in Uncategorized | May 14th, 2007

Free Classical Music Podcasts

in Music | May 14th, 2007

Smart music at no cost. Hard to beat.

• An Inti­mate Tour Through the Music of Yo-Yo Ma iTunes Feed Web Site
  • Each episode of this pod­cast delves into the his­to­ry of his career, and what led him to record each of the tracks of his cur­rent release Appas­sion­a­to.
• Bach Pod­cast from Magnatune.com iTunes Feed Web Site
  • 60 free min­utes of Bach.
• Bach Fes­ti­val of Philadel­phia Feed Web Site
  • Live per­for­mances of J.S. Bach works per­formed by var­i­ous artists for The Bach Fes­ti­val of Philadel­phia.
• Boston Sym­pho­ny Orches­tra Con­ser­va­to­ry iTunes Feed Web Site
  • This edu­ca­tion­al pod­cast gives you an inside look at the sym­pho­ny. Cur­rent­ly you will find a two sea­son overview and record­ings of Beethoven and Arnold Schoen­berg.
• Clas­si­cal Per­for­mance iTunes Feed Web Site
  • Clas­si­cal music per­for­mances from WGB­H’s Stu­dio One in Boston.
• Dan­marks Radio — Mozart Sym­phonies Feed Web Site
  • For the cel­e­bra­tion of Mozart’s 250th anniver­sary, Den­mark radio offered pod­casts of nine Mozart sym­phonies by the Dan­ish Radio Sym­pho­ny Orches­tra. Since the web site is in Dan­ish, your best bet is to access these high qual­i­ty MP3’s through the feed.
• Deutsche Welle
  • Beethoven­fest iTunes Feed Web Site
    • Beethoven’s most famous sym­phonies per­formed by excel­lent young orches­tras and new com­po­si­tions by award-win­ning com­posers.
  • Clas­si­cal Mas­ter­pieces iTunes Feed Web Site
    • Six mas­ter com­posers, six sym­phonies, a star con­duc­tor and a lead­ing orches­tra are the main ingre­di­ents of this remark­able musi­cal feast.
• Gramo­phone Pod­cast Feed Web Site
  • A month­ly win­dow into the world’s most author­i­ta­tive clas­si­cal music mag­a­zine, fea­tur­ing an overview of the best releas­es, news, exclu­sive inter­views with lead­ing fig­ures from the music world, and lots of great­mu­sic.
• NPR Music iTunes Feed Web Site
  • Reviews, musi­cian inter­views, live record­ings from Morn­ing Edi­tion, All Things Con­sid­ered, and oth­er NPR pro­grams.
• Radio Swe­den: Mozart iTunes Feed Web Site
  • Swedish Radio has launched a Mozart Pod­cast to cel­e­brate Mozart’s 250th birth­day. They’ve been pod­cast­ing their own record­ings from the 1940–1950s of Mozart’s operas.
• The Con­cert iTunes Feed Web Site
  • Beethoven, Bach, Mozart and more from the Isabel­la Stew­art Gard­ner muse­um in Boston.
• Wag­n­er Operas Pod­cast iTunes Feed Web Site
  • Fea­tures, among oth­er things, per­for­mances from the Bayreuth Fes­ti­val.

25 Blogs for Movie Buffs

in Film | May 11th, 2007

See Our Arts & Cul­ture Pod­casts — Tell a Friend About Open Cul­ture   - Sub­scribe to Our Feed

20+ Great Book & Literature Blogs

in Books | May 9th, 2007

Below, you’ll find a list of 20 fine lit­er­ary blogs. Like our pod­cast col­lec­tions, this list will grow over time. In fact, it will become part of a larg­er list of great cul­ture blogs. Over the com­ing weeks, we’ll roll out new install­ments and then mash them togeth­er into one larg­er list. Stay tuned for more.

If you feel that we’re miss­ing some extra­or­di­nary blogs, please feel free to email us.

• Blog of a Book Slut: Book­slut’s edi­tor-in-chief, Jes­sa Crispin, pro­vides links and com­men­tary for those who love to read. The pop­u­lar relat­ed web­site includes fea­ture sto­ries, author inter­views, reviews, columns about book-relat­ed con­tent, etc.
• Book­Dad­dy: It’s your source for intel­li­gent book blath­er. The stat­ed mis­sion of the site is to “pon­der print media, lit­er­a­cy & pub­lish­ing. Any­thing on wood pulp, pix­els or stone is up for dis­cus­sion.”
• Books, Inq: This blog offers a behind-the-scenes look at a book-review edi­tor’s world. In this case, the book review edi­tor is Frank Wil­son, of the Philadel­phia Inquir­er.
• Book World: What you get here is one wom­an’s attempt to read what’s worth read­ing and say some­thing about it along the way.
• Chekhov’s Mis­tress: An oft-cit­ed lit­er­a­ture blog writ­ten by Bud Parr, a book lover who also runs a net­work of lit­er­ary blogs called Metax­u­Cafe.
• Con­fes­sions of an Idio­syn­crat­ic Mind: Sarah Wein­man puts togeth­er here “a respect­ed resource for com­men­tary on crime and mys­tery fic­tion.”
• Crit­i­cal Mass: Offer­ing com­men­tary on lit­er­ary crit­i­cism, pub­lish­ing, and writ­ing, this blog is writ­ten by the Board of Direc­tors of the non-prof­it that issues the year­ly Nation­al Book Crit­ics Cir­cle Awards.
• Eve’s Alexan­dria: A nice­ly bal­anced mul­ti-per­son lit­er­ary blog com­ing out of the UK.
• Lau­rable’s Poet­ry Weblog: A poet­ry weblog that spe­cial­izes in con­nect­ing read­ers with audio of poets read­ing their work.
• Maud New­ton: A wide­ly-read blog that spe­cial­izes in pub­lish­ing & writ­ing indus­try news, plus occa­sion­al lit­er­ary links, amuse­ments, pol­i­tics, and rants.
• Moor­ish Girl: A well regard­ed book and lit­er­a­ture blog writ­ten by Laila Lala­mi, author of Hope and Oth­er Dan­ger­ous Pur­suits.
• Rake’s Progress: Named by The Guardian as one of the 10 best book blogs.
• ReadyS­teady­Blog: Run by Mark Thwaite, this is an “inde­pen­dent book review web­site … devot­ed to review­ing the very best books in lit­er­ary fic­tion, poet­ry, his­to­ry and phi­los­o­phy.”
• Slate Books: Even though tech­ni­cal­ly not a blog, it should be on your read­ing list.
• So Many Books: Giv­en the tagline ‘the agony and the ecsta­sy of a read­ing life”, here’s a laud­ed blog that takes you into the read­ing world of Stephanie Hollmichel.
• The Ele­gant Vari­a­tion: A well-reviewed and respect­ed book blog that tends to give spe­cial atten­tion to the LA lit­er­ary scene. Fea­tures a real­ly exten­sive blogroll that’s worth pick­ing through.
• The Guardian Book Blog: It’s not exact­ly your aver­age inde­pen­dent book blog, but it’s got valu­able con­tent and it’s worth your time.
• The Keny­on Review Blog: If you’re a writer, you sure­ly know The Keny­on Review, and you should also get to know their blog.
• The Lit­blog Co-Op: A use­ful blog that unites the “lead­ing lit­er­ary
  weblogs for the pur­pose of draw­ing atten­tion to the best of
  con­tem­po­rary fic­tion, authors and press­es, strug­gling to be noticed in
  a flood­ed mar­ket­place.”
• This Space: A lit­er­ary blog writ­ten by Stephen Mitchel­more, a blog­ger who Ready Steady Book deems “the finest writer we have in the lit­er­ary blo­gos­phere.”
• Vulpes Lib­ris: “Vulpes Lib­ris: A mul­ti-nation­al pack of book­fox­es blog­ging, review­ing and chat­ting about books and book mat­ters. Par­tic­i­pa­tion wel­come.”
• Words With­out Bor­ders Blog — This weblog is the online com­ple­ment to Words With­out Bor­ders: The Online Mag­a­zine for Inter­na­tion­al Lit­er­a­ture. And, yes, as you’d expect, it’s a lit­er­a­ture blog with an inter­na­tion­al focus.

Stay tuned for more to come!

The Supreme Court Goes Digital

in Law | May 8th, 2007

The Supreme Court has long tak­en heat for being in the tech­no­log­i­cal arrière-garde, a crit­i­cism that has seemed fair giv­en its unwill­ing­ness to even allow cam­eras into its oral argu­ments.

Slow­ly, how­ev­er, that per­cep­tion may be about to change. Accord­ing to the ABA Jour­nal eRe­port, the Court has stuck a small toe into the tech­nol­o­gy waters by pro­vid­ing web access to video­taped evi­dence that fig­ured into a recent case, Scott v. Har­ris. The url for the video gets ref­er­enced with­in the writ­ten opin­ion for the case, and a link is pro­vid­ed from the Court’s opin­ions web page. (You’ll need Real Play­er to watch it.)

The video itself is noth­ing spe­cial. It fea­tures very low qual­i­ty footage of a car chase tak­en from the dash­board of a police car, and it’s essen­tial­ly the same sce­nario that Amer­i­ca has seen played out for almost 20 years on Fox’s COPS. As you watch the video, you can’t help but feel that this land­mark moment for the court is a non-moment. But that’s per­haps to be expect­ed when a tra­di­tion-bound insti­tu­tion banal­ly enters a brave new world.

John Stewart: When Comedians Start Asking the Tough Questions

in Comedy, Current Affairs | May 6th, 2007

When Bill Moy­ers returned to PBS two weeks ago, his first pro­gram took a care­ful look at how the main­stream media has fall­en down on the job when it comes to ask­ing tough ques­tions to politi­cians. Giv­en this start­ing point, it seemed log­i­cal for Moy­ers to speak next (iTunes — Feed) with John Stew­art, host of The Dai­ly Show. That’s because adver­sar­i­al jour­nal­ism is now found more read­i­ly on Com­e­dy Cen­tral than on ABC, NBC, CBS, CNN, Fox, etc. The inter­view with Stew­art, which is quite sub­stan­tive and worth a lis­ten, makes ref­er­ence to John McCain’s recent appear­ance on The Dai­ly Show and also to Steven Col­bert’s famous/infamous roast of Pres­i­dent Bush in 2006. You can watch both below.

Amer­i­can tele­vi­sion shows have been sat­i­riz­ing politi­cians for a long time. That’s not new. But what’s new with Stew­art is that he’s upend­ing the whole point of tele­vi­sion satire. Whether you look at Jay Leno’s tame humor, or the more bit­ing humor of Sat­ur­day Night Live, the point of the satire has always been to get a laugh. For Stew­art, some­thing else is going on. Watch the McCain inter­view and you see that the joke is essen­tial­ly a prop, a con­ve­nient means of get­ting at some­thing much more seri­ous, a way of hav­ing a blunt, no non­sense con­ver­sa­tion, pre­cise­ly the kind of con­ver­sa­tion that the main­stream media has been large­ly unwill­ing, if not down­right afraid, to have with our lead­ers.

Oh the Humanity

in Uncategorized | May 6th, 2007

Spiderman 3: Web Roundup

in Film | May 5th, 2007

David Byrne and Daniel Levitin Have Music on the Brain

in Music, Video - Science | May 3rd, 2007

Seed Mag­a­zine has an hour-long video con­ver­sa­tion with David Byrne (“Rock­’s renais­sance man”) and Daniel Lev­itin (neu­ro­sci­en­tist) about the con­nec­tions between music and cog­ni­tion. Check out the high­lights above or view the full inter­view here. Daniel Lev­it­in’s This is Your Brain on Music came out last year, as did David Byrne’s Arbore­tum.