• Colum­bia Uni­ver­si­ty — Teach­ers Col­lege
  • Through this pro­gram geared for edu­ca­tors, you can obtain online cer­tifi­cates in the fol­low­ing areas: Teach­ing and Learn­ing with Tech­nol­o­gy, Design­ing Inter­ac­tive Mul­ti­me­dia Instruc­tion, & Cog­ni­tion and Tech­nol­o­gy. Click for more info.
• Duke Uni­ver­si­ty — Exec­u­tive MBA
  • Duke’s Fuqua School of Busi­ness offers an Exec­u­tive MBA pro­gram that takes place most­ly online. (Note: the pro­gram does also include short vis­its to cam­pus.) The expec­ta­tion is that you’d spend 15–25 hours per week using Inter­net-enabled tech­nol­o­gy to com­plete your course­work.

• eCor­nell
  • Estab­lished and whol­ly-owned by Cor­nell Uni­ver­si­ty, eCor­nell pro­vides online cours­es in the areas of strat­e­gy, lead­er­ship and man­age­ment devel­op­ment, human resources, finan­cial man­age­ment, and hos­pi­tal­i­ty man­age­ment. Stu­dents par­tic­i­pat­ing in the pro­gram can receive one of a num­ber of cer­tifi­cates. See course cat­a­logue.

• Har­vard Exten­sion School
  • Cur­rent­ly, Har­vard’s Exten­sion School offers many indi­vid­ual cours­es online. How­ev­er, through entire­ly online pro­grams, you can acquire cer­tifi­cates in two areas: Envi­ron­men­tal Man­age­ment and Applied Sci­ences.

• Har­vard Sum­mer School
  • High school and col­lege stu­dents can now take sum­mer school cours­es at Har­vard via the inter­net and get col­lege cred­it. Cours­es include Neu­ro­bi­ol­o­gy, Intro­duc­tion to Inter­na­tion­al Rela­tions, and oth­ers. Get more info here.

• Johns Hop­kins — Cen­ter for Tal­ent­ed Youth
  • Geared for stu­dents between grades 5 and 12, this pro­gram com­ing out of Johns Hop­kins “began offer­ing dis­tance cours­es in 1983 with assis­tance from the Nation­al Endow­ment for the Human­i­ties. The pro­gram has now grown to more than 7,000 enroll­ments year­ly, with stu­dents through­out the Unit­ed States and more than 60 coun­tries.”

• MIT — Sys­tem Design and Man­age­ment
  • Spon­sored by MIT’s Sloan School of Man­age­ment and the School of Engi­neer­ing, the SDM pro­gram lasts 24 months and cul­mi­nates in a Mas­ter of Sci­ence degree in Engi­neer­ing and Man­age­ment. Most of the grad­u­ate pro­gram takes place online. How­ev­er, there are some on-cam­pus require­ments. Click for more infor­ma­tion.

• Stan­ford Uni­ver­si­ty
  • Mas­ters Pro­grams — Through Stan­ford, you can earn Mas­ter’s degrees entire­ly online in the fol­low­ing areas: Bio­med­ical Infor­mat­ics, Com­put­er Sci­ence, Elec­tri­cal Engi­neer­ing, Man­age­ment Sci­ence and Engi­neer­ing, and Mechan­i­cal Engi­neer­ing. Get more info here.
  • Writ­ing Pro­gram — Cre­at­ed by a part­ner­ship between Stan­ford’s Steg­n­er Writ­ing Pro­gram and Stan­ford Con­tin­u­ing Stud­ies, this pro­gram allows stu­dents any­where to take top flight writ­ing work­shops online.

• Uni­ver­si­ty of Cal­i­for­nia — Berke­ley Exten­sion
  • UC Berek­ley’s con­tin­u­ing edu­ca­tion pro­gram now offers more than 120 online cours­es.

• Uni­ver­si­ty of Penn­syl­va­nia
  • UPenn is offer­ing online cours­es, some of which yield cer­tifi­cates, across sev­er­al dif­fer­ent schools with­in the uni­ver­si­ty — Med­i­cine, Eng­lish, and more.

The first episode of the sev­enth and final sea­son of the Sopra­nos aired last night. If you can’t quite remem­ber all the plot­lines that brought us from Sea­son 1 to this point, then give this snap­py lit­tle video a quick look. It boils down six sea­sons in sev­en min­utes. Don’t blink. You might miss some­thing. (Note: Like The Sopra­nos, this sum­ma­ry has strong/adult con­tent. If this is not your thing, then skip it.)

P.S. 60 min­utes just aired a seg­ment on the Sopra­nos. You may want to check it out.

David Wes­sel, the deputy Wash­ing­ton bureau chief of The Wall Street Jour­nal, recent­ly gave a talk

at the Yale School of Man­age­ment, which he titled “Can News­pa­per Jour­nal­ism Sur­vive Blogs, Fox News and Karl Rove?” (Lis­ten here on iTunes.)  Speak­ing can­did­ly, Wes­sel read­i­ly acknowl­edged that the print news­pa­per busi­ness is in trou­ble, and even hint­ed that some of our major news­pa­pers, the Jour­nal per­haps includ­ed, may not ulti­mate­ly be long for the world. The prob­lem, as he describes it, is twofold: First, read­ers and adver­tis­ers con­tin­ue to move from print to the inter­net, a medi­um that old school papers can’t mon­e­tize very well. Sec­ond — and this is the crux of his argu­ment — he sees the major papers also suf­fer­ing because they face com­pe­ti­tion from more overt­ly politi­cized media play­ers, such as Fox, Drudge and var­i­ous blogs that don’t adhere to tra­di­tion­al stan­dards of jour­nal­ism. While The Wall Street Jour­nal strives to be “fair and bal­anced,” Fox News (rather iron­i­cal­ly) and many right and left-wing blogs read­i­ly embrace bias and man­age to cap­i­tal­ize on it fair­ly well. This leaves the mid­dle of the road media in trou­ble.

Now, there is sure­ly some mer­it to this argu­ment. But it real­ly does­n’t seem to get to the root of the prob­lem. Wes­sel paints the WSJ’s woes as being essen­tial­ly polit­i­cal when they real­ly are not. It’s more about busi­ness and cul­ture than any­thing else. When the inter­net took off in the late 90s, we heard about how it low­ered bar­ri­ers to entry and allowed play­ers with lit­tle cap­i­tal to get online and com­pete. Now, ten years lat­er, we’re see­ing the results. Estab­lished con­tent play­ers have found them­selves com­pet­ing with an infi­nite num­ber of spe­cial­ized con­tent providers, some of which are damn good, and some not. (Per­haps we can lump the unabashed­ly polit­i­cal blogs in the lat­ter group.) Put sim­ply, the infor­ma­tion world is being splin­tered much like the tele­vi­sion world was with the advent of cable, except even more so, and this leaves read­ers with many viable choic­es. For bet­ter or worse, the gen­er­al­ist press seems almost doomed to give way to spe­cial­ized blogs and web sites that read­ers can aggre­gate into an organ­ic whole with the help of book­marks and new­fan­gled “feed read­ers.” (See, for exam­ple, Google Read­er, MyYa­hoo, or Blog­lines.) This prob­a­bly includes The Wall Street Jour­nal. And would David Wes­sel be sur­prised to see Amer­i­ca’s lead­ing finan­cial paper even­tu­al­ly sup­plant­ed by a chang­ing con­stel­la­tion of alter­na­tives? Prob­a­bly not. You can already hear the doubt in his voice … and very faint­ly the suck­ing sound in the halls of Dow Jones.

Stephen Green­blatt, a Har­vard pro­fes­sor, lead­ing Shake­speare schol­ar, and author of the 2005 best­seller Will in the World, penned a piece in the lat­est New York Review of Books that sur­veys Shake­speare’s pol­i­tics — his take on the uses and abus­es of polit­i­cal pow­er. The piece starts in a won­der­ful way, so for­give us for quot­ing it a lit­tle at length:

In 1998, a friend of mine, Robert Pin­sky, who at the time was serv­ing as the poet lau­re­ate of the Unit­ed States, invit­ed me to a poet­ry evening at the Clin­ton White House, one of a series of black-tie events orga­nized to mark the com­ing mil­len­ni­um. On this occa­sion the Pres­i­dent gave an amus­ing intro­duc­to­ry speech in which he recalled that his first encounter with poet­ry came in junior high school when his teacher made him mem­o­rize cer­tain pas­sages from Mac­beth. This was, Clin­ton remarked wry­ly, not the most aus­pi­cious begin­ning for a life in pol­i­tics.

After the speech­es, I joined the line of peo­ple wait­ing to shake the Pres­i­den­t’s hand. When my turn came, a strange impulse came over me. This was a moment when rumors of the Lewin­sky affair were cir­cu­lat­ing, but before the whole thing had blown up into the grotesque nation­al cir­cus that it soon became. “Mr. Pres­i­dent,” I said, stick­ing out my hand, “don’t you think that Mac­beth is a great play about an immense­ly ambi­tious man who feels com­pelled to do things that he knows are polit­i­cal­ly and moral­ly dis­as­trous?” Clin­ton looked at me for a moment, still hold­ing my hand, and said, “I think Mac­beth is a great play about some­one whose immense ambi­tion has an eth­i­cal­ly inad­e­quate object.”

I was aston­ished by the apt­ness, as well as the quick­ness, of this com­ment, so per­cep­tive­ly in touch with Mac­beth’s anguished brood­ing about the impuls­es that are dri­ving him to seize pow­er by mur­der­ing Scot­land’s legit­i­mate ruler. When I recov­ered my equi­lib­ri­um, I asked the Pres­i­dent if he still remem­bered the lines he had mem­o­rized years before. Of course, he replied, and then, with the rest of the guests still patient­ly wait­ing to shake his hand, he began to recite one of Mac­beth’s great solil­o­quies:

    If it were done when ’tis done, then ’twere well
    It were done quick­ly. If th’ assas­si­na­tion
    Could tram­mel up the con­se­quence, and catch
    With his surcease suc­cess: that but this blow
    Might be the be-all and the end-all, here,
    But here upon this bank and shoal of time,
    We’d jump the life to come. But in these cas­es
    We still have judge­ment here, that we but teach
    Bloody instruc­tions which, being taught, return
    To plague th’in­ven­tor.

(1.7.1–10)

There the most pow­er­ful man in the world—as we are fond of call­ing our leader—broke off with a laugh, leav­ing me to con­jure up the rest of the speech that ends with Mac­beth’s own baf­fle­ment over the fact that his immense ambi­tion has “an eth­i­cal­ly inad­e­quate object”:

       I have no spur
    To prick the sides of my intent, but only
    Vault­ing ambi­tion, which o’er­leaps itself
    And falls on th’other.…

(1.7.25–28)[1]

I left the White House that evening with the thought that Bill Clin­ton had missed his true voca­tion, which was, of course, to be an Eng­lish pro­fes­sor. But the pro­fes­sion he actu­al­ly chose makes it all the more appro­pri­ate to con­sid­er whether it is pos­si­ble to dis­cov­er in Shake­speare an “eth­i­cal­ly ade­quate object” for human ambi­tion.

The arti­cle goes on to explore just this ques­tion, and it’s well worth the read. (And, oh how do I miss Clin­ton in some ways.) The piece also sets the stage for a radio pro­gram that aired last week on one of our favorite shows, PRI’s Open Souce (Feed — Mp3). Speak­ing with Stephen Green­blatt and two oth­er schol­ars — Oliv­er Arnold (Prince­ton) and Jim Fitz­mor­ris (Tulane) — the host Christo­pher Lydon sorts through Shake­speare’s out­look on pow­er and lead­er­ship (with­in both monar­chies and republics), and then they cir­cle back to view Amer­i­ca’s polit­i­cal land­scape through the Bard’s eyes. Shake­speare made his polit­i­cal com­men­tary often by look­ing back over 1500 years to Ancient Rome. So is it too far fetched to project his think­ing for­ward 400 years, to Amer­i­ca 2007? Have a lis­ten and you decide.

See our com­plete list of Arts & Cul­ture Pod­casts.