Nobel Prize Winner Reads From His New Novel

in Books | August 13th, 2009

J.M. Coet­zee won the Nobel Prize in Lit­er­a­ture in 2003. This com­ing Decem­ber, Viking will release his lat­est nov­el, Sum­mer­time. The New York Review of Books recent­ly pub­lished two excerpts from the book (here and here). And you can now lis­ten to Coet­zee read the first of the two excerpts. It’s called “Undat­ed Frag­ments.” It’s avail­able in the fol­low­ing for­mats: MP3 — iTunes — RSS Feed. In the mean­time, we’ve added the New York Review of Books pod­cast to our col­lec­tion of Ideas & Cul­ture Pod­casts, which can also be accessed through our Free iPhone App.

Fol­low Open Cul­ture on Face­book and Twit­ter!

Top Ten Reasons Why the Kindle Won’t Be an iPod for Books

in Amazon Kindle, Books, e-books, Most Popular | August 11th, 2009

A lit­tle side­bar to our pre­vi­ous post that won­ders whether Ama­zon’s Kin­dle can rev­o­lu­tion­ize the book indus­try…

1) When you buy an iPod, you can trans­fer all of your cur­rent music onto it. With Kin­dle you have to start buy­ing all new books.

2) The paper-form book (aka “dead tree ver­sion”) is still the best tech­nol­o­gy for read­ing: ful­ly portable, a nice thing to own and put on shelves, great for shar­ing, good in bed, at beach, etc. If you lose it or get it wet, no big deal—easily replace­able.

3) Music has con­stant­ly found new for­mats that improve on the old. Same for the iPod. It’s unques­tion­ably bet­ter than that big­ger, skip­ping CD play­er. Books haven’t been able to improve on the form for cen­turies.

4) Hold­ing 100 albums in your hand is great. Hold­ing 100 books? Not as much.

5) How often do you real­ly go away for so long that you need 10+ books? (Book­stores are every­where.)

6) Kin­dle is too expen­sive (see #1) and too big.

7) Books take much longer to con­sume, don’t work well in indi­vid­ual (shuf­fled) parts, and we often only read them once.

8.) Now that you can car­ry music on your phone, and the iPhone has bun­dled music, email, inter­net, and tele­phone in one small size, is any­one real­ly will­ing to buy a big­ger iPhone or Kin­dle just to read books on it?

9) Most of us spend more time lis­ten­ing to music than read­ing. We just do; it’s eas­i­er to do while we’re involved with oth­er things.

10) Books: they’re bet­ter!

Seth Har­wood pod­casts his ideas on the pub­lish­ing indus­try and his fic­tion for free at sethharwood.com. He is cur­rent­ly fig­ur­ing out how pub­lish­ers should best approach the new, emerg­ing e‑book mar­ket. Hear his ideas in his lat­est Hot Tub Cast™ and read them here soon. His first nov­el is JACK WAKES UP, in stores now.

Science Catches the Eye of the Police

in Science | August 10th, 2009

Rather humor­ous. You can catch more of Steve Span­gler’s sci­en­tif­ic work on his YouTube chan­nel and web site. We’ve also added him to our list of Intel­li­gent YouTube Col­lec­tions.

Hendrix Plays the National Anthem

in Music | August 9th, 2009

In hon­or of the 40th anniver­sary of the Wood­stock Fes­ti­val, we have Jimi Hen­drix play­ing the U.S. nation­al anthem. It’s not your usu­al anthem. Nope, this is the anthem played dis­so­nant­ly in a new counter-cul­ture style, the anthem turned into a blis­ter­ing com­men­tary on the Viet­nam War. No doubt, con­ser­v­a­tives and the silent major­i­ty did­n’t like it. But, like it or not, it remains one of the mem­o­rable rock state­ments of the 60s. For more Hen­drix at Wood­stock, check out here, here, and here.

Caravaggio and Rembrandt Side by Side

in Art | August 6th, 2009

Straight from Metafil­ter. Seemed worth pass­ing along to our read­ers:

The Rijksmu­se­um in Ams­ter­dam invites you to com­pare Car­avag­gio and Rem­brandt. For an overview of Rem­brandt’s work here are Rem­brandt van Rijn: Life and Work and A Web Cat­a­logue of Rem­brandt Paint­ings. For Car­avag­gio there’s caravaggio.com which makes use of the Ital­ian web­site Tut­ta l’opera del Car­avag­gio.

Martin Sheen’s Senior Moment

in Life | August 5th, 2009

On the lighter side. Thanks Rachel for send­ing this along…

Find the link to the orig­i­nal video here.

Chris Anderson @ Google

in Audio Books, Books, Google | August 4th, 2009

Chris Ander­son, the author of Free: The Future of a Rad­i­cal Price (down­load a free audio file of the book here) is mak­ing the rounds, pro­mot­ing his new book. Of course, it was only nat­ur­al that Ander­son (also the author of The Long Tail and edi­tor-in-chief of Wired) should pay a vis­it to Google, a com­pa­ny that gen­er­ates bil­lions of dol­lars by serv­ing free con­tent and ser­vices. With the talk above, you get an intro­duc­tion to Ander­son­’s take on “free” and some good Q&A. The pre­sen­ta­tion runs about 53 min­utes in total.

Math Magic

in Math, TED Talks | August 3rd, 2009

Arthur Ben­jamin is a self-pro­claimed “math­ema­gi­cian.” He’s also a pro­fes­sor of math­e­mat­ics at Har­vey Mudd Col­lege. No need to say more. Watch him go. We’re adding this one to our list of YouTube favorites.

via The Teach­ing Com­pa­ny’s Face­book Page.

Big Ideas

in Video - Arts & Culture | August 2nd, 2009

A new addi­tion to our pop­u­lar and still grow­ing col­lec­tion: Intel­li­gent Video: The Top Cul­tur­al & Edu­ca­tion­al Video Sites … (The list now has close to 50 intel­li­gent video sites.)

Big Ideas, a pro­gram that comes out of Cana­da, fea­tures a “vari­ety of thought-pro­vok­ing top­ics which range across pol­i­tics, cul­ture, eco­nom­ics, art his­to­ry, sci­ence…. The pro­gram has intro­duced Ontario view­ers to the impres­sive brain­pow­er of peo­ple like Niall Fer­gu­son on Amer­i­can empire, Daniel Libe­skind on archi­tec­ture, George Stein­er on the demise of lit­er­a­cy, Camille Paglia on aes­thet­ic edu­ca­tion, and Noam Chom­sky on U.S. pol­i­tics.” You will also find talks here by Umber­to Eco, Mar­garet Atwood, Richard Flori­da, Steven Pinker, Lewis Lapham. See the full list of videos here.

via Metafil­ter

Oliver Sacks on the iPod

in Music | August 1st, 2009

Oliv­er Sacks, the famous neu­rol­o­gist and author of Musi­cophil­ia, a study that looks at the human brain and music, speaks in Harpers about the land­scape alter­ing iPod:

As Daniel Lev­itin has point­ed out, pas­sive lis­ten­ing has large­ly replaced active music-mak­ing. Now that we can lis­ten to any­thing we like on our iPods, we have less moti­va­tion to go to con­certs or church­es or syn­a­gogues, less occa­sion to sing togeth­er. This is unfor­tu­nate, because music-mak­ing engages much more of our brains than sim­ply lis­ten­ing. Part­ly for this rea­son, to cel­e­brate my 75th birth­day last year, I start­ed tak­ing piano lessons (after a gap of more than six­ty years). I still have my iPod (it con­tains the com­plete works of Bach), but I also need to make music.

via The Dai­ly Dish