Sean Penn Reads Bob Dylan’s Memoir

in Music | March 18th, 2009

A quick find worth pass­ing along… 

Although some­what uncon­ven­tion­al as far as mem­oirs go, Chron­i­cles: Vol­ume One recap­tures Bob Dylan’s “first stir­rings of cre­ativ­i­ty with amaz­ing urgency” (as Janet Maslin once put it) , and brings you to places that the nor­mal Dylan biog­ra­phy won’t. It brings you back to the small moments that shaped Dylan’s ear­ly days as a musi­cian in New York, and to the intel­lec­tu­al and musi­cal influ­ences that framed his way of see­ing things: Thu­cidy­des, Hank Williams, Dos­to­evsky, Woody Guthrie, John Locke and Jean Genet. I down­loaded the audio book ver­sion of Chron­i­cles over the week­end and was per­haps most cap­ti­vat­ed by the nar­ra­tion record­ed by Sean Penn, the new­ly-mint­ed Acad­e­my Award win­ner. Penn is not play­ing a role here. But, at points, you think you’re lis­ten­ing to Dylan him­self, which makes it a rather unique audio expe­ri­ence. You can down­load the audio book for $13.65. But, you could also poten­tial­ly get it for free.  Audi­ble runs a reg­u­lar pro­mo­tion that lets you down­load two books for free if you sign up for a 14 day free tri­al. Get the details here.

For many free audio books, check out our col­lec­tion here.

Stephen Colbert’s History Lesson: Bring Angry Mob to AIG

in Comedy, Current Affairs | March 17th, 2009

Cour­tesy of Stephen Col­bert, we get a lit­tle his­to­ry les­son that reminds us how we fixed prob­lems once upon a time in Amer­i­ca. Get the full episode here.

Ancient Rome in 3D on Google Earth

in Google, History | March 17th, 2009

In Novem­ber, Google launched  a 3D tour of Ancient Rome, cir­ca 320 AD. The tour, pro­duced with the help of the Rome Reborn project at the Uni­ver­si­ty of Vir­ginia, fea­tures over 6,000 build­ings, some ren­dered in fine detail, and it includes some inte­ri­ors as well. The Colos­se­um, the Roman Forum, the Basil­i­ca Julia, the Tem­ple of Ves­ta — they’re all there. The video above intro­duces you to the tour, and shows you how to access it on Google Earth. (The soft­ware can be down­loaded here). I should note that Google just held a com­pe­ti­tion that let edu­ca­tors devel­op his­to­ry lessons (aimed at high school stu­dents) using ele­ments of the 3D Tour. The win­ners and their lessons can be found here.

Orson Welles’ Final Moments

in Film, Television | March 17th, 2009

Above, you can watch Orson Welles’ last inter­view and pub­lic appear­ance. The clip brings you back to Octo­ber 10, 1985, when the great film­mak­er, then 70 years old, appeared on the Merv Grif­fin show and talked a good deal about aging and his aging gen­er­a­tion. Just two hours lat­er, Welles would die of a heart attack at his Los Ange­les home. The clip is added to our YouTube Favorites in a sen­ti­men­tal kind of way.

Relat­ed Con­tent: 

The War of the Worlds on Pod­cast: How H.G. Wells and Orson Welles Riv­et­ed A Nation

Clay Shirky on the Demise of the Newspaper

in Media | March 15th, 2009

Clay Shirky, who does a lot of good think­ing (see his lat­est book) about the social and eco­nom­ic effects of inter­net tech­nolo­gies, has post­ed a new piece on the slow but steady demise of the news­pa­per. It’s an intel­li­gent, not entire­ly lengthy, piece. Here’s a quick quote to whet your appetite:

Round and round this [debate], with the peo­ple com­mit­ted to sav­ing news­pa­pers demand­ing to know “If the old mod­el is bro­ken, what will work in its place?” To which the answer is: Noth­ing. Noth­ing will work. There is no gen­er­al mod­el for news­pa­pers to replace the one the inter­net just broke.

With the old eco­nom­ics destroyed, orga­ni­za­tion­al forms per­fect­ed for indus­tri­al pro­duc­tion have to be replaced with struc­tures opti­mized for dig­i­tal data. It makes increas­ing­ly less sense even to talk about a pub­lish­ing indus­try, because the core prob­lem pub­lish­ing solves — the incred­i­ble dif­fi­cul­ty, com­plex­i­ty, and expense of mak­ing some­thing avail­able to the pub­lic — has stopped being a prob­lem…

Soci­ety doesn’t need news­pa­pers. What we need is jour­nal­ism. For a cen­tu­ry, the imper­a­tives to strength­en jour­nal­ism and to strength­en news­pa­pers have been so tight­ly wound as to be indis­tin­guish­able. That’s been a fine acci­dent to have, but when that acci­dent stops, as it is stop­ping before our eyes, we’re going to need lots of oth­er ways to strength­en jour­nal­ism instead.

When we shift our atten­tion from ’save news­pa­pers’ to ’save soci­ety’, the imper­a­tive changes from ‘pre­serve the cur­rent insti­tu­tions’ to ‘do what­ev­er works.’ And what works today isn’t the same as what used to work.

And while I’m on this top­ic, let me also direct your atten­tion to a piece pub­lished on Mash­able by a recent col­league of mine, Woody Lewis. It gives you a good look at the 10 Ways News­pa­pers are Using Social Media to Save the Indus­try (assum­ing that can be done).

via Clay Shirky’s Twit­ter Feed

Stephen Colbert on Ayn Rand Thinking

in Comedy, Current Affairs | March 15th, 2009

Or watch it here.

Leonard Cohen, Live From The Beacon Theatre

in Music | March 12th, 2009

Leg­endary Cana­di­an musi­cian Leonard Cohen is now tour­ing the Unit­ed States for the first time in 15 years (get all of the details here). Fans who can’t catch a show will be pleased to know that NPR’s All Songs Con­sid­ered pro­vides free access to Cohen’s recent show at the Bea­con The­atre in NYC. (It was record­ed on or around Feb­ru­ary 19th.) The set should run about 1:14 and includes 12 songs. You can get it here:  Stream — RSS Feed — iTunes.

Ricky Gervais on American Optimism

in Comedy, Life | March 9th, 2009

Ricky Ger­vais, the come­di­an and brains behind The Office, talks here about the dif­fer­ence between British and Amer­i­can humor, and it real­ly gets down to deep cul­tur­al dif­fer­ences. Opti­mism, the belief that any­thing is pos­si­ble, ver­sus an ingrained pes­simism and pen­chant for the under­dog. I won­der whether UK read­ers would agree with this char­ac­ter­i­za­tion. And, more so, I won­der which out­look, the British or Amer­i­can, can bet­ter get you through these dif­fi­cult times. The answer, to me, is not obvi­ous…

The Books We Say We’ve Read

in Books | March 6th, 2009

Have you ever lied about read­ing a book? Well, if so, you’re hard­ly alone. Accord­ing to The Guardian, 65% of peo­ple polled in a sur­vey admit­ted to hav­ing made such a lie. And what books did they claim to have read? George Orwell’s 1984 ranked #1. Then the order went some­thing like this: Tol­stoy’s War and Peace, James Joyce’s Ulysses, and the Bible. 

I was remind­ed today that 1984 was first pub­lished 60 years ago. You can get the 60th anniver­sary edi­tion here, or you can always down­load a free, high qual­i­ty audio book from Archive.org. And, for more free audio books, vis­it our large col­lec­tion.

Fol­low us on Twit­ter here…

Kindle on iPhone

in Amazon Kindle, e-books, iPhone | March 4th, 2009

Just a quick fyi that Ama­zon has released a free app on iTunes that lets you down­load Ama­zon ebooks to the iPhone. This means that you don’t nec­es­sar­i­ly have to buy a Kin­dle in order to pur­chase & read ebooks from the largest ven­dor of ebooks– although I find the Kin­dle read­er to be con­sid­er­ably prefer­able to the iPhone’s small screen. But that is just me. One nice fea­ture built into the new Ama­zon app is the abil­i­ty to keep text in sync on the two devices. So, for exam­ple, if you’re read­ing Anna Karen­i­na on the iPhone, your Kin­dle will know where you left off and auto­mat­i­cal­ly start you at the right place the next time that you pick it up. A nice idea. But will I use it? Not sure. You? For more details on the new app, see Life­hack­er’s cov­er­age.

Update: Vis­it our col­lec­tion of Free eBooks, and load free books right to your PC, Smart Phone or Kin­dle.