Philip Roth’s Everyman and Beyond

in Books, Literature | December 29th, 2006

Cour­tesy of the radio pro­gram Open Source, we get an intrigu­ing and widerang­ing inter­view with Philip
Roth, where he talks can­did­ly about his lat­est and 27th nov­el Every­man, a work that takes an exis­ten­tial­ly anguish­ing look at the end of life. We also get Roth read­ing from oth­er past nov­els, talk­ing about the day-to-day prac­tice of writ­ing, and offer­ing thoughts on the cur­rent state of Amer­i­can pol­i­tics. You can catch the inter­view in one of three ways: iTunes, Rss feed, mp3 stream.

For oth­er inter­views with promi­nent thinkers, see our page called Smart Talks — Lead­ing Thinkers in Mul­ti-Media.

Philosophy Talk and Intelligent Design

in Philosophy, Religion | December 26th, 2006

It’s not quite “Car Talk,” but it’s not ter­ri­bly far away. Phi­los­o­phy Talk, a week­ly pub­lic radio pro­gram pre­sent­ed by two Stan­ford phi­los­o­phy pro­fes­sors, offers a “down-to-earth and no-non­sense approach” to phi­los­o­phy that’s engag­ing, if not enter­tain­ing. The show, which can be streamed from the web site, tends to range wide­ly. In recent weeks, they’ve tak­en a look at neu­ro­science, Amer­i­can prag­ma­tism, quan­tum real­i­ty, war crimes, belief in God, and dream­ing, each time inter­view­ing a lead­ing thinker in the field and also post­ing help­ful, relat­ed infor­ma­tion on the The Phi­los­o­phy Talk blog.

To get a feel for how Ken Tay­lor and John Per­ry run their show, you may want to check out an episode that deals with intel­li­gent design, a the­o­ry that has emerged out of Amer­i­ca’s cul­ture wars to com­pete philo­soph­i­cal­ly or ide­o­log­i­cal­ly (depend­ing on how you see things) with evo­lu­tion. Here, the hosts are joined by Daniel Den­nett, the Direc­tor of the Cen­ter for Cog­ni­tive Stud­ies at Tufts Uni­ver­si­ty and the author of Dar­win’s Dan­ger­ous Idea. Togeth­er, they tack­le the essen­tial ques­tions: “Is there any rea­son to
think the cause or caus­es of order in the uni­verse bear an even remote anal­o­gy to human intel­li­gence? Even if they did, would that mean these intel­li­gent caus­es had the benev­o­lence and sense of jus­tice required of a Chris­t­ian God? Is this whole issue one of sci­ence, reli­gion, or phi­los­o­phy?” You can catch the episode on iTunes or stream it through Real Play­er. (Also check out the resources at the bot­tom of this page.)

A Christmas Carol by Charles Dickens

in Books, Literature | December 23rd, 2006

Let’s go into Christ­mas on the right note, with a free pod­cast of Charles Dick­en’s A Christ­mas Car­ol. (Find it here on iTunes.) Writ­ten in 1843, Dick­en’s tale remains one of the most pop­u­lar Christ­mas sto­ries of all time. It gave us the indeli­ble char­ac­ters of Ebenez­er Scrooge, Tiny Tim, and the Ghosts of Christ­mas Past, Present, and Future. And it invent­ed the notion of “christ­mas spir­it.” This pod­cast is rather well read. If you’d like to read along with the actu­al text, you can get a free etext here, cour­tesy of Project Guten­berg.

Also, you can find oth­er free Christ­mas sto­ries at Lib­rivox. On this page, you can stream mp3s of many dif­fer­ent hol­i­day tales.

For more free audio books, check out our Audio Book Pod­cast Col­lec­tion. We now have over 40 clas­sics list­ed and ready to down­load. Hap­py hol­i­days.

Book Chapters Presented by The New York Times

in Books | December 21st, 2006

Here is a quick tid­bit for the read­er who does­n’t like buy­ing books sight unseen. Each week, The New York Times posts on its web site the full text of the first chap­ter of books reviewed in The New York Times Book Review, or which oth­er­wise appear on the NYT best­seller lists. You can find some of the recent­ly high­light­ed texts on The Times’ First Chap­ters page. Or for a com­plete list, you can turn to this less designed page and work through a list of books arranged in clear, alpha­bet­i­cal order.

More Free Texts: With­in our Edu­ca­tion­al Web Resources com­pi­la­tion, we have includ­ed many oth­er sites that pro­vide access to free online texts. Sim­ply look under the first sec­tion called “Online Texts & Text Search,” and you will be on your way.

Google’s Shakespeare

in Books, Literature | December 13th, 2006

Google has always shied away from the con­tent cre­ation busi­ness. While Yahoo spent pre­cious resources devel­op­ing expen­sive con­tent, the Google folks con­tent­ed them­selves with devel­op­ing tech­nol­o­gy that orga­nized the rest of the world’s infor­ma­tion. And it paid off well. Giv­en this approach, it was some­what strange to stum­ble upon an edi­to­ri­al­ized part of their web site that invites users to “Explore Shake­speare with Google.” But we’re glad we did.

Google’s Shake­speare prod­uct is part of the com­pa­ny’s larg­er Book Search ini­tia­tive, which, to boil it down, involves scan­ning mil­lions of books, putting them on Google’s servers, and allow­ing users to search the print uni­verse like they do the world of web con­tent. Although some aspects of the project have proven to be high­ly con­tro­ver­sial (name­ly, the deci­sion to scan mil­lions of copy­right­ed texts), oth­er aspects have been eas­i­ly wel­comed by the pub­lish­ing com­mu­ni­ty. This includes the deci­sion to scan and archive a panoply of old, pub­lic domain texts.

This is where we get to Google’s Shake­speare. What you’ll find here is a col­lec­tion of all of the Bard’s plays in full text. The his­to­ries, tragedies, come­dies, romances — they are all here. The folks at Google­plex give you the abil­i­ty to access each play in its entire­ty and peruse it online. Or, alter­na­tive­ly,  you can down­load each play as a PDF file, which gives you the abil­i­ty to print the text and work through it in new ways. This kind of edi­to­r­i­al col­lec­tion is hard to argue with. In fact, we’d like to see more col­lec­tions like it. But some­thing tells us that this isn’t like­ly — that the Bard (oh, and Chi­na) is just about the only thing for which Google will make an excep­tion.

The Iraqi Experience in Digital

in Politics | December 11th, 2006

The vast major­i­ty of Amer­i­cans have only a remote sense of what Iraqis
are expe­ri­enc­ing these days. We hear about peo­ple dying dai­ly — 10 in a mar­ket here, 30 in a mosque attack there — but it comes across as sta­tis­tics, as num­bers divorced from a real­i­ty that we can empathize with. In past wars, you could blame this fail­ure to under­stand the war in con­crete, human terms on gov­ern­ment cen­sor­ship and timid report­ing. But, with this war, the pub­lic does­n’t have that excuse. This is the first major Amer­i­can war fought in the age of the inter­net, and, as a result, a fuller pic­ture of the war has always been just  a Google search away. With that thought in mind, I have pulled togeth­er some dig­i­tal resources that paint a fuller pic­ture of what the US inva­sion has giv­en every­day Iraqis. In clear terms, you can see what life real­ly looks like in this new­found democ­ra­cy.

Pod­cast: For starters, I would high­ly rec­om­mend this recent pod­cast from Open Source, a PRI pro­duc­tion. It includes Iraqis and experts talk­ing about the dis­lo­ca­tion of many Iraqi cit­i­zens, and the grow­ing refugee cri­sis in Syr­ia and Jor­dan. (Note: this pod­cast requires iTunes, which you can down­load for free here.)

Blogs: This col­lec­tion of blogs writ­ten most­ly by Iraqis in Eng­lish will give you a real-time look at life in Iraq.

• A Fam­i­ly in Bagh­dad
• Alive in Bagh­dad
  • You might want to par­tic­u­lar­ly focus on the streamed video inter­views.
• Blog­ging Bagh­dad: The Untold Sto­ry (Assem­bled by NBC reporters work­ing on the ground in Iraq.)
• Heal­ing Iraq
• Today in Iraq
• Trea­sure of Bagh­dad

Pic­tures: This pho­to diary by CBS News offers an extend­ed archive of pho­tos cap­tur­ing the dai­ly expe­ri­ence in Iraq.

Catch The Nobel Prize Awards Ceremony Live

in Uncategorized | December 10th, 2006

Today (Sun­day, Decem­ber 10), the Nobel Prizes will be award­ed in Stock­holm, Swe­den. The Peace Prize
gets award­ed ear­ly in the day (1:50 pm Cen­tral Euro­pean Time), and then, sev­er­al hours lat­er, come the rest (start­ing at 4:30 CET). By click­ing on these links, you can watch the cer­e­monies live over the Net. Stock­holm is 6 hours ahead of the US east coast, and 9 hours ahead of the west coast.

Final­ly, you can also watch here the indi­vid­ual speech­es giv­en by this year’s Nobel Prize win­ners. Most were pre­sent­ed this past Fri­day in Stock­holm.

Salon.com Conversations

in Media | December 8th, 2006

Here’s a quick lit­tle tip for you. Salon.com has a nice col­lec­tion of audio con­ver­sa­tions with fig­ures from the high­er ech­e­lons of the pop cul­ture world. David Lynch, Pedro Almod­ó­var, Amy Sedaris, the list goes on. You can access these talks from the Salon.com site, and, along the way, be forced to look at umpteen ads before you get what you want. Or you can take a very quick short cut, go straight to iTunes by click­ing here, and get the talks with no pain, no wait, no ads. It’s your choice, of course.

The Edge Video Collection

in Science | December 7th, 2006

Nope, we’re not talk­ing about U2. We’re talk­ing about
John Brockman.
And just who is he? He’s the lit­er­ary agent of the
intel­lec­tu­al stars. He is to the think­ing world what Scott Boras is to base­ball.
If you’re a major sci­en­tif­ic thinker, and if you can write for the
gen­er­al pub­lic, you’ll like­ly find your­self in the Brock­man sta­ble, and
he’ll land you a major book deal. And you’ll be in good com­pa­ny.
Brock­man rep­re­sents Richard Dawkins (the author of the cur­rent
best­seller, The God Delu­sion), Jared Dia­mond (Guns, Germs & Steel), and Daniel Gole­man (Emo­tion­al Intel­li­gence), just to name a
few.

His web­site, Edge.org, fea­tures a good amount of con­tent by — or
about — the vision­ary thinkers that he rep­re­sents. You can find lots
of good read­ing here (the BBC calls it “Fan­tas­ti­cal­ly
stimulating…It’s like the crack cocaine of the think­ing world…”)
and also a great video trove fea­tur­ing many promi­nent sci­en­tif­ic
thinkers talk­ing about what they know best. Take a look around and
you’ll like­ly get the intel­lec­tu­al fix that you’re look­ing for.

Coltrane Spotify Sample

in Art, Creativity, Literature | December 1st, 2006

Third

Amer­i­ca lost more than it real­ized today. Sty­ron was, of course, appre­ci­at­ed by a great num­ber of writ­ers, read­ers, and crit­ics. But, these days, he isn’t usu­al­ly men­tioned in the same sen­tence as Philip Roth, John Updike, or Nor­man Mail­er, the elder states­men of con­tem­po­rary Amer­i­can lit­er­a­ture. There are some legit­i­mate rea­sons for that. Rep­u­ta­tion is often sim­ply a func­tion of out­put and, since 1993, Sty­ron had­n’t pub­lished any­thing new. He was then deal­ing with seri­ous depres­sion, which he wrote elo­quent­ly about in one of his last works, Dark­ness Vis­i­ble: A Mem­oir of Mad­ness, and he would be in and out of hos­pi­tals from there.