In the past couple of years, The New Yorker has rolled out a series of animated cartoons, which puts in motion its famous cartoons. They can be watched iTunes, YouTube or right on the web.
Interviews with Schoenberg and Bartók
We gave you Tchaikovsky’s Voice Captured on an Edison Cylinder (1899) and James Joyce Reading from Finnegans Wake. And now, thanks to Robert, we let you listen in on interviews with two other great composers — Arnold Schoenberg (1874–1951) and Béla Bartók (1881–1945) recorded in 1944.
Google Puts Supreme Court Opinions Online
A quick fyi: Starting today, you can find online legal opinions from the Supreme Court, as well as federal and state courts, thanks to Google Scholar. When you visit Google Scholar, click on the “Legal opinions and journals” radio button, and then begin your query. If you type “separate but equal,” Scholar with present you with famous Supreme Court Cases such as Plessy v. Ferguson and Brown v. Board of Education. You get the gist. You can read more about this online legal database over at Google’s blog.
UPDATE/NOTE FROM READER: “This has already been done for the US Supreme Court, and very well, at oyez.org. Oyez is easy to use, has lots of additional content, including summaries and audio of oral arguments, and is ad-free and Creative Commons licensed for its original content. Plus, you can search by court term, Justice, and the name of the legal counsel.” An alternative source to look at…
The Crowdsourced Musical Collaboration
This musical bit is easier watched than described. Click through, start the 20 videos playing in any order/timing that you want, and see what you get. You can read the FAQ for the InB b 2.0 project here.
Thanks V for the tip!
Nabokov’s Last
Vladimir Nabokov wanted his last unfinished novel destroyed (learn more about it here). But, 32 years after his death, the book is being published. You can buy The Original of Laura starting Tuesday. Meanwhile, you can also read through a few excerpts thanks to the Times Online.
Tchaikovsky’s Voice Captured on an Edison Cylinder (1890)
Take a quick trip back in time, to 1890. Here you can listen to Pyotr Tchaikovsky (The Nutcracker, the 1812 Overture, etc.) and other eminent musicians having some fun, recording their voices on a then new-fangled technology, the phonograph cylinder, invented by Thomas Edison in 1877. To get a transcript of what the friends had to say, you can read the transcript after the jump. Thanks Maggie for this tip. (via BoingBoing)
Can Cultural Evolution Stave Off Global Collapse?
The pattern always repeats itself. Civilizations rise and fall. Then new ones take their place. But, something else may be about to happen. There might be an impending collapse of our entire global civilization. Not one major civilization, but the entire global civilization, gone. Or, so that’s how Stanford professor Paul Ehrlich sees it. Ehrlich, who has been called “one of the most influential ecologists of our age,” sees one thing staving off disaster. A big shift in culture first and foremost. A cultural evolution. Watch above.
A New TV Guide for Internet Television
Today, Clicker.com comes out of beta and promises to become the complete guide to Internet Television. Currently, the site “contains more than 450,000 episodes, from over 6,000 shows, from over 1,200 networks, tens of thousands of movies, and 50,000 music videos from 20,000 artists.” The content (all apparently legal) is generally supplied by other content providers, and then aggregated by Clicker. Although the content is often quite pop, you can find some university content (Berkeley, Yale, Princeton, Stanford, etc.) in the mix, much of it supplied by Academic Earth. Other quality content appears in the Art & Artists section here and the Documentary section here.
Thanks Denise for the tip.
via USA Today
Stephen Hawking/Carl Sagan Mashup Released as Single
For the past couple of months, A Glorious Dawn, a mashup melding Stephen Hawking’s voice with scenes from Carl Sagan’s Cosmos, has been making its way around the blogosphere. Now, on the eve of what would have been Sagan’s 75th birthday (he died in 1996), A Glorious Dawn has been officially released as a single by Third Man Records, the label created by White Stripes singer Jack White. We have posted the video above. You can also download the song in mp3 and other formats here, or buy it as a special 7 inch single (pre-order here).
via Huffington Post and Telegraph.co.uk
Free Movies Online: Now Expanded with Many Classics
Two weeks ago, I posted a collection of 20 sites where you can watch free movies online. Thanks to your help, the page now features 30 Places to Watch Free Movies Online, and I hope to keep it growing. Below, I have featured five of the new additions, which includes many important classics. Please feel free to share the full collection with friends, and keep sending your suggestions my way:
Internet Archive — Feature Films: When you’re looking for free movies online, the Internet Archive should be your first stop. It features large collections of comedies, film noir and sci-fi/horror flix. You will also find some foreign films here, along with important classic films, including Elia Kazan’s Panic in the Streets, John Huston’s Beat the Devil, Fritz Lang’s Scarlet Street, Howard Hawks’ His Girl Friday, Sergei Eisenstein’s Battleship Potemkin and The Kid with Charlie Chaplin. You can access the Archive’s full movie library here.
Babelgum Films: Babelgum’s goal is to act as an international ‘glue’, bringing a huge range of professional and semi-professional films to a global audience – like a modern-day Tower of Babel. They’re also making an effort to get their content to smartphones. They have an iPhone app now and apps for other phones on the horizon. Get more detail on the mobile apps here.
FMO: FreeMoviesOnline features a large selection of public domain films. Here, you’ll find films featuring John Wayne (Paradise Canyon, Humphrey Bogart (Beat the Devil), Cary Grant (The Amazing Quest of Ernest Bliss), Fred Astaire (Royal Wedding), Hitchcock’s The Man Who Knew Too Much, and many others.
Fancast: This site features a long list of free movies. Some notable films include Laurence Olivier and Kirk Douglas in Spartacus, Johnny Depp in Fear & Loathing in Las Vegas, Cary Grant and Audrey Hepburn in Charade, Gary Cooper in The Pride of the Yankees, Robert DeNiro in Ronin, and Billy Wilder’s The Private Life of Sherlock Holmes. Unfortunately, I think this site restricts films to an American audience. But please let me know if I am wrong about that.
Google Video: For some time now, major classics have appeared on Google Video. Take for example: the 1922 German silent film Nosferatu, The Phantom of the Opera (1925), Sergei Eisenstein’s 1918 film Alexander Nevsky, Howard Hughes’ The Outlaw (1943), Akira Kurosawa’s Rashomon (1950), Night of the Living Dead (1968), 1984 (based on the Orwell novel) and three films by the great Frank Capra — It Happened One Night (with Clark Gable), It’s a Wonderful Life and Mr. Smith Goes to Washington (both with Jimmy Stewart).
Indie Movies Online: Just as it sounds. A good place to watch full-fledged indie films on the web. Right now, you can find Peter Greenaway’s film, Rembrandt’s J’accuse and The Future We Will Create — Inside the World of TED. The site seems to be available in the US, UK, Canada and Australia, but perhaps also beyond.
For many more free films, please visit 30 Places to Watch Free Movies Online
The Fall of the Berlin Wall in Moving Images
When I traveled to East Berlin in 1988, my first time as a youngster, I read reports of a split between the hardline East German regime and the opening Soviet government. But nobody really paid much attention to that news. Less than a year later, the Iron Curtain and the Berlin Wall would be gone, all of it. Above, you can watch footage that shows how East Germans experienced that moment, and here, courtesy of @courosa, you can find a series of vivid historical images that commemorate the events that took place 20 years ago.
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