Presented creatively …
Noam Chomsky vs. William F. Buckley, 1969
Is there such a thing as the benign use of international force? It’s a question that Noam Chomsky and William F. Buckley, leading thinkers from the left and right, took up in 1969. And, of course, the whole question of Vietnam loomed in the background. As you’ll see below (and in Part 2 here) the debate is remarkably civil. And when Buckley threatens to punch Chomsky in the face, it’s said much more lovingly than when he offered to do the same to Gore Vidal in 1968.
As an interesting aside, when Buckley died earlier this year, Chomsky revisited the 1969 debate and Buckley’s legacy and essentially saw him looking a lot better than his conservative heirs — although I’m not sure that Chomsky was really passing along a deeply felt compliment here.
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Paul Krugman’s Nobel Prize in Economics
Paul Krugman is mainly known in the States as an economist who writes frequently for The New York Times. Meanwhile, few really know much about his serious academic work. Now that’s he’s been awarded the Nobel Prize, it’s worth giving you a quick feel for it. Here’s Krugman giving you the gist in his own words (iTunes — Rss Feed — Stream).
A Brief History of the 1929 Crash
With the gyrations of the world markets, 1929 was suddenly very present last week. All too present. What really went down in ’29? Below we present “The Crash of 1929,” a documentary that aired as part of PBS’ The American Experience Series. Part 1 appears below. You can get the remaining parts here: Part 2, Part 3, Part 4 and Part 5.
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Virtual Tour of the Forbidden City
Thanks to $3 million dollars from IBM and three years of effort, you can now download a virtual tour of China’s Forbidden City. Based on gaming software, the project lets you take a three dimensional tour of the imperial palace built during the mid-Ming Dynasty, starting in 1406 (get more info here).
Update: This was originally posted in 2008. It looks like the virtual tour has been taken offline.
via Metafilter
Morphing Van Gogh Portraits
You’ll get the concept of this pretty quickly. And if you’re a fan, see these other clips (Women in Art & Women in Film). These creative videos by Philip Scott Johnson all reside in this larger YouTube collection, which has now made it on to our our growing list: Intelligent Life at YouTube: 80 Educational Video Collections.
President Tours U.S To Survey Damage Caused By His Presidency
Yeah, okay, I am getting off track here with this comic bit from The Onion, veering from culture to politics. Sorry for the detour. I will get back on track tomorrow. Really, I will…
Saturday Night Live on AIG’s Bottomless Chutzpah
It didn’t take long for corporate America to start brazenly shafting the American taxpayer again. Just days after the government spent $85 billion bailing out AIG, the company shelled out $440,000 to send its execs to a Southern California resort. There a good $23,000 was spent on well-deserved spa treatments.
The corruption has reached points where you just have to laugh (did you know that AIG’s CEO also gets a $5 million performance bonus?), and that’s what Saturday Night Live helps you do. Watch the video below and fast forward to the last two and a half minutes.
PS In the comments, one of our readers has offered a defense of AIG. Your thoughts?
YouTube Starts Airing Full-Length TV Shows
First it was indie movies; now it’s classic TV shows. Thanks to a deal with CBS, you can now watch classic television shows on YouTube. Here, you’ll find Beverly Hills, 90210, MacGyver, and even Star Trek — not exactly high-culture, but you can’t win every time.
For more edifying series of YouTube videos, see our piece: Intelligent Life at YouTube: 75 Educational Video Collections.
Invitation to Stanford’s Course on the US Presidential Elections
Here’s a project that a few colleagues and I have had some fun developing. So it only seems fair that I get the scoop, right?
Starting on October 15, you can follow a timely, free course presented by Stanford University. Led by Martin Lewis, the course will explore the geography of U.S. presidential elections (both past and present), and challenge the suggestion that we are simply divided into a “Red America” and “Blue America.” It’s really much more complicated than that, as the introductory video below makes pretty clear. (Get the iTunes version here.)
The course will run five weeks, and it will include a debrief after the November election. A new video (running between 90 and 120 minutes) will be posted every Wednesday on iTunes and YouTube. And we’ve set up a web site for the course where you’ll be able to interact with the professor, and where you can also find a lot more information, including a complete course description and readings for the course. Once the course gets started, I will post a reminder. In the meantime, I wanted to give you an advanced heads up and hopefully whet your appetites a bit.
Lastly, I should mention that this course comes out of Stanford’s fine Continuing Studies program, and it will be eventually listed in our collection of Free Courses.
A Short Course in Behavioral Economics
Here’s a course for our historical moment.…
Behavioral economics—“the study of how thinking and emotions affect individual economic decisions and the behavior of markets”—is a relatively new discipline. This approach to economics, which marries psychology and economics and discards the assumption that every economic actor is rational, was developed partly by Richard Thaler, Director of the Center for Decision Research at the University of Chicago Graduate School of Business. Now, thanks to the Edge.org, you can follow a short class on the subject. It’s taught by Thaler himself and he’s joined by Harvard economist Sendhil Mullainathan and Nobel Laureate Daniel Kahneman.
The course, delivered in text and video, is being rolled out weekly on the Edge web site in six installments. You can find Weeks 1 and 2 here and here. And you can check back for new installments here (scroll to the very bottom of the page.)
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