What are the 1000 best novels? The Guardian thinks it knows. This list was put together by The Guardian’s review team and a panel of experts. As you’ll see, the definitive list is helpfully subdivided into themes: love, crime, comedy, family and self, state of the nation, science fiction and fantasy, war and travel.
On that note, I should also highlight a collection of Life-Changing Books put together by our readers. You’ll find many good reads here as well.
At least in my mind, Aretha Franklin stole the show on Tuesday. It’s hard to top her singing My Country, ‘Tis of Thee — the beauty of the voice, the obvious poignant symbolism of the moment, and then her hat. Yes, the hat that has captured the public imagination. Just days later, we have a Facebook group dedicated to her headwear, and now on Flickr a series of photos that creatively superimpose the Franklin hat on other celebrities, Colbert and Bullwinkle included.
What’s My Line? aired on CBS from 1950 to 1967, making it the longest-running game show in American television history. During its eighteen seasons, the show featured hundreds of celebrities & VIPs. Above, you can watch Salvador Dali in action. You can also rewind the video tape and check out Alfred Hitchcock, Frank Lloyd Wright, Eleanor Roosevelt, Groucho Marx, Carl Sandburg, among others. For more oldies and goodies, check out Orson Welles Vintage Radio & The War of the Worlds on Podcast: How H.G. Wells and Orson Welles Riveted A Nation.
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The story behind the artwork that defined the Obama campaign is a fascinating one. Shepard Fairey’s posters achieved prominence much in the same way that Obama did. They rose from the ground up. Everyday people supported and promoted his imaginative posters on the web, until they became something of a public phenomenon. And they turned the status quo — in this case, the tradition political poster — into something fresh and new. In this interview (iTunes — Feed — Stream), Fairey, once a self-proclaimed “outlaw street artist,” talks about how got started with his Obama pieces, and how his most celebrated work ended up in the permanent collection at the U.S. National Portrait Gallery.
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Speaking at the TED conference in 2007, Malcolm Gladwell (author of The Tipping Point, Blink, and now Outliers: The Story of Success) introduces you to the food industry’s pursuit of the perfect spaghetti sauce, which ultimately tells you something essential about human choice and happiness.
If you didn’t see how the inauguration of the 44th American president went down, here it goes.
A good find over at Metafilter. Here you’ll find 22 inauguration speeches, starting with McKinley’s 1901 address. There’s some great footage in this series of videos.
Along similar lines, The New York Times has posted an interactive feature that covers every inaugural address. You can read the full text of each speech, and see which words and ideas were most widely used within each text. It’s a quick way to see what issues mattered most during a given historical moment. Start with George Washington’s address here.
Lastly, let me leave you with this. FDR’s 1933 address, which helped America move with a little more confidence through another difficult time. It’s the speech that gives us “There’s nothing to fear but fear itself,” a kind of prelude to “Yes we can.” Here’s to new beginnings.
In 2008, our attention was mostly focused on the long American presidential campaign and the dramatic crash of the global financial system. These two stories overshadowed many other important ones. And so Foreign Policy has put together a collection of the most overlooked foreign affairs stories of ’08. Russia’s move into Africa, the beginning of a new Darfur, solar panels emitting greenhouse gases — these stories and more get covered here.
The full “I Have a Dream” speech. The place: The Lincoln Memorial. The Date: August 28, 1963. The Why: To bring about many small changes in American society, which eventually and collectively bring us to Tuesday. Take it away Martin:
This week, Stanford has started to roll out a new course, Einstein’s General Theory of Relativity. Taught by Leonard Susskind, one of America’s leading physics minds, this course is the fourth of a six-part sequence — Modern Physics: The Theoretical Minimum — that traces the development of modern physics, moving from Newton to Black Holes. As the title suggests, this course (which runs 20 hours in total) focuses squarely on the groundbreaking work of Albert Einstein. And, it’s undoubtedly a plus that the course was presented in Stanford’s Continuing Studies program, which means that it’s tailored to smart non-specialists like you. You can watch the first lecture on iTunes here, or YouTube below. The remaining lectures will be rolled out on a weekly basis. If you would like to watch the longer sequence of courses, I have provided a complete list of links here. Enjoy.
Thankfully, it’s not all bad news here in Silicon Valley. Yesterday, Google and the Prado (the major art museum in Madrid) announced that you can launch Google Earth from wherever you live, travel virtually to Spain, and then take a close look at fourteen of the museum’s finest paintings. And, by “close,” I mean close. According to a Google spokesman said: “The paintings have been photographed in very high resolution and contain as many as 14,000 million pixels (14 gigapixels).” “With this high level resolution you are able to see fine details such as the tiny bee on a flower in The Three Graces (by Rubens), delicate tears on the faces of the figures in The Descent from the Cross (by Roger van der Weyden) and complex figures in The Garden of Earthly Delights (by El Bosco).” The fourteen paintings include pieces by Francisco de Goya, Diego Velázquez and Hieronymus Bosch. You can begin the tour (and get Google Earth software) from this landing page. The video below also offers a nice visual illustration of what this project is all about. (A quick tip: if you have Google Earth, make sure that you have “3D Buildings” checked off under “Layers.” Then do a search for “Prado” and click on “Museu del Prado.” From there, click on the image of the museum. Next, you should see a series of paintings that you can begin to explore.)
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