Learning English with Free Audio Lessons (ESL)

in English Language, Language Lessons | April 6th, 2007

These days, Open Cul­ture has been attract­ing an inter­na­tion­al audi­ence. To give you a lit­tle­sam­ple, 43% of our read­ers come from out­side the US, and they come chiefly from Tai­wan (lots from Tai­wan late­ly), Ger­many, Chi­na, Japan, France, Spain, India, Mex­i­co and Brazil. But if you count them all up over the past week, we have had vis­i­tors from 105 coun­tries over­all. Very grat­i­fy­ing.

Giv­en this, it seems worth high­light­ing some pod­casts that can help you improve your Eng­lish. (We’re assum­ing that you already know some Eng­lish, or you would­n’t be here in the first place.)

The most obvi­ous pod­cast to start with is the apt­ly titled Eng­lish as a Sec­ond Lan­guage Pod­cast (iTunes — Feed — Web Site). Put togeth­er by two for­mer pro­fes­sors, this very rich and deep col­lec­tion teach­es stu­dents prop­er pro­nun­ci­a­tion, idioms and slang, and it gen­er­al­ly gets high marks. These guys seem to have a good cor­ner on the mar­ket, and they’re worth your time.

Now, there are oth­er, more focused ways to learn Eng­lish. If you’re a native Span­ish speak­er, you may want to give some atten­tion to Eng­lish for Span­ish Speak­ers, which is oth­er­wise called, Por Fin Aprende Ingles (iTunes — Feed — Web Site).

Or if you’re main­ly look­ing to improve your Eng­lish for busi­ness pur­pos­es, you can check out Busi­ness Eng­lish Pod (iTunes — Feed — Web Site), which will teach you to func­tion effec­tive­ly in an Amer­i­can busi­ness envi­ron­ment. Anoth­er option is ESL Busi­ness News (iTunes — Feed — Web Site), a week­ly pod­cast that presents inter­na­tion­al busi­ness news in clear, slow­ly spo­ken Eng­lish. As you lis­ten to the pod­cast, you can also read a tran­script at the same time.

Final­ly, if you’re look­ing for some­thing less for­mal and a lit­tle more quirky, you can also always spend a lit­tle time lis­ten­ing to The Bob and Rob Show: Week­ly Eng­lish Lessons from a Yan­kee and a Brit (iTunes — Feed — Web Site). This uncon­ven­tion­al show often uses humor to teach gram­mar and idioms to inter­me­di­ate-to-advanced stu­dents, and you’ll get a feel for both Amer­i­can and Eng­lish accents.

To learn more lan­guages, click to see our col­lec­tion: How to Learn Lan­guages for Free: Span­ish, Eng­lish, Chi­nese & 37 Oth­er Lan­guages,

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Indie films for Your Apple TV

in Apple, Film | April 6th, 2007

Here’s a tip cour­tesy of The Unof­fi­cial Apple Weblog.

Apple TV just hit the mar­ket, as we men­tioned last week. And while the prod­uct has a lot of promise, the imme­di­ate down­side is that there’s a dearth of con­tent ready for you to watch. But here’s a promis­ing option: Hun­gryFlix lets you down­load inde­pen­dent films that are specif­i­cal­ly for­mat­ted for Apple TV. You prob­a­bly won’t rec­og­nize too many of the titles — they are inde­pen­dent films after all — but the price for the down­loads is cer­tain­ly right. For more video pod­casts, click here.


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

in Uncategorized | April 5th, 2007


Waroftheworld_1 Since we’re already talk­ing today about Orson Welles (see imme­di­ate­ly below), it seems worth doing a reprise of anoth­er arti­cle that looks at Welles’ famous radio broad­cast. It’s per­haps our most pop­u­lar entry to date. Enjoy.

Over the past year, we’ve seen tech-savvy book lovers start record­ing and issu­ing their own home­grown audio books and aggre­gat­ing them on sites like Lib­rivox. The audio texts most­ly come from the pub­lic domain for obvi­ous copy­right rea­sons (though you can find some excep­tions), and, yes, they’re some­times of uneven qual­i­ty. Among the first releas­es, you’d expect to find a lot of the great clas­si­cal works – the major plays of Shake­speare, the foun­da­tion­al philo­soph­i­cal works by Pla­to, etc. – and you do get some of those. But what you find more often are texts by more mod­ern writ­ers work­ing in the thriller, adven­ture, and sci fi gen­res: Wash­ing­ton Irv­ing, Robert Louis Steven­son, Edgar Allen Poe, Arthur Conan Doyle, and H.G. Wells. (Find these pod­casts here.) It seems entire­ly fit­ting (and, when you think about it, unsur­pris­ing) that Wells, the father of sci­ence fic­tion, would be among the first to find his writ­ings dig­i­tal­ly record­ed and dis­trib­uted. Nowa­days, you can down­load, sync and lis­ten to his major works – The New Accel­er­a­tor (mp3), The Invis­i­ble Man (iTunes — feed), The Time Machine (iTunes — feed), and The War of the Worlds  (iTunes).

But what’s even bet­ter and cool­er than all of this, at least in our minds, is that you can now also down­load the ver­sion of The War of the Worlds that Orson Welles famous­ly adapt­ed and aired on nation­al radio in Octo­ber 1938. Pre­sent­ed so that it sound­ed like an actu­al news broad­cast, the Orson Welles ver­sion was mis­tak­en for truth by many lis­ten­ers who caught the pro­gram mid­stream (more info here), and, soon enough, they found them­selves cow­er­ing in base­ments or flee­ing in cars with guns cocked and loaded, all in a des­per­ate attempt to avoid an unfold­ing Mar­t­ian inva­sion. You can catch the mp3 ver­sion of the famous Welles’ record­ing here. Or here is an alter­na­tive in case the orig­i­nal file gets over­ly traf­ficked. Enjoy.

See our com­plete Audio Book Pod­cast Col­lec­tion and oth­er pod­cast col­lec­tions.

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The Sucking Sound at The Wall Street Journal

in Media | April 4th, 2007



Wall_street_journalDavid Wes­sel, the deputy Wash­ing­ton bureau chief of The Wall Street Jour­nal, recent­ly gave a talk

at the Yale School of Man­age­ment, which he titled “Can News­pa­per Jour­nal­ism Sur­vive Blogs, Fox News and Karl Rove?” (Lis­ten here on iTunes.)  Speak­ing can­did­ly, Wes­sel read­i­ly acknowl­edged that the print news­pa­per busi­ness is in trou­ble, and even hint­ed that some of our major news­pa­pers, the Jour­nal per­haps includ­ed, may not ulti­mate­ly be long for the world. The prob­lem, as he describes it, is twofold: First, read­ers and adver­tis­ers con­tin­ue to move from print to the inter­net, a medi­um that old school papers can’t mon­e­tize very well. Sec­ond — and this is the crux of his argu­ment — he sees the major papers also suf­fer­ing because they face com­pe­ti­tion from more overt­ly politi­cized media play­ers, such as Fox, Drudge and var­i­ous blogs that don’t adhere to tra­di­tion­al stan­dards of jour­nal­ism. While The Wall Street Jour­nal strives to be “fair and bal­anced,” Fox News (rather iron­i­cal­ly) and many right and left-wing blogs read­i­ly embrace bias and man­age to cap­i­tal­ize on it fair­ly well. This leaves the mid­dle of the road media in trou­ble.

Now, there is sure­ly some mer­it to this argu­ment. But it real­ly does­n’t seem to get to the root of the prob­lem. Wes­sel paints the WSJ’s woes as being essen­tial­ly polit­i­cal when they real­ly are not. It’s more about busi­ness and cul­ture than any­thing else. When the inter­net took off in the late 90s, we heard about how it low­ered bar­ri­ers to entry and allowed play­ers with lit­tle cap­i­tal to get online and com­pete. Now, ten years lat­er, we’re see­ing the results. Estab­lished con­tent play­ers have found them­selves com­pet­ing with an infi­nite num­ber of spe­cial­ized con­tent providers, some of which are damn good, and some not. (Per­haps we can lump the unabashed­ly polit­i­cal blogs in the lat­ter group.) Put sim­ply, the infor­ma­tion world is being splin­tered much like the tele­vi­sion world was with the advent of cable, except even more so, and this leaves read­ers with many viable choic­es. For bet­ter or worse, the gen­er­al­ist press seems almost doomed to give way to spe­cial­ized blogs and web sites that read­ers can aggre­gate into an organ­ic whole with the help of book­marks and new­fan­gled “feed read­ers.” (See, for exam­ple, Google Read­er, MyYa­hoo, or Blog­lines.) This prob­a­bly includes The Wall Street Jour­nal. And would David Wes­sel be sur­prised to see Amer­i­ca’s lead­ing finan­cial paper even­tu­al­ly sup­plant­ed by a chang­ing con­stel­la­tion of alter­na­tives? Prob­a­bly not. You can already hear the doubt in his voice … and very faint­ly the suck­ing sound in the halls of Dow Jones.

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Nietzsche, Melville, Jane Austen & More: The Latest Audio Book Classics Released by Librivox

in Books | April 3rd, 2007

Nietzsche_4Through­out March, the folks at Lib­rivox were putting on the full court

press. Stag­ing their own ver­sion of March Mad­ness, Lib­rivox and its army of vol­un­teers com­plet­ed 70 audio record­ings of pub­lic domain texts. Among them, you’ll find some essen­tial clas­sics in lit­er­a­ture and phi­los­o­phy. The list of new addi­tions starts with Jane Austen’s Sense and Sen­si­bil­i­ty (full zip file — indi­vid­ual mp3 files) and Her­man Melville’s Moby Dick (full zip file — indi­vid­ual mp3 files), but it also extends to oth­er time-test­ed clas­sics. Let’s list them quick­ly:

See Open Cul­ture’s Pod­cast Col­lec­tions:

Arts & Cul­ture — Audio Books — For­eign Lan­guage Lessons — News & Infor­ma­tion — Sci­ence — Tech­nol­o­gy — Uni­ver­si­ty (Gen­er­al) — Uni­ver­si­ty (B‑School) — Pod­cast Primer

 


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Shakespeare and the Uses of Political Power

in Literature | April 2nd, 2007


Stephen Green­blatt, a Har­vard pro­fes­sor, lead­ing Shake­speare schol­ar, and author of the 2005 best­seller Will in the World, penned a piece in the lat­est New York Review of Books that sur­veys Shake­speare’s pol­i­tics — his take on the uses and abus­es of polit­i­cal pow­er. The piece starts in a won­der­ful way, so for­give us for quot­ing it a lit­tle at length:

In 1998, a friend of mine, Robert Pin­sky, who at the time was serv­ing as the poet lau­re­ate of the Unit­ed States, invit­ed me to a poet­ry evening at the Clin­ton White House, one of a series of black-tie events orga­nized to mark the com­ing mil­len­ni­um. On this occa­sion the Pres­i­dent gave an amus­ing intro­duc­to­ry speech in which he recalled that his first encounter with poet­ry came in junior high school when his teacher made him mem­o­rize cer­tain pas­sages from Mac­beth. This was, Clin­ton remarked wry­ly, not the most aus­pi­cious begin­ning for a life in pol­i­tics.

After the speech­es, I joined the line of peo­ple wait­ing to shake the Pres­i­den­t’s hand. When my turn came, a strange impulse came over me. This was a moment when rumors of the Lewin­sky affair were cir­cu­lat­ing, but before the whole thing had blown up into the grotesque nation­al cir­cus that it soon became. “Mr. Pres­i­dent,” I said, stick­ing out my hand, “don’t you think that Mac­beth is a great play about an immense­ly ambi­tious man who feels com­pelled to do things that he knows are polit­i­cal­ly and moral­ly dis­as­trous?” Clin­ton looked at me for a moment, still hold­ing my hand, and said, “I think Mac­beth is a great play about some­one whose immense ambi­tion has an eth­i­cal­ly inad­e­quate object.”

I was aston­ished by the apt­ness, as well as the quick­ness, of this com­ment, so per­cep­tive­ly in touch with Mac­beth’s anguished brood­ing about the impuls­es that are dri­ving him to seize pow­er by mur­der­ing Scot­land’s legit­i­mate ruler. When I recov­ered my equi­lib­ri­um, I asked the Pres­i­dent if he still remem­bered the lines he had mem­o­rized years before. Of course, he replied, and then, with the rest of the guests still patient­ly wait­ing to shake his hand, he began to recite one of Mac­beth’s great solil­o­quies:

    If it were done when ’tis done, then ’twere well
    It were done quick­ly. If th’ assas­si­na­tion
    Could tram­mel up the con­se­quence, and catch
    With his surcease suc­cess: that but this blow
    Might be the be-all and the end-all, here,
    But here upon this bank and shoal of time,
    We’d jump the life to come. But in these cas­es
    We still have judge­ment here, that we but teach
    Bloody instruc­tions which, being taught, return
    To plague th’in­ven­tor.

(1.7.1–10)

There the most pow­er­ful man in the world—as we are fond of call­ing our leader—broke off with a laugh, leav­ing me to con­jure up the rest of the speech that ends with Mac­beth’s own baf­fle­ment over the fact that his immense ambi­tion has “an eth­i­cal­ly inad­e­quate object”:

       I have no spur
    To prick the sides of my intent, but only
    Vault­ing ambi­tion, which o’er­leaps itself
    And falls on th’other.…

(1.7.25–28)[1]

I left the White House that evening with the thought that Bill Clin­ton had missed his true voca­tion, which was, of course, to be an Eng­lish pro­fes­sor. But the pro­fes­sion he actu­al­ly chose makes it all the more appro­pri­ate to con­sid­er whether it is pos­si­ble to dis­cov­er in Shake­speare an “eth­i­cal­ly ade­quate object” for human ambi­tion.

The arti­cle goes on to explore just this ques­tion, and it’s well worth the read. (And, oh how do I miss Clin­ton in some ways.) The piece also sets the stage for a radio pro­gram that aired last week on one of our favorite shows, PRI’s Open Souce (Feed — Mp3). Speak­ing with Stephen Green­blatt and two oth­er schol­ars — Oliv­er Arnold (Prince­ton) and Jim Fitz­mor­ris (Tulane) — the host Christo­pher Lydon sorts through Shake­speare’s out­look on pow­er and lead­er­ship (with­in both monar­chies and republics), and then they cir­cle back to view Amer­i­ca’s polit­i­cal land­scape through the Bard’s eyes. Shake­speare made his polit­i­cal com­men­tary often by look­ing back over 1500 years to Ancient Rome. So is it too far fetched to project his think­ing for­ward 400 years, to Amer­i­ca 2007? Have a lis­ten and you decide.

See our com­plete list of Arts & Cul­ture Pod­casts.

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BMW in the Audio Book Business?

in Audio Books | April 2nd, 2007

Well, kind of, sort of. Here’s what you’ll find over at www.bmw-audiobooks.com:

“Put on your seat­belt and pre­pare for highs, lows and plen­ty of twists and turns. BMW, in con­junc­tion with Ran­dom House, brings you BMW Audio Books, a unique series of spe­cial­ly- com­mis­sioned short sto­ries show­cas­ing the work of some of the finest con­tem­po­rary writ­ing tal­ent. Each grip­ping audio book is yours to down­load for free. Lis­ten to them on your MP3 play­er, your lap­top or ide­al­ly, in the car. So sit back, hit play and enjoy the ride.”

Sto­ries include:

See our com­plete lists of Audio Book Pod­casts.



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Best of Open Culture — March

in Uncategorized | April 1st, 2007

Here’s a quick recap of March’s favorites in case you missed them:


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Atheists for Jesus, or Really a Debate Over Whether Religion and Science Can Get Along

in Religion | March 30th, 2007

Over the past two days, NPR’s Fresh Air has devot­ed two pro­grams to inter­ro­gat­ing whether reli­gion and sci­ence can co-exist. On Wednes­day, air time was first giv­en to Richard Dawkins, the famed Oxford Uni­ver­si­ty schol­ar of evo­lu­tion who, with his recent pub­li­ca­tion of The God Delu­sion, has launched a vig­or­ous defense of athe­ism. As you could well imag­ine, Dawkins (iTunes — feed — stream) is hard­ly will­ing to make accom­mo­da­tions for reli­gion, and he’s com­fort­able liv­ing in a world where Dar­win­ist thought solves prob­lems that reli­gion itself usu­al­ly tries to sort out — that is, the basic hows and whys of exis­tence. It has been said that Dawkins comes off as being as zeal­ous in his athe­ism as his reli­gious coun­ter­parts are in their faith. But no mat­ter how you look at him, you have to admire his abil­i­ty to make an art­ful argu­ment .… and also his sense of humor. Yes, he claims half in jest to wear an “Athe­ists for Jesus” t‑shirt. (See a pho­to here.)

Next, on Thurs­day, Ter­ry Gross invit­ed Fran­cis Collins (iTunes — feed — stream) onto the show. Collins is a geneti­cist, and not just any one. He is cur­rent­ly the direc­tor of the Nation­al Human Genome Research Project, and he most notably led a team that cracked the human genome back in 2000. He is also an evan­gel­i­cal Chris­t­ian, and, again, not just your aver­age one in that he accepts the valid­i­ty of evo­lu­tion. Hav­ing recent­ly pub­lished a new work, The Lan­guage of God: A Sci­en­tist Presents Evi­dence for Belief, Collins is sub­tly look­ing to steer a mid­dle course, to find ways to let reli­gion and sci­ence co-exist and not let the one under­mine the integri­ty of the oth­er. How well the argu­ments hang togeth­er is an open ques­tion. But it’s nonethe­less gen­uine­ly inter­est­ing to hear how he’s think­ing things through. And cer­tain­ly it’s worth lis­ten­ing to Dawkins and Collins’ inter­views side by side. This is NPR at its best, and, yes, I’d gen­tly chal­lenge one of our read­ers to find any­thing on Fox News that’s on an equal­ly intel­li­gent plane. (See the user com­ments at the bot­tom of this page.)

See our com­plete lists of Arts & Cul­ture Pod­casts, or our larg­er Pod­cast Library.  Email a friend and let them know about Open Cul­ture.

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25 Smart Video Podcasts That You Can Watch on Apple TV

in Apple, Technology, Web/Tech | March 29th, 2007

Apple_tv_4_3Ear­li­er this week, we dis­cussed the recent release of Apple TV, the new gad­get that lets you wire­less­ly down­load videos from iTunes to your cushy widescreen TV. For many con­sumers, the log­i­cal ques­tion to ask is whether there’s much to watch if they plunk down the $299 for the hard­ware. (Check it out in our Ama­zon store.) And our read­ers might par­tic­u­lar­ly won­der whether there’s much in the way of cul­tur­al video. With these ques­tions in mind, we’ve put togeth­er a sam­pling of worth­while video pod­casts (oth­er­wise called “vod­casts”) that you can imme­di­ate­ly start con­sum­ing with Apple TV. These videos can also be found in our pod­cast library.

  • Arts & Cul­ture Vod­casts
    • New York­er Car­toons iTunes Feed
      • Catch ani­mat­ed ver­sions of The New York­er’s famous car­toons.
    • Son­ny Rollins Pod­cast iTunes Feed Web Site
      • A 12-part video pod­cast series (to be released in month­ly install­ments) that intro­duces Son­ny Rollins, one of our jazz greats.
    • Sun­dance Film Fes­ti­val iTunes Web Site
      • Get behind the scenes cov­er­age at the lat­est stag­ing of the influ­en­tial Sun­dance Film Fes­ti­val.
  • For­eign Lan­guage Lessons
    • MyGermanClass.com Ler­nen Wir Deutsch! iTunes Feed Web Site
      • A series of edu­ca­tion­al and enter­tain­ing video pod­casts that will teach you Ger­man.
    • Japan­ese Class iTunes Web Site
      • These video­casts from the Kyoto Japan­ese Lan­guage School use video to demon­strate how to writein Japan­ese.
  • News & Infor­ma­tion
  • Sci­ence
    • Cam­bridge Uni­ver­si­ty Sci­ence Fes­ti­val iTunes Web Site
    • Dis­cov­ery Chan­nel Video Pod­casts iTunes Feed Web Site
      • A trove of video pod­casts from Dis­cov­ery. It includes Ever­est — Beyond the Lim­it (iTunes).
    • NASAcast iTunes Feed Web Site
      • A series of the lat­est videos from NASA.
    • Nation­al Geo­graph­ic’s Wild Chron­i­cles iTunes Feed Web Site
      • “See the nat­ur­al world like nev­er before through the eyes of Nation­al Geo­graph­ic adven­tur­ers, sci­en­tists, researchers, and the extra­or­di­nary Crit­ter­cam.”
    • NOVA iTunes Feed Web Site
      • A series of short vod­casts from NOVA.
  • Tech­nol­o­gy
    • Adobe Cre­ative Suite Video Pod­cast iTunes Feed Web Site
      • Ter­ry­White teach­es you how to unlock the pow­er of Cre­ative Suite with visualex­am­ples. Empha­sis gets placed on inDe­sign and Pho­to­shop.
    • InDig­i­tal iTunes Feed Web Site
      • A pop­u­lar video pod­cast focus­ing on the lat­est gad­gets and high-tech prod­ucts.
    • GeekBrief.TV Video Pod­cast iTunes Feed Web Site
      • Fea­tur­ing­Cali Lewis, this “fast, fun and flir­ty” vod­cast explores news­about tech toys and tools. Gen­er­al­ly very well reviewed by users.
    • Dig­gna­tion iTunes Feed Web Site
      • A week­ly web cul­ture pod­cast that focus­es on the tops sto­ries on Digg.com, the pop­u­lar social con­tent web site. Host­ed by Kevin Rose and Alex Albrecht.
  • Uni­ver­si­ty
    • INSEAD­’s Lead­er­cast iTunes Web Site
      • A series of video pod­casts that come out of one of Europe’s elite busi­ness pro­grams.
    • Stan­ford Uni­ver­si­ty
      • Mod­ern The­o­ret­i­cal Physics: Quan­tum Entan­gle­ment iTunes Web Info
        • A cut­ting edge physics video course taught by Leonard Susskind, one of the lead­ing fig­ures in the field.
        • Host­ed by Ted Kop­pel, this pan­el dis­cus­sion focus­es on the glob­al chal­lenges that we’re fac­ing in this cen­tu­ry. Pan­elists include: Supre­me­Court Jus­tice Antho­ny Kennedy, for­mer Sec­re­tary of State GeorgeSchultz, for­mer Sec­re­tary of Defense William Per­ry, Yahoo co-Founder

          Jer­ry Yang, and Stan­ford Pres­i­dent John Hen­nessy, among oth­ers.

    • The Uni­ver­si­ty Chan­nel iTunes Feed Web Site
      • Prince­ton­has assem­bled a col­lec­tion of pub­lic affairs lec­tures, pan­els ande­vents from aca­d­e­m­ic insti­tu­tions all over the world. You can find

        lec­tures here from some of the world’s lead­ing thinkers.

    If we’re miss­ing any­thing great, please drop us a line.

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Wikipedia’s (Sometimes Dirty) Little Secret

in Uncategorized | March 28th, 2007


When you think Wikipedia, you think ency­clo­pe­dia. And when you think
ency­clo­pe­dia, you think edu­ca­tion, self enrich­ment and all kinds of
good stuff.

A trip to Wikipedi­a’s home page ini­tial­ly con­firms those impres­sions. It points you to rather edi­fy­ing con­tent: an intro­duc­tion to the Pash­tun peo­ple, an entry on the Aus­tralian pel­i­can, a look at the Vikings’ his­tor­i­cal exploits, etc. So far, so good. All very com­mend­able.

Now here’s the slight rub. Wikicharts
pur­ports to list the 100 most viewed pages on Wikipedi­a’s Eng­lish
lan­guage site, and very quick­ly the num­bers sug­gest that neti­zens
aren’t always mak­ing schol­ar­ly use of the web’s free ency­clo­pe­dia.
Here’s how some of the num­bers break down: In March 2007, 12 of the
100 most viewed pages on Wikipedia (includ­ing 4 of the top 20) deal with sex, some of
which goes beyond explain­ing the sim­ple birds and bees. (Con­sult the list for more on that.) Mean­while
anoth­er 30+ entries delve into pop cul­ture — South Park, Brit­ney
Spears, Anna Nicole Smith, you get the point.

So, how many touch on more square­ly edu­ca­tion­al top­ics? About 35.
And many of those include straight­for­ward entries on coun­tries (France,
India, Cana­da, etc.), or pieces that elu­ci­date the new block­buster
film, The 300. And while it’s good to see peo­ple using Wikipedia to under­stand the film, we all know that these more obscure his­tor­i­cal entries will fall off the top 100 list as quick­ly as movies come and go. That does­n’t leave too many entries that
are rem­i­nis­cent of an ency­clo­pe­dia. In the top 100, you get a hand­ful of clas­sic top­ics — entries on Ein­stein, Leonar­do da Vin­ci, and Glob­al
Warm­ing — but that is about it.

All of this sug­gests that there’s some­thing of a dis­con­nect between
how we per­ceive Wikipedia (or how Wikipedia por­trays itself) and how it
often gets used. Does this under­mine the val­ue of the more sub­stan­tive
pieces that you can find on the ency­clo­pe­dic site? Cer­tain­ly not.
Wikipedia can be a great resource when it is at its best. But it does
sug­gest that Wikipedi­a’s enrich­ing con­tent is not its most pop­u­lar, and
con­verse­ly that Wikipedi­a’s high­est traf­fic is flow­ing to con­tent that
prob­a­bly won’t be show­ing up on Wikipedi­a’s home­page any time soon.

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