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≡ Category: Uncategorized | ≅ 1 Comment
Spend some time on iTunes, and you’ll find some excellent cultural podcasts, simply hours worth of high-touch intellectual content. And the excellent part is that the trove is growing, and the quality content keeps on coming.
The rub is that it takes time to separate the wheat from the chaff — too much time, if you [...]
≡ Category: Books, Literature | ≅ Leave a Comment
Last week, The New York Times’ Book Review published its list, 100 Notable Books of the Year and it has since followed up with a whittled down list, The 10 Best Books of 2006. It’s boiled down to 5 works of fiction, and 5 non-fiction, and here’s what it looks like:
FICTION
ABSURDISTAN - Gary ShteyngartTHE COLLECTED [...]
≡ Category: Books, Literature | ≅ Leave a Comment
We now know the list of Nobel Prize winners for 2006, and the award ceremony in Stockholm is not far off (December 10th). This year’s prize in literature went to Orhan Pamuk, who is almost a rock star in his home country, Turkey, but less well known outside. But that’s clearly about to change. If [...]
≡ Category: Uncategorized | ≅ Leave a Comment
Open Culture has been up and running for less than a month, and we’ve been monitoring traffic for about two weeks, thanks to Google Analytics. So far, here’s what we’ve seen: Roughly 70% of readers come from within the US, leaving 30% to an international audience, which is itself very diverse. The readership represents almost [...]
≡ Category: Uncategorized | ≅ Leave a Comment
There is a lot of buzz around podcasting these days. Last December, the editors of the New Oxford American Dictionary selected "podcast" as the word of the year (and they defined it as "a digital recording of a radio broadcast or similar program, made available on the Internet for downloading to a personal audio player"). [...]
≡ Category: Books | ≅ Leave a Comment
Gift buying season is upon us, and it’s time to start thinking about a thoughtful gift for friends and family. On December 3, The New York Times Book Review will publish in print its list, "100 Notable Books of the Year." However, you can catch it online beforehand and use it to start making your [...]
≡ Category: Uncategorized | ≅ Leave a Comment
Universities pump out knowledge every day, and thankfully, many of the best universities and colleges are now starting to tape important lectures, if not full courses, and make them available as podcasts. We’ve spent the past few weeks finding the best podcast collections, both on iTunes and off. If you visit the University iTunes/Podcasts Collection [...]
≡ Category: Religion | ≅ Leave a Comment
These days, the Enlightenment project finds itself in a tense cultural competition with religion. Go around the US and ask, "how did we come to be?" and you will get different answers. Some, appealing to science and reason, the children of the Enlightenment, will look to evolution for answers. Others, with a religious bent, will [...]
≡ Category: Film | ≅ Leave a Comment
Robert Altman has died at 81, leaving behind a legacy of ambitious films. After making his mark with MASH in 1970, Altman’s career moved along in fits and starts. He would give us The Long Goodbye in 1973, Nashville in 1975, unfortunately Popeye in 1980 (and nothing else too remarkable during the 1980s), then two [...]
≡ Category: Uncategorized | ≅ Leave a Comment
There’s a lot of free, high quality educational materials floating around the ether. It’s just a question of knowing where to find them, and what’s wheat and what’s chaff. On the left hand side of this page, you will find carefully-selected collections of free university podcasts, free online courses and media, and free educational web [...]
≡ Category: Literature | ≅ Leave a Comment
And it’s not looking too pretty. The New York Times review begins:
Thomas Pynchon’s new novel, “Against the Day,” reads like the sort of imitation of a Thomas Pynchon novel that a dogged but ungainly fan of this author’s might have written on quaaludes. It is a humongous, bloated jigsaw puzzle of a story, pretentious without [...]
≡ Category: Uncategorized | ≅ Leave a Comment
Milton Friedman, a Nobel Prize winner, architect and leading advocate of free markets, and one of the most important economists of the 20th century, died this past week at 94.
The University of Chicago, where Friedman taught since 1946, has collected a series of articles reviewing his life and accomplishments. Along similar lines, Stanford’s Hoover [...]
≡ Category: Philosophy | ≅ Leave a Comment
If you have some time on your hands, you can download and listen to a complete audio version of Plato’s Republic on your iPod. Divided into 12 installments, this monument of political theory is written in dialogue form. And it certainly helps that these dialogues are read by an actor. This nice touch helps hold [...]
≡ Category: Yale | ≅ Leave a Comment
Yale announced yesterday that it’s joining the podcast revolution, and they’re doing it with a little bit of ooomph. (If you have iTunes, click here to enter Yale’s collection. If you don’t, you can download it here from Apple for free.) What you’ll find on Yale iTunes are free lectures by Yale’s big hitters. You’ll [...]
≡ Category: Books, Literature | ≅ Leave a Comment
There’s more to Google Book Search than a good lawsuit.
These days, they’re serving up the classics — all in the public domain
– for free. Literary folks can now read and search the complete
collection of Shakespeare’s works. And, in some cases, you can even
download PDF versions to your computer. (Check out Exploring Shakespeare with Google.) Beyond [...]
≡ Category: Stanford | ≅ 1 Comment
Day after day, on campuses across the country, professors impart invaluable knowledge to students. And, somewhat unfortunately, this knowledge has been traditionally disseminated only so far — which is to say not beyond the classroom walls.
We’re perhaps at the early stages of seeing this change. Stanford University has recently teamed up with Apple to [...]
≡ Category: Uncategorized | ≅ Leave a Comment
Thomas Pynchon has made a career milking elusiveness for all its worth. His writing is notoriously hard to pin down. Publishers never know when to expect something new. (He has only put out 6 books since 1963.) And, physically, Pynchon is nowhere, ever, to be found.
But this much we know right now. Against the [...]
≡ Category: Literature | ≅ Leave a Comment
Dave Eggers entered the literary world with a big bang. His first book, A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius (2000), came out of nowhere and sat on the bestseller list for 14 weeks. It also made Eggers a Pulitzer Prize finalist and almost the recipient of a rich movie deal — had he not turned [...]
≡ Category: Current Affairs | ≅ Leave a Comment
As Bob Woodward’s latest book climbed the bestseller charts last week, the personal fortunes of Don Rumsfeld tumbled. The one man’s rise and the other man’s fall were not totally disconnected. Published weeks before the mid-term elections, State of Denial effectively rehashed the Bush administration’s many mistakes made before and after 9-11, and before and [...]
≡ Category: Video - Politics/Society | ≅ Leave a Comment
Seymour Hersh almost seems out of place in our era of soft pedal journalism. Looking at his track record, he knows one way to approach a story, and that is with intensity and no punches pulled. In 1969, he broke the story on My Lai, revealing how US troops massacred over 500 people — most [...]
≡ Category: Film | ≅ Leave a Comment
Janus Films has spent the last 50 years bringing classic foreign films to American audiences, exposing them to the works of Ingmar Bergman, Federico Fellini, Jean-Luc Godard, Akira Kurosawa, and François Truffaut, among others. To celebrate its half-century anniversary, the film distribution company has done something pretty remarkable. It has released on DVD a collection [...]
≡ Category: Uncategorized | ≅ Leave a Comment
When we wake up tomorrow morning, a new political era will have begun. The Democrats will have taken control of the House of Representatives and perhaps amazingly the Senate, suddenly finding themselves politically relevant for the first time in six very long years. And they’ll have the unusual luxury of deciding how they will exercise [...]
≡ Category: Law | ≅ Leave a Comment
The Google Book Search project ran into another roadblock last week when a group representing 400 French publishers joined another lawsuit brought earlier this year in French courts. The upshot of the lawsuit is essentially the same as the suit brought by a consortium of American publishers last year: They’re looking to put a quick [...]
≡ Category: Harvard | ≅ Leave a Comment
What do sleeping and computing have in common? Not a whole lot (nor really should they), except for this. We sleep and use computers a good chunk of our lives, and yet we generally have no idea how either works. Sleep is the 33% of our lives that we hardly give a thought to. And [...]
≡ Category: Literature | ≅ Leave a Comment
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 [...]
≡ Category: Podcast Articles and Resources | ≅ 10 Comments
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Ideas/Issues
Alan Watts Podcast iTunes Feed Web Site
Alan Watts helped interpret and popularize Asian philosophies/religions for Western audiences. These podcasts give you access to his archived talks/public lectures.
Big Ideas iTunes Feed Web Site
Big Ideas offers lectures on a variety of thought-provoking topics which [...]
