≡ Category: Current Affairs, Science, UC Berkeley, Video - Science | ≅ Leave a Comment
Richard Muller teaches one of the most popular undergraduate courses at UC Berkeley: Physics for Future Presidents. You can download the course in audio (iTunes - Feed - MP3s) or watch it on YouTube (see first lecture below and get full course here). And now you can buy Muller’s new book. Just published by [...]
≡ Category: Current Affairs, Science, UC Berkeley | ≅ Leave a Comment
How does modern neuroscience make sense of the current McCain-Obama race? Have a listen to Christopher Lydon’s fascinating conversation with George Lakoff, a professor of cognitive linguistics at the University of California, Berkeley (iTunes - MP3 - Feed - Web Site).
Lakoff is the author of the new book, The Political Mind: Why You Can’t Understand [...]
≡ Category: Current Affairs, History, Online Courses, Video - Science | ≅ Leave a Comment
How about a blog post that doesn’t deal with the controversy surrounding The New Yorker’s clumsy attempt at satirizing Barack and Michelle Obama …. ? (Update: See the imagined, right-wing satirical cartoon of John McCain.)
When Stanford launched its new YouTube channel several weeks ago, it debuted with a complete series of lectures from an undergraduate [...]
≡ Category: Current Affairs | ≅ Leave a Comment
A quick fyi: Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Seymour Hersch has a new piece in The New Yorker detailing “a major escalation of covert operations against Iran.” The plans drafted by the Bush administration and funded by Congress brings the US another step closer to a military strike against Iran’s nuclear program, and such a strike becomes [...]
≡ Category: Current Affairs | ≅ Leave a Comment
The controversy surrounding the Bush administration’s adventures with warrantless wiretapping first began in December 2005, when the New York Times broke the story. During the months that followed, the whole debate remained fairly abstract. We talked about individual rights and the power of the executive. We never thought about the individuals who were actually monitored [...]
≡ Category: Current Affairs | ≅ Leave a Comment
Speaking at the TED Conference, Alisa Miller (CEO of Public Radio International) explains why Americans know less and less about the rest of the world. Along the way, she uses some eye-popping graphs to put things in perspective. Watch the video below or find it on our YouTube playlist …
Also, for more smart videos, you [...]
≡ Category: Current Affairs | ≅ Leave a Comment
As a quick follow up to our post earlier today, I wanted to highlight the Smithsonian Channel’s first broadcast on BlogTalkRadio, which aired tonight. Right in time for Memorial Day, the program features an involved conversation with Jan Scruggs, the founder and president of the Vietnam Veterans Memorial Fund, who conceived the idea of building [...]
≡ Category: Current Affairs, Most Popular | ≅ 1 Comment
There’s been no shortage of articles trying to explain the ongoing housing and mortgage crisis. But none does a more clear and entertaining job than this recent episode of This American Life, “The Giant Pool of Money” (iTunes - Feed - MP3). Step by step, the show traces how we got into this mess. Along [...]
≡ Category: Current Affairs | ≅ Leave a Comment
There’s nothing like a good debate to reveal the issues that matter most to a society. And that’s what The Doha Debates have to offer — a good, nuanced look at the hottest issues in the Arab and Islamic worlds. The debates, which have been held in Qatar over the past three years, follow the [...]
≡ Category: Current Affairs, Film | ≅ Leave a Comment
On the American home front, the Iraq war has entered its apathetic phase. The war continues to grind on, but the mission gets far less news ink than before, and the debate over the war’s merits and tactics rarely gets hashed back through. That’s perhaps because many have decided to mentally park the issue until [...]
≡ Category: Current Affairs, Stanford | ≅ Leave a Comment
Speaking at Brown University earlier this week, Thomas Friedman had to deal with some unfortunate extra-curricular activities. As he took the stage, two students calling themselves the “Greenwash Guerillas” launched pies (video here) at Friedman and largely missed. But they did leave behind some pamphlets spelling out their motives. According to The Brown Daily Herald, [...]
≡ Category: Current Affairs | ≅ Leave a Comment
To mark the fifth anniversary of the Iraq invasion, PBS’s Frontline is airing “Bush’s War,” which offers “the definitive documentary analysis of one of the most challenging periods in the nation’s history.” Drawing on an extensive archive, the program lays out the “entire narrative,” showing how “the war began and how it has been fought, [...]
≡ Category: Current Affairs | ≅ Leave a Comment
During the run up to the Iraq war, the Bush administration estimated that the military mission would run around $50 billion, even though experts doubted those numbers at the time. (In 2002, Yale’s William Nordhaus guessed that the costs could reach $500 billion within five years.) Now, here we are in 2008, and new tallies [...]
≡ Category: Current Affairs | ≅ Leave a Comment
Are political attack ads such a bad thing? John G. Geer, author of In Defense of Negativity: Attack Ads in Presidential Campaigns, doesn’t necessarily think so. He maintains that they often enrich, rather than corrode, the political process. And now his publisher has assembled The Attack Ad Hall of Fame. Included on the list is [...]
≡ Category: Current Affairs, Politics | ≅ 1 Comment
In response to China’s vigorous crackdown on Tibet (see this photojournalism account), a group of experts were convened to discuss Tibet and its future. The panelists included Robert Thurman (famed Buddhism scholar at Columbia University), John Kenneth Knaus (Harvard University), John Tkacik (Senior Research Fellow at The Heritage Foundation), and Amit A. Pandya (Henry L. [...]
≡ Category: Current Affairs | ≅ Leave a Comment
This bit of audio (MP3 - Feed - Web Site) lucidly explains what happened at Bear Stearns, and why the Fed acted as it did. It’s worth a good listen if you’ve been trying to piece together the logic. The audio comes from the News Hour with Jim Lehrer.
[Update: I'd also recommend this piece from [...]
≡ Category: Current Affairs, Politics | ≅ 1 Comment
It’s rare that professors find themselves at the center of a political firestorm. But that’s where Samantha Power, Professor of Practice of Global Leadership and Public Policy at Harvard, found herself last week when, during an off-the-record conversation with a reporter, she referred to Hillary Clinton as a “monster” and then had to resign as [...]
≡ Category: Current Affairs, Video - Politics/Society | ≅ 7 Comments
Here’s a nice counterpoint to our post last week covering Susan Jacoby’s new book The Age of American Unreason and her lament that America has declined into a morass of anti-intellectualism and low expectations.
Let’s set the scene: A reporter selects a young Barack Obama supporter at a rally and starts peppering him with questions about [...]
≡ Category: Current Affairs, Law, Stanford, Video - Politics/Society | ≅ Leave a Comment
Below we have posted the last lecture that Lawrence Lessig will ever present on Free Culture. It’s an area where he has spent the past decade working, and this talk offers an excellent introduction to Lessig’s thought and work on this issue. Given at Stanford on January 31, the presentation is one that Steve Jobs [...]
≡ Category: Current Affairs | ≅ Leave a Comment
Here’s a quick follow up to our post on Susan Jacoby’s new book, The Age of American Unreason. Since the original post, we have pulled together some media featuring Jacoby and her views on America’s drift toward anti-intellectualism.
First, you can watch her recent interview with Bill Moyers: Video - Mp3 - iTunes - Feed.
Next, [...]
≡ Category: Current Affairs | ≅ 5 Comments
There is a lot of publicity this week around Susan Jacoby’s new book, The Age of American Unreason. The new work fits into the tradition of Richard Hofstadter’s 1963 classic, Anti-Intellectualism in American Life. And it seemingly moves in the same orbit as Al Gore’s The Assault on Reason (2007). The upshot of Jacoby’s [...]
≡ Category: Current Affairs | ≅ Leave a Comment
You’ve figured it out. You know exactly which presidential candidate you like the best. Or do you?
Psychologists at Harvard have posted an online quiz that lets you know whether your unconscious mind favors the same candidate as your conscious mind. Spend a few minutes with it and see whether you’re in sync with yourself. And [...]
≡ Category: Current Affairs | ≅ Leave a Comment
We covered the Second Amendment a couple of weeks ago. (Does it confer the right to bear arms?) So why not touch on the First Amendment this week and point you to an engaging interview (MP3 - iTunes - Feed) with the Pulitzer Prize-winning author Anthony Lewis, who has just released the new book: Freedom [...]
≡ Category: Current Affairs | ≅ 1 Comment
Since its publication in 2005, Thomas Friedman’s The World Is Flat has remained a steady bestseller. And now it’s the most downloaded podcast on iTunesU. Capturing a talk presented at M.I.T. in 2005, this video podcast introduces you to Friedman’s concept of Globalization 3.0. It’s a new era of globalization that gained momentum just a [...]
≡ Category: Current Affairs, Philosophy | ≅ Leave a Comment
On the eve of Super Tuesday, things are getting ugly. Immanuel Kant has gone negative on Friedrich Nietzsche (see below), and the Nietzsche campaign has wasted no time responding. These enlightened attacks ads have been added to our YouTube Playlist.
Subscribe to Our Feed
Related Content:
Enlightenment on iTunes: The Philosophy of Immanuel Kant
Ideas and Culture Podcasts
Other [...]
≡ Category: Current Affairs | ≅ Leave a Comment
On the lighter side ….
Yesterday, I got a chance to attend Larry Lessig’s last lecture ever on “Free Culture.” (More on Lessig here.) It was a presentation worthy of Steve Jobs, and I’ll have more to say about it later.
For now, I’ll leave you with an example of creative “remixing” cited during his talk. [...]
≡ Category: Current Affairs | ≅ Leave a Comment
The Nature Conservancy asked its staff and leading environment bloggers how you can make “personal, science-based choices to help save the planet.” Here are their 14 suggestions.
Subscribe to Our Feed
≡ Category: Current Affairs | ≅ Leave a Comment
You need to give it a minute:
via The Daily Dish
≡ Category: Current Affairs | ≅ Leave a Comment
The celebration of Martin Luther King’s birthday was a little different this year. It had a political edge to it, and unavoidably so. Dr. King’s work made possible what we’re finally seeing today — a black candidate making a serious run at the American presidency. So it seemed entirely appropriate that Barack Obama spoke Sunday [...]
≡ Category: Current Affairs, Politics, Web/Tech | ≅ Leave a Comment
The truism goes that laws and sausages are the two things you don’t want to see being made. Nevertheless, if more of us paid attention to what our congressional representatives are really up to (and let them know when they screw up), we’d probably be a little happier with how the system works overall. Two [...]
