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I want to send a quick apology to our email subscribers. Long story short, we encountered some problems with our email subscription list over the past week (problems that we’re beyond our control). But things are working again, and I wanted to highlight some of the posts you may have missed. Sorry again. And here [...]
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Every June 16 is Bloomsday, which commemorates Jame’s Joyce’s Ulysses (get free audio here). In Dublin and around the world, celebrations usually include a reading of Joyce’s classic. This year, in New York City, one high-profile event featured Stephen Colbert reading the part of Leopold Bloom, the character around which the sprawling novel turns. You [...]
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In 2004, Danger Mouse released The Grey Album which layered the rapper Jay-Z’s The Black Album on top of The Beatles’ White Album. Black and white makes grey.
Now, on YouTube, you can find The Grey Video, which experimentally brings Danger Mouse’s concept to video. The video, created by two Swiss directors, meshes clips from The [...]
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David Harvey, an important social theorist and geographer, has got the right idea. Take what you know. Teach it in the classroom. Capture it on video. Then distribute it to the world. Keep it simple, but just do it.
In launching this new web site, Harvey is making available 26 hours of lectures, during which he [...]
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In case you missed it, a new piece in the Atlantic Monthly — Is Google Making Us Stupid? — raises some questions about whether the internet is changing the way we think. Or, to paraphrase, is it tinkering with our brains, remapping the neural circuitry, reprogramming our memory, shortening our concentration, making it harder to [...]
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The advent of digital cameras has changed photography as we know it. It has dramatically lowered the cost of photography, and we’re now snapping more photos than ever before. But we’re not necessarily taking better pictures.
This is where Nikon steps in. Their cameras make casual photographers immensely better than they actually are. (Trust me, I [...]
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The name of the program is Morning Stories (iTunes - Feed - Web Site). The host is Tony Kahn. And the show is all about presenting great stories from everyday people — stories that get at something deeply human, things that other people can identify with, no matter what their age, background, or nationality. (Hence [...]
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Ira Glass, host of the beloved radio show This American Life, offers a helpful reminder that excellence doesn’t come automatically. (See video below.) It takes work, years of it. And he revisits some of his early radio work in order to prove it.
The Glass video has been added to our YouTube playlist. (Thanks to Kottke.org [...]
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On a lighter note…
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Ne Me Quitte Pas - It’s Jacques Brel’s classic from 1959. It’s a fixture in the French cultural imagination. And it’s been covered left and right, by such singers as Nina Simone (here) and Frank Sinatra (listen). Now, Jacques, take it away. (PS You can find Brel’s video on our YouTube playlist.)
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I like re-posting this from time to time, especially around commencement time: Steve Jobs, CEO of Apple Computer, delivered this speech at Stanford’s commencement ceremony in June 2005, offering some simple guidelines for living a meaningful life. Somewhat ironically, Jobs never graduated from college. But no matter, there’s lots of good thinking here, and the [...]
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This video gives you the quick gist of how wikis work, and it’s part of a larger series of videos on YouTube — called The Commoncraft Show — that explain the inner-workings of various tech items. Recent videos delve into the mechanics of Twitter, RSS Feeds, social networking, and online photo sharing. We’ve added the [...]
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Just a quick fyi: Amazon’s digital book reader, the Kindle, is finally back in supply. If you’ve been waiting since March, now is your chance.
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Thank goodness.
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In case you’ve ever wondered ….
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I wanted to flag for you a three part series on the “digital commons” and the preservation of open source education. Produced by Tom Hanson at OpenEducation.net, you can find the three articles below. Also, to get more content along these lines, head on over to OER Blogs, a good aggregator of open education resource [...]
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The Pulitzer Center on Crisis Reporting (which we recently featured in 10 Signs of Intelligent Life at YouTube) is sponsoring the Global Issues/Citizen Voices Contest. Final winners will be chosen by the Pulitzer Center and will receive a Pulitzer Center Citizen Journalist Award. You can get involved. The deadline is March 12. Get details here.
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Just a quick note: If you Google “Open Culture,” you’ll now find that Google has placed “sub-links” beneath the main search results, and these sub-links give you access to some of our most popular pages. (See real-time search results here.) If you’re looking for free audiobooks, online courses and foreign language lessons (just to give [...]
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The answer is our collection called Free Online Courses from Great Universities, of course. We spent some time this weekend adding new courses to the collection, and it now includes about 110 free courses in total. We’ve also made it easy to pop these courses on your iPod (or any other MP3 player). From our [...]
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This animated mockumentary traces the history of evil from Ancient Greece until today. It’s been getting some play on the internet this week. And, if anything, you have to give it points for creativity. We’ve added it to our YouTube Playlist.
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They don’t call it the city of light for nothing.
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Courtesy of the BBC, this video features Brian Cox, a particle physicist and ex D:Ream keyboard player, who travels across the US, firing lasers at the moon and going wild in the Arizona desert, all in order to understand the deep secrets of gravity — something that neither Newton nor Einstein fully understood. It’s in [...]
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Watch the work of a satirical illustrator in action over at The New Yorker.
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It’s been a constant lament that YouTube offers its users scant little intellectual content. And that content is itself hard to find. Just visit YouTube’s so-called Education Section, and you’ll be hard-pressed to find anything actually educational. But the good news is that we’re seeing some recent signs of intelligent life at YouTube. The video [...]
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In one of our recent pieces, we highlighted a video that featured law professor Cass Sunstein interpreting the second amendment and questioning whether it conferred the right to bear arms. In response, one of our readers offered this comment:
“Reeeeeally good talk. My friend and I sat down to watch it, and before we started, we [...]
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This counts as science, right?
Also see 18 Stunning Bridges From Around The World via Metafilter.
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Check them out here.
via Lifehacker
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Below, we’ve listed some links that will hopefully pique your interest. Some were sent in by readers. Many thanks for them (and feel free to send good stuff our way. Contact us here.)
* How Google Earth Unearths Ancient Cities: Yes, Google is revolutionizing even archaeology.
* Norman Mailer Archive Opens: It took the University of [...]
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Here’s a quick recap of our post this past week:
When 165 Thinkers Changed Their Minds
One Laptop Per Child vs. Intel
David Lynch on iPhone
YouTube’s Slow Drift Toward Enlightenment
17 Free and Downloadable Graphic Novels
Malcolm X at Oxford University 1964
Medieval Tech Support
The Launch of Wikia Search
Pulp Fiction Audio Tales
Ipod Radio
Mailer [...]
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I was wondering how I’d eventually work sports into Open Culture, and I’ve finally done it.
Let’s set the scene. It’s 1974. In Zaire. Muhammad Ali takes on George Foreman in the classic “Rumble in the Jungle.” Norman Mailer, the great writer and boxing enthusiast (who recently left us), narrates how the fight went down. This [...]
