≡ Category: History, Video - Politics/Society | ≅ Leave a Comment
Howard Zinn, a historian from Boston University, best known for his book People’s History of the United States: 1492 to Present, has been brought to YouTube. This video presents an animated version of Zinn’s essay, Empire or Humanity? What the Classroom Didn’t Teach Me about the American Empire. Zinn cartoon-style, here it goes (and you [...]
≡ Category: Google, Most Popular, Video - Arts & Culture, Video - Politics/Society, Video - Science, YouTube | ≅ 3 Comments
Smart video collections keep appearing on YouTube. But rather antithetical to the ethos of its parent company (Google), YouTube unfortunately makes these collections difficult to find. So we’ve decided to do the job for them. These enriching/educational videos come from media outlets, cultural institutions, universities and non-profits. There are about 70 collections in total, and [...]
≡ Category: Media, Video - Arts & Culture, Video - Politics/Society, Video - Science | ≅ Leave a Comment
Late in the week, TEDTalks named its top ten videos. Whether this is a quantitative or qualitative judgment, I am not sure. On the list, you’ll find Al Gore talking about how to avert a climate crisis, David Gallo showing amazing underwater creatures, and Ken Robinson describing why schools kill creativity (we’ve posted that one [...]
≡ 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: History, Video - Politics/Society, Video - Science | ≅ Leave a Comment
What set the stage for Silicon Valley to change the entire landscape of technology? What made companies like Google, Yahoo and Hewlett Packard possible? According to this talk presented at Google by Steve Blank, it all goes back to the aftermath of World War II. It starts when Stanford University and its engineering/electronics department began [...]
≡ Category: Politics, Video - Politics/Society, YouTube | ≅ Leave a Comment
If you’re a resident of a Super Tuesday state, we hope you can find some time to pull the lever tomorrow. Also, we hope you’ll forgive (at least) one more political post before Super Tuesday. Whatever your political affiliations, the video below is a compelling example of new media at work. According to the New [...]
≡ Category: Law, Video - Politics/Society | ≅ 1 Comment
What does the Second Amendment mean? It’s something that the Supreme Court has never really said. In this hour long video, Cass Sunstein, a very well known law professor from the University of Chicago, takes a crack at interpreting this amendment and seeing whether its original meaning actually confers the right to bear arms. Originalists/conservatives [...]
≡ Category: History, Video - Politics/Society | ≅ 1 Comment
We love finding these vintage media gems. Below, we have Malcolm X speaking at Oxford University in 1964. In this classic speech, you get a good feel for Malcolm X’s presence and message and also the social issues that were alive during the day. You’ll hear X’s famous claim that liberty can be attained by [...]
≡ Category: Current Affairs, Politics, Video - Politics/Society | ≅ 2 Comments
Again, no commentary needed. Informative in many ways, Bhutto’s talk was taped at the Council on Foreign Relations in August. More info here.
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≡ Category: Video - Politics/Society | ≅ Leave a Comment
YouTube gets smarter one painfully small step at a time. First courses from Berkeley; next videos of Nobel Prize winners. More coming?
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≡ Category: Religion, Video - Politics/Society | ≅ 1 Comment
Mitt Romney, a Mormon, looked yesterday to set aside lingering concerns about his religion in a highly publicized speech. Immediately, the speech revived memories of John F. Kennedy’s attempt, during the 1960 campaign, to ease concerns about his Catholicism. We’ve posted both speeches below. The similarities are there. But the differences are more profound. I’ll [...]
≡ Category: Television, Video - Politics/Society | ≅ Leave a Comment
As the weeks go on, more and more of us are starting to notice that Hollywood’s writers are on strike. One by one new television shows are running out of fresh material. But if you’re a fan of The Daily Show, (and, well, we are) you were hit practically on day one, since the topical [...]
≡ Category: Comedy, Video - Politics/Society | ≅ Leave a Comment
Someone did a lot of legwork and pulled together a heap of Monty Python videos on YouTube. The list includes one famous segment called “Dead Parrot,” which is notable partly because it’s funny, and partly because it forms the basis of a secondary joke.
To make a long story short, there are some folks out there [...]
≡ Category: Current Affairs, Video - Politics/Society | ≅ 1 Comment
Back in 1971, Philip Zimbardo, a Stanford psychology professor, set up an experiment that quickly and now famously went awry. Here, Zimbardo had undergraduates play the role of prisoners and prison guards in a mock prison environment. Meant to last two weeks, the experiment was cut short after only six days when, as The Stanford [...]
≡ Category: Religion, Video - Politics/Society, Video - Science | ≅ 1 Comment
When debating religion, you can take the low road (e.g., Ann Coulter’s recent flirtation with anti-semitism) or the high road. Here’s Richard Dawkins, an avowed atheist and evolutionary biologist at Oxford, having a high-minded conversation about the existence (or non-existence) of God with Alister McGrath, who is Professor of Historical Theology at Oxford University and [...]
≡ Category: Current Affairs, Video - Politics/Society | ≅ 1 Comment
Ahmadinejad’s recent appearance at Columbia University generated a lot of serious press (watch his speech here), and, quite rightly, journalists and commentators seized on his more outlandish assertions - that the Holocaust is not a historical given, and that homosexuals actually don’t exist in Iran. After all of the serious reporting was done, Saturday [...]
≡ Category: Current Affairs, Politics, Video - Politics/Society | ≅ 3 Comments
Strange culture we live in these days. It’s the comedians that ask the hard questions. See John Stewart below and the referenced Dick Cheney video below that.
≡ Category: Current Affairs, Politics, Video - Politics/Society | ≅ Leave a Comment
What’s gone wrong with America’s democracy? It’s a question that Al Gore takes a hard look at in his recent (and well-reviewed) book, The Assault on Reason. Below, Gore gives you the gist of his argument in a half-hour video. It’s a bit heady. He’s invoking the Ancient Greeks, the Enlightenment, Edward Gibbon, Adam Smith [...]
≡ Category: Current Affairs, Religion, Video - Politics/Society, Video - Science | ≅ Leave a Comment
These days, there is no shortage of public thinkers launching a vigorous defense of atheism. Most recently, Christopher Hitchens has come out with God is Not Great. And, holding true to form, he has used this book and related media campaign as an opportunity to fight out the ugly culture wars once again. All [...]
≡ Category: Current Affairs, Film, Google, Video - Arts & Culture, Video - Politics/Society | ≅ Leave a Comment
For some, it came as no surprise that “Sicko,” Michael Moore’s latest film and critical look at America’s healthcare system, got strong reviews at The Cannes Film Festival. What else would you expect from Europe’s lefty intelligentsia? Then there was this little curveball. The right-leaning Fox News also called the film “brilliant and uplifting.” How [...]
≡ Category: Current Affairs, Politics, Video - Politics/Society | ≅ 3 Comments
America’s 42nd president spoke this weekend at Harvard’s Class Day, a traditional event held for graduating seniors. While Class Day often features pop icons and comedians — take this speech by Ali G from a few yeas ago — Clinton’s speech was a bit more serious and idealistic, and it reminds us that there may [...]
≡ Category: Current Affairs, Google, Media, Politics, Video - Politics/Society | ≅ 2 Comments
YouTube is a little more than two years old. It’s a mere toddler. But, it’s now owned by an overgrown, fully-bearded nine year old. Yes, that would be Google, and that means that YouTube is ready to storm its way into the media mainstream, pampers and all.
You can be sure that GooTube has already [...]
≡ Category: Media, Politics, Video - Politics/Society | ≅ 1 Comment
As many know by now, David Halberstam, the Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist, was killed in a car accidenton Monday just a few short miles from the Stanford campus. As the obits were all quick to point out, Halberstam made his name during an era that paralleled our own, during the Vietnam War. And he did it [...]
≡ Category: Video - Politics/Society | ≅ Leave a Comment
Next Wednesday, at 9 pm, respected journalist Bill Moyers will return to PBS and air a 90-minute presentation called Buying the War. Along the way, he’ll look at how the mainstream American press wound up cheerleading for the Bush administration’s drive toward war in Iraq rather than doing their real job — asking tough questions [...]
≡ Category: Video - Politics/Society | ≅ Leave a Comment
Al Gore made a much publicized trip back to Washington yesterday. As The New York Times describes it, "It was part science class, part policy wonk paradise, part politics and all theater as former Vice President Al Gore came to Congress … to insist that global warming constitutes a “planetary emergency” requiring an aggressive federal [...]
≡ 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 [...]
