≡ Category: History | ≅ Leave a Comment
Right in time for Memorial Day, The Teaching Company has made available a 30 minute lecture, Eisenhower and Operation Overlord (download mp3 here or mp4 here), which is an outtake from a larger course called “World War II: A Military and Social History.” The lecture, presented by Professor Thomas Childers (University of Pennsylvania), delves into [...]
≡ Category: Life, Uncategorized | ≅ Leave a Comment
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 [...]
≡ Category: Books, Stanford | ≅ Leave a Comment
Here at Stanford, a couple of our teachers (Tom Kealey and Adam Johnson) took a novel approach to running a writing class. They wanted to see what happens when 14 students collectively write, edit and illustrate a graphic novel. (A graphic novel is a type of comic book that features a lengthy and complex storyline.) [...]
≡ Category: Music, Random | ≅ Leave a Comment
File this under “Random” …
Contribute to The Power of Dreams Music Education Fund at www.detroitsymphony.com and click on Education or go here.
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≡ 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: YouTube | ≅ 1 Comment
Lots of newsprint has been dedicated to MIT’s OpenCourseWare initiative. And, of course, it’s understandable. MIT’s project offers free access to materials from 1800 MIT courses, many on the cutting edge of technology and engineering. It is all great. But suddenly MIT is not the only tech powerhouse getting into the business of providing free [...]
≡ Category: Web/Tech | ≅ 3 Comments
Long ago, I got in the habit of using Merriam-Webster’s online dictionary. And I’ve suffered through the painfully slow page loads for the better part of a decade. But then I stumbled upon a better alternative. NinjaWords is “a really fast dictionary … fast like a Ninja.” Give it a try. You’ll enjoy the speed.
PS [...]
≡ Category: Books | ≅ Leave a Comment
As I write, the most emailed article on The New York Times offers a few reflections on Peter Boxall’s book, 1001 Books You Must Read Before You Die. The Times piece makes a couple of logical points: First, there’s no time to waste if you hope to read every book on the list. Reading a [...]
≡ Category: Television | ≅ Leave a Comment
On Sunday night, HBO aired its new film “Recount,” which delved back into the controversial Florida recount that determined the outcome of America’s 2000 presidential election. Days before the film (watch the trailer here) hit the airwaves, Charlie Rose conducted an interview with Kevin Spacey (actor in the film), Jeffrey Toobin (Senior Legal Analyst at [...]
≡ Category: Most Popular, Science, Video - Science | ≅ 5 Comments
On the cooler side ….
≡ Category: Harvard | ≅ Leave a Comment
The open access movement keeps rolling along. See here.
≡ Category: Uncategorized | ≅ Leave a Comment
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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≡ Category: Books, Literature | ≅ Leave a Comment
Segueing from our last post, I wanted to feature a reading given by Tobias Wolff, a master of the short story, who also happens to teach creative writing at Stanford.
In March, he released a new book, Our Story Begins: New and Selected Stories. And below we have posted a clip of him reading from a [...]
≡ Category: Stanford | ≅ Leave a Comment
A quick fyi: Yesterday, Stanford Continuing Studies opened up registration for its summer lineup of online writing courses. Offered in partnership with the Stanford Creative Writing Program (one of the most distinguished writing programs in the country), these online courses give beginning and advanced writers, no matter where they live, the chance to refine their [...]
≡ Category: Music | ≅ 2 Comments
The always handy Lifehacker has pulled together resources that will teach you to play guitar, drums and piano. Some of these lessons are taught via video, others with podcasts. And if you’re looking to teach yourself music theory, then head over to Musictheory.net. They’ve got you covered.
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≡ 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: Media | ≅ 1 Comment
Here’s a little something for consumers and producers of good cultural media.
BlogTalkRadio gives anyone with a computer and telephone the ability to create their own live radio show, and then later turn the broadcast into a podcast. So far, about 82,000 shows have aired on this free service, and about 2.4 million listeners [...]
≡ Category: Literature | ≅ Leave a Comment
Apparently, this is “an authentic wax cylinder recording of Whitman reading from his late poem ‘America’ that appeared in 1888 …”
via The Daily Dish
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≡ Category: Music | ≅ 2 Comments
FirstSounds.org has gathered some of the earliest sound recordings. This clip, dating back to 1860, features someone singing the French folksong “Au Clair de la Lune” on April 9, 1860, and it “is the earliest audibly recognizable record of the human voice yet recovered.”
≡ 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: Music | ≅ Leave a Comment
Jazz fans, here you go. A list of the most essential jazz albums compiled by David Remnick (editor of The New Yorker) and Richard Brody.
And, for the fun of it, I’m throwing in a video of David Brubeck playing the classic “Take Five” circa 1961. (Also find it on our YouTube playlist.)
≡ Category: Uncategorized | ≅ 1 Comment
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 [...]
≡ Category: Books | ≅ Leave a Comment
The wisdom of crowds concept works for writing software. (Think open source.) But does it work for writing novels? That’s what Penguin and De Monfort University (in the UK) wanted to figure out when they launched an experiment in February 2007 called “A Million Little Penguins.” Over the course of five weeks, roughly 1500 writers [...]
≡ Category: Foreign Language | ≅ 2 Comments
We have recently spent some time updating our Foreign Language Lesson Podcast Collection. And, along the way, one thing became clear. During the past six months, the number of podcasts offering free lessons in foreign languages has greatly increased, and the lessons now extend far beyond the traditional languages that you’d expect. In addition to [...]
≡ Category: Random | ≅ 1 Comment
Just when you’ve thought that you’ve seen it all … Fake or real? I am guessing it’s the latter.
(PS This has nothing to do with things cultural.)
via The Daily Dish
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≡ Category: Media | ≅ 7 Comments
The German publisher Bertelsmann announced that it will publish annually a 1,000 page edition of Wikipedia starting next September. To be called “The One-Volume Wikipedia Encyclopedia,” it will sell for 19.95 euros (or roughly $32 U.S.) and feature some of the most popular articles from the German version of Wikipedia. One euro per copy will [...]
≡ Category: Science | ≅ Leave a Comment
We talk a good deal here about free university courses and lectures, and mostly we end up talking about the humanities. But here’s a good excuse to talk about the sciences, and particularly about computer science. A project started in Slovenia, Videolectures.net provides “free and open access of high quality video lectures presented by distinguished [...]
≡ Category: Books | ≅ Leave a Comment
Last week, Junot Diaz landed the Pulitzer Prize for fiction with his debut novel, The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao. The book, which Diaz took 11 years to write, also won the National Book Critics Circle Award for best novel of 2007. Below, we have Diaz speaking last year about his prize winning book [...]
