Salon.com Conversations

Here’s a quick lit­tle tip for you. Salon.com has a nice col­lec­tion of audio con­ver­sa­tions with fig­ures from the high­er ech­e­lons of the pop cul­ture world. David Lynch, Pedro Almod­ó­var, Amy Sedaris, the list goes on. You can access these talks from the Salon.com site, and, along the way, be forced to look at umpteen ads before you get what you want. Or you can take a very quick short cut, go straight to iTunes by click­ing here, and get the talks with no pain, no wait, no ads. It’s your choice, of course.

The New York Times on iTunes

Nytpodcasts
It may sound a bit strange, but you can now lis­ten to the front page of The New York Times. Amer­i­ca’s finest dai­ly paper now offers a series of 22 pod­casts on iTunes, which come in dai­ly and week­ly fla­vors. Most are direct spin-offs of pop­u­lar sections/features of the paper. Here’s a sam­ple of what you can load on to you iPod:

You get the point.

If you like this kind of thing, you might want to check out our large col­lec­tion of news pod­casts — over 80 pod­casts from major news orga­ni­za­tions.

Or check out our com­plete pod­cast col­lec­tion, Smart iTunes Resources: The Free Pod­cast Col­lec­tion.

 


The Edge Video Collection

Brockman2Nope, we’re not talk­ing about U2. We’re talk­ing about
John Brockman.
And just who is he? He’s the lit­er­ary agent of the
intel­lec­tu­al stars. He is to the think­ing world what Scott Boras is to base­ball.
If you’re a major sci­en­tif­ic thinker, and if you can write for the
gen­er­al pub­lic, you’ll like­ly find your­self in the Brock­man sta­ble, and
he’ll land you a major book deal. And you’ll be in good com­pa­ny.
Brock­man rep­re­sents Richard Dawkins (the author of the cur­rent
best­seller, The God Delu­sion), Jared Dia­mond (Guns, Germs & Steel), and Daniel Gole­man (Emo­tion­al Intel­li­gence), just to name a
few.

His web­site, Edge.org, fea­tures a good amount of con­tent by — or
about — the vision­ary thinkers that he rep­re­sents. You can find lots
of good read­ing here
(the BBC calls it “Fan­tas­ti­cal­ly
stimulating…It’s like the crack cocaine of the think­ing world…”)
and also a great video trove fea­tur­ing many promi­nent sci­en­tif­ic
thinkers talk­ing about what they know best. Take a look around and
you’ll like­ly get the intel­lec­tu­al fix that you’re look­ing for.

Iraq Study Group Report: Free Download

The long-await­ed Iraq Study Group Report came out today, and, by evening, the book ver­sion was already #32 on Amazon.com’s top 100 book list. The book runs about 160 pages, but the sub­stance of the report runs only about 60, and you can spare your­self the $10.95 retail price and sim­ply down­load it in PDF form for free here. You can also get much more back­ground infor­ma­tion about the Iraq Study Group at: http://www.usip.org/isg/

Open Culture Featured on Top Apple Blog

It’s nice to see some of our work get­ting a lit­tle appre­ci­a­tion. TUAW.com, oth­er­wise known as The Unof­fi­cial Apple Weblog, one of the 100 most pop­u­lar blogs in the coun­try, recent­ly spot­light­ed our pod­cast col­lec­tions, which set off a viral effect. Hours lat­er, del.icio.us users picked up on it, and the next thing you know, our pod­cast page was the third most pop­u­lar page on the social book­mark­ing ser­vice. And, from there, oth­er sites caught on. It’s amaz­ing to watch how the inter­net works in real time.

CyberLaw: Harvard Law School Opens to You


Cyberonescreenshot

Here’s anoth­er free­bie for the intel­lec­tu­al tech junkie. Har­vard Law School is offer­ing this semes­ter an inno­v­a­tive course, CyberOne: Law in the Court of Pub­lic Opin­ion. What it cov­ers is how arguments/debates get played out in the media space cre­at­ed by the Inter­net and oth­er new tech­nolo­gies. And, beyond that, it specif­i­cal­ly focus­es on how the “First World and cor­po­rate dom­i­na­tion of enter­tain­ment media, laws, and news can be bal­anced by the voic­es of indi­vid­u­als, groups and uni­ver­si­ties who use new media intel­li­gent­ly.” To bet­ter exam­ine how dif­fer­ent con­stituen­cies use the Net, the course has been opened not only to law stu­dents, but to dis­tance learn­ers reg­is­tered in Har­vard’s Exten­sion School, and also to every­one who has an inter­net con­nec­tion, or so-called “At-Large” Learn­ers. (This is where you come in, and there’s no cost.) In keep­ing with its tech­no­log­i­cal focus, the course incor­po­rates a range of Inter­net tech­nolo­gies into the teach­ing. Blogs, wikis, Google mes­sage boards, vir­tu­al worlds cre­at­ed by Sec­ond Life  — it’s all part of the exper­i­ment that you might want to look into more close­ly.

Resources: 

iTunes & Foreign Language Lessons For Free

We’ll be the first to admit it. We’ve been going on some­thing of an iTunes tear late­ly. We told you first about the great uni­ver­si­ty pod­casts that you can grab on iTunes. Next, it was the cul­tur­al pod­casts. Now, it’s time for free for­eign lan­guage lessons.

If you search hard enough on iTunes, you can find pod­casts that will help you learn Chi­nese, Eng­lish, French, Ger­man, Greek, Ital­ian, Japan­ese, Kore­an, Por­tuguese, Russ­ian, and Span­ish. But, if you want to save your­self the time and has­sle, just vis­it our iTunes For­eign Lan­guages page, and you’ll find a sol­id list of pod­casts that you can load on to your iPod and keep busy for a good long while.

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Coltrane Spotify Sample

Sec­ond attempt

Third

 

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 is often sim­ply a func­tion of out­put and, since 1993, Sty­ron had­n’t pub­lished any­thing new. He was then deal­ing with seri­ous depres­sion, which he wrote elo­quent­ly about in one of his last works, Dark­ness Vis­i­ble: A Mem­oir of Mad­ness, and he would be in and out of hos­pi­tals from there.

Sup­port Open Cul­ture

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