Smart Links

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 Texas two years to orga­nize 1,000 box­es of let­ters and unpub­lished man­u­scripts writ­ten by Nor­man Mail­er. And it’s now ready, just a short two months after the author’s death. Among oth­er things, the archive hous­es cor­re­spon­dence that shows a warmer side of a writer often known for his surli­ness.

* 2007 Dar­win Awards Announced: Here’s a lit­tle dark humor. The Dar­win Awards, which “com­mem­o­rate those who improve our gene pool by remov­ing them­selves from it,” has released its awards for 2007. You can find some of the “hon­or­able men­tions” here.

* Islam, the West and the Bhut­to Lega­cy: Fol­low­ing the assas­si­na­tion of Benazir Bhut­to, FORA.tv has assem­bled a video chan­nel “built around three pub­lic talks she gave in the year before her recent return to Pak­istan. Fif­teen pro­grams relat­ing to Pak­istan, Islam and approach­es to extrem­ism are now there, more will be added.”

* Clas­sic Film Clips: Over on YouTube, one of our read­ers has assem­bled a video col­lec­tion that fea­tures seg­ments from many clas­sic films — Dr. Strangelove, Metrop­o­lis, etc. It nice­ly com­ple­ments our own col­lec­tion, to which you might want to sub­scribe.

* Lost Star Wars Intro: Here’s the lost intro that mer­ci­ful­ly nev­er made it into the final film.

* Print Pub­lic Domain Books on Paper: This inter­me­di­ary ser­vice makes it easy to print paper copies of free pub­lic domain books found on the inter­net. The books are free; the print­ing is not. But it nets out well over­all. Via Red­Fer­ret

*  Best Online Doc­u­men­taries: Title is fair­ly self-explana­to­ry.

*  Sir Edmund Hillary: A Life in Pic­tures — From Nation­al Geo­graph­ic.

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