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.”
This American Life Demystifies the Housing/Credit Crisis
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 the way, you’ll discover how 70 trillion dollars of global money needed to get parked somewhere, and it found the US housing market. As the money poured in, the American investment community cranked out as many mortgages as it could. And when there were no more qualified home buyers left, the banks started lowering lending standards until there were none left. In the end, even dead people were getting mortgages (sadly, a true story). Give the podcast a listen. The whole debacle gets pieced together in a way that you’ve probably never heard before.
For more details, look here.
Burning Issues Inside the Arab World
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 format used in the famous Oxford Union debates. And they’ve been aired over the BBC and have picked up a sizable international following. (You can download the debates in video or via podcast from this page.) The speakers generally include “academics, politicians, religious figures, government officials, policy experts and journalists” and some of the recent topics debated include the following (thanks Kirsten for the heads up on this):
- Is the Sunni-Shia conflict damaging Islam’s reputation as a religion of peace?
- Do the Palestinians risk becoming their own worst enemy?
- Is the face veil a barrier to integration in the West?
- Should the Palestinians give up their full right of return?
100 Essential Jazz Albums According to The New Yorker
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.)
Steve Jobs: Wisdom for the New Graduate
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 speech is well worth a listen. We’ve posted the video below (and it’s added to our YouTube playlist), but you could also catch it on iTunes: video here, or audio here.
Can a Novel Be Written Wikipedia Style? The Results Are In.
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 drafted a collaborative novel using wiki software (the same one used by Wikipedia), and you can now view the completed manuscript here. So far the reviews are not overwhelming. According to one observer, “it’s incoherent. You might get something similar if you took a stack of supermarket checkout line potboilers and some Mad Libs and threw them in a blender.” And then there’s this pithy verdict by the snarky blog, Gawker: “The text itself is terrible.” Ouch. But maybe someone who is less reflexively dismissive will have a different view, though I wouldn’t bet on it. Have a read here. Also see De Montfort’s post mortem of the project here.
Shark Surfing: File Under Novel Ways to Spend Your Weekend
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.)
Wikipedia Goes Commercial
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 go back to Wikimedia, which runs Wikipedia. But nothing, as Readwriteweb notes, will go to the writers who actually create the encyclopedia entries.
Because Wikipedia is published under a free license, its content can be freely used and commercialized. And that’s precisely what Bertelsmann plans to do. In Wikipedia, Bertelsmann has found a motherlode of free content it. It can then monetize that content, keep most of the profits (a publisher’s dream), and kick 5% back to Wikimedia, most likely as a way to undercut the critics. It’s all perhaps legal. But does it feel a bit unseemly? Just a touch. Or maybe you disagree?
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