In 2004, Danger Mouse released The Grey Album which layered the rapper Jay-Z’s The Black Album on top of The Beatles’ White Album. Black and white makes grey.
Now, on YouTube, you can find The Grey Video, which experimentally brings Danger Mouse’s concept to video. The video, created by two Swiss directors, meshes clips from The Beatles’ film A Hard Day’s Night with footage of Jay‑Z performing. Watch it below, and get more info on The Grey Album here. Also check our collection of MP3 Music Blogs.
The controversy surrounding the Bush administration’s adventures with warrantless wiretapping first began in December 2005, when the New York Times broke the story. During the months that followed, the whole debate remained fairly abstract. We talked about individual rights and the power of the executive. We never thought about the individuals who were actually monitored by the program. And that’s because we didn’t know who was on the government’s list, and because we assumed that the government was targeting terrorists, or those closely connected to them … which isn’t exactly how things turned out.
The latest edition of This American Life (entitled “The Truth Will Out”) features an interview with an apparent target of the wiretapping program. It’s none other than Lawrence Wright, a staff writer for The New Yorker magazine (see his latest piece here) who covers the Middle East and won the Pulitzer Prize (2007) for his book: The Looming Tower: Al Qaeda and the Road to 9/11. During the segment (which starts at minute 26 of the hour-long program), Wright recounts how he discovered the tapping, and how Mike McConnell, the Director of National Intelligence, reacted when Wright confronted him with this knowledge. You can download the program here: MP3 — iTunes — Feed.
By the way, This American Life, perhaps the most popular podcast out there, is looking to raise money to keep the podcast going. You can donate money here and support public radio at its best.
David Harvey, an important social theorist and geographer, has got the right idea. Take what you know. Teach it in the classroom. Capture it on video. Then distribute it to the world. Keep it simple, but just do it.
In launching this new web site, Harvey is making available 26 hours of lectures, during which he gives a close reading of Karl Marx’s Das Kapital (1867). This work, often considered to be Marx’s masterpiece, is where he elaborated a critique of capitalism and laid the groundwork for an ideology that took the 20th century by storm (and then it disappeared in a fairly quick snap). Harvey is no stranger to this text. He has taught this class for over 40 years now, both in universities (Johns Hopkins and CUNY) and in the community as well.
The videos will be rolling out in stages. We have posted the first one below. (The first lecture actually starts about 6 minutes in. A short introduction precedes it). Generally, the videos can be accessed via Harvey’s web site, or via iTunes and RSS Feed. Also, we have placed the course in our collection of Free Online Courses, which keeps on growing. Find it under the “Economics” section.
Here’s a quick public service announcement: UCSF, one of the leading medical schools in the US, has launched a Memory & Aging Channel on YouTube, whose purpose is to “educate patients, caregivers and health professionals about the various forms of neurodegenerative diseases.” The diseases covered here include Alzheimer’s, Frontotemporal dementia and Creutzfelt-Jakob. We’ve added the collection to our larger list of educational video collections on YouTube.
Last week, the venerable Encyclopaedia Britannica gave into the pressure created by Wikipedia when it announced that it is trialling a new service (see the beta site here) that will let the public write and edit articles. The difference, however, is that Britannica’s model won’t be democratic (not all can participate) and its editorial staff will enforce higher standards. Or, as the announcement put it, “we will welcome and facilitate the increased participation of our contributors, scholars, and regular users, but we will continue to accept all responsibility of what we write under our name. We are not abdicating our responsibility as publishers or burying it under the now-fashionable wisdom of the crowds.”
This experiment with collaborative authoring may — or may not — yield a better encyclopedia (although some experts have questioned whether the general Britannica model has any inherent advantages). It’s hard to know how things will turn out. But what’s more readily clear is the speed with which the 240 year-old Encyclopaedia Britannica got outflanked by Wikipedia, born just seven years ago. We have seen this scenario played out over and over again. But it never ceases to amaze. The traditional institutions, just when they seem as permanent as things can get, suddenly get upended. And, they don’t see it coming. Caught flatfooted, they try to adapt, usually by adopting the methods used by their competitor. But it’s mostly too late, and the real game is over.
Britannica may stick around. But will this generation of children — or the next — grow up thinking of Britannica as the default research resource? A question that I’ll leave to you to answer.
Today, Stanford is officially launching its YouTube channel (get it here). Among the videos, you will find Oprah Winfrey’s commencement speech (given this weekend) and other graduation speeches from recent years. From there, you can peruse the larger video collection. Notably, the channel offers access to some complete courses, including Clay Carson’s African-American History: Modern Freedom Struggle and Leonard Susskind’s two courses on modern Physics — Classical Mechanics and Quantum Mechanics. (Four more Susskind courses tracing the arc of modern physics will follow.)
The Stanford Channel also features many individual speeches/lectures that currently have a strong bent toward science and business. (You’ll likely find the humanities and social sciences getting better represented over time.) One particular video worth watching is a roundtable conversation called “Anxious Times.” Hosted by Ted Koppel, the participants included Anthony Kennedy (US Supreme Court), William Perry (former US Secretary of Defense), George Shultz (former US Secretary of State), Jerry Yang (CEO, Yahoo!), and John Hennessy (President, Stanford University), among others. And they spent a good two hours thinking about the many threats now confronting the world (global flu pandemics, North Korea’s nuclear ambitions, threats to civil liberties, etc.), and how we can get beyond them.
The Samsung f480, which is essentially an iPhone clone, may not have scored too many points with the tech critics. But its guerilla marketing on YouTube deserves some credit. Make a really creative video, sneak in some social commentary, add some product placement at the very end, put it on YouTube, and watch it go viral:
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