Take a Road Trip with Cyberspace Visionary William Gibson, Watch No Maps for These Territories (2000)

“I probably worry less about the real future than the average person,” says William Gibson, the man who coined the term “cyberspace” and wrote books like Neuromancer, Idoru, and Pattern Recognition. These have become classics of a science-fiction subgenre branded as “cyberpunk,” a label that seems to pain Gibson himself. “A snappy label and a manifesto would have been two of the very last things on my own career want list,” he says to David Wallace-Wells in a 2011 Paris Review interview. Yet the popularity of the concept of cyberspace — and, to a great extent, its having become a reality — still astonishes him. “I saw it go from the yellow legal pad to the Oxford English Dictionary, but cyberspace is everywhere now, having everted and colonized the world. It starts to sound kind of ridiculous to speak of cyberspace as being somewhere else.” A dozen years earlier, in Mark Neale’s biographical documentary No Maps for These Territories, the author tells of how he first conceived it as “an effective buzzword,” “evocative and essentially meaningless,” and observes that, today, the prefix “cyber-” has very nearly gone the way of “electro-”: just as we’ve long since taken electrification for granted, so we now take connected computerization for granted.

“Now,” of course, means the year 1999, when Neale shot the movie’s footage. He did it almost entirely in the back of a limousine, tricked out for communication and media production, that carried Gibson on a road trip across North America. The long ride gives us an extended look into Gibson’s curious, far-reaching mind as he explores issues of the inevitability with which we find ourselves “penetrated and co-opted” by our technology; growing up in a time when “the future with a capital F was very much a going concern in North America”; the loss of “the non-mediated world,” a country to which we now “cannot find our way back”; the modern reality’s combination of “a pervasive sense of loss” and a Christmas morning-like “excitement about what we could be gaining”; his early go-nowhere pastiches of J.G. Ballard and how he then wrote Neuromancer as an approach to the “viable but essentially derelict form” of science fiction; his fascination with the sheer improbability of those machines known as cities; and his mission not to explain our moment, but to “make it accessible,” finding the vast, near-incomprehensible structure underlying the pounding waves of thought, trend, and technology through which we all move. Watching No Maps for These Territories here in cyberspace, I kept forgetting that Gibson said these things a tech-time eternity ago, so pertinent do they sound to this moment. And happiness, as he puts it in one aside, “is being in the moment.”

No Maps for These Territories will be added to our collection, 200 Free Documentaries Online, part of our larger collection, 675 Free Movies Online: Great Classics, Indies, Noir, Westerns, etc..

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William Gibson, Father of Cyberpunk, Reads New Novel in Second Life

The Penultimate Truth About Philip K. Dick: Documentary Explores the Mysterious Universe of PKD

Colin Marshall hosts and produces Notebook on Cities and Culture and writes essays on cities, language, Asia, and men’s style. He’s at work on a book about Los Angeles, A Los Angeles Primer. Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall or on Facebook.

Take a Road Trip with Cyberspace Visionary William Gibson, Watch No Maps for These Territories (2000) is a post from: Open Culture. Follow us on Facebook, Twitter, and Google Plus, or get our Daily Email. And don’t miss our big collections of Free Online Courses, Free Online Movies, Free eBooks, Free Audio Books, Free Foreign Language Lessons, and MOOCs.

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Take a Road Trip with Cyberspace Visionary William Gibson, Watch No Maps for These Territories (2000)

Learn the Elements of Cinema: Spielberg’s Long Takes, Scorsese’s Silence & Michael Bay’s Shots

Ever since the advent of YouTube and the release of Thom Andersen’s Los Angeles Plays Itself, the video essay about filmmaking has blossomed on the internet. When these essays are good, they force you to look at movies anew. Kogonada’s brilliant interrogation of Stanley Kubrick’s use of one-point perspective, Matt Zoller Seitz’s dissection of Wes Anderson’s cinematic style and, in a completely different tone, Red Letter Media’s blistering, exhaustive take down of George Lucas’s regrettable Star Wars prequels, all argue convincingly that perhaps the best way to discuss the merits and flaws of a movie or filmmaker is through the medium of film itself.

Add to this list Tony Zhou’s Every Frame a Picture. An editor by trade, Zhou has created a series of videos about how the masters of cinema use the basic elements of cinema – the duration of a shot, the application of sound, the use of a tracking shot. In his elegant videos he makes arguments that are unexpected. Martin Scorsese, for instance, who is famous for his groundbreaking use of music, is just as brilliant with his judicious use of silence. You can watch it above.

And below, Zhou argues that Steven Spielberg, a filmmaker not commonly associated with restraint, is actually a master of the understated long take.

And in this video, he argues that while Michael Bay might make adolescent, over-stuffed, soulless spectacles, he does know how to construct a shot.

You can nerd out and watch even more of Zhou’s films here.

Related Content:
The Perfect Symmetry of Wes Anderson’s Movies

Signature Shots from the Films of Stanley Kubrick: One-Point Perspective

Jonathan Crow is a Los Angeles-based writer and filmmaker whose work has appeared in Yahoo!, The Hollywood Reporter, and other publications. You can follow him at @jonccrow. And check out his blog Veeptopus, featuring pictures of vice presidents with octopuses on their heads.

 

Learn the Elements of Cinema: Spielberg’s Long Takes, Scorsese’s Silence & Michael Bay’s Shots is a post from: Open Culture. Follow us on Facebook, Twitter, and Google Plus, or get our Daily Email. And don’t miss our big collections of Free Online Courses, Free Online Movies, Free eBooks, Free Audio Books, Free Foreign Language Lessons, and MOOCs.

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Learn the Elements of Cinema: Spielberg’s Long Takes, Scorsese’s Silence & Michael Bay’s Shots

Utah Education Blogger Says He Was Fired For 'Promoting A Gay Agenda' After Writing About Homophones

An education blogger in Utah is out of a job today after writing a blog post explaining “homophones” for the Nomen Global Language Center. 

Tim Torkildson said he was fired by his boss and NGLC owner, Clarke Woodger, for promoting a gay agenda.

If you need a quick reminder from elementary school English class, a homophone is a word or words that are pronounced like another word but varies in spelling or definition, like “to, too, and two.”

This is not the same as a homophobe, which is defined as a person who hates or fears those who identify with a homosexual orientation.

“This blog about homophones was the last straw.  Now our school is going to be associated with homosexuality,” Woodger allegedly told Torkildson before letting him go.

Torkildson wrote a post about the firing here.

“I had to look up the word,” Woodger allegedly told him, “because I didn’t know what the hell you were talking about.  We don’t teach this kind of advanced stuff to our students, and it’s extremely inappropriate.  Can you have your desk cleaned out by eleven this morning?  I’ll have your check ready.”

The story was picked up by the Salt Lake Tribune, where it reads as an article worthy of The Onion. 

According to the Tribune,

Woodger says his reaction to Torkildson’s blog has nothing to do with homosexuality but that Torkildson had caused him concern because he would “go off on tangents” in his blogs that would be confusing and sometimes could be considered offensive.

Nomen is Utah’s largest private English as a Second Language school and caters mostly to foreign students seeking admission to U.S. colleges and universities. Woodger says his school has taught 6,500 students from 58 countries during the past 15 years. Most of them, he says, are at basic levels of English and are not ready for the more complicated concepts such as homophones.

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Utah Education Blogger Says He Was Fired For 'Promoting A Gay Agenda' After Writing About Homophones

Allen Ginsberg & The Clash Perform the Punk Poem “Capital Air,” Live Onstage in Times Square (1981)

The Clash had been called sellouts ever since they signed with CBS and made their 1977 debut, so the charge was pretty stale when certain critics lobbed it at their turn to disco-flavored new wave and “arena rock” in 1982’s popular Combat Rock. As Allmusic writes of the record, “if this album is, as it has often been claimed, the Clash’s sellout effort, it’s a very strange way to sell out.” Combat Rock’s hits—“Rock the Casbah” and “Should I Stay or Should I Go”—are catchy and anthemic, respectively, but this hardly breaks new stylistic ground, though the sounds are cleaner and the influences more diffuse. But the true standouts for my money—“Straight to Hell” and “Ghetto Defendant”—perfect the strain of reggae-punk The Clash had made their career-long experiment.

The latter track, an midtempo dub take on the pathos of heroin addiction and underclass angst, features a cameo spoken-word vocal from Allen Ginsberg, who co-wrote the song with Joe Strummer. Far from simply lending the song Beat cred—as Burroughs would for a string of artists, to varying degrees of artistic success—the Ginsberg appearance feels positively essential, such that the poet joined the band on stage during the New York leg of their tour in support of the album. But before “Ghetto Defendant,” there was “Capital Air,” a composition of Ginsberg’s own that he performed impromptu with the band in New York in 1981. As Ginsberg tells it, he joined the band backstage during one of their 17 shows at Bonds Club in Times Square during the Sandinista tour. Strummer invited the poet onstage to riff on Central American politics, and Ginsberg instead taught the band his very own punk song, which after 5 minutes of rehearsal, they took to the stage and played.

Just above, hear that onetime live performance of “Capital Air,” one of those anti-authoritarian rants Ginsberg turned into an art form all its own—ripping capitalists, communists, bureaucrats, and the police state—as the band backs him up with a chugging three-chord jam. Ginsberg wrote the song, according to the Allen Ginsberg Project, in 1980, after returning from Yugoslavia and “realizing that police bureaucracies in America and in Eastern Europe were the same, mirror images of each other finally,” a feeling captured in the lines “No Hope Communism, No Hope Capitalism, Yeah. Everybody is lying on both sides.” Many of these same themes worked their way into “Ghetto Defendant,” written and recorded six months later.

Just above, hear the Combat Rock album version of “Ghetto Defendant.” (The track appeared in longer form on the record’s first, unreleased, incarnation, Rat Patrol From Fort Bragg). Ginsberg’s contributions to the track, which he intones as “the voice of God,” match his free-associative dark humor against Strummer’s narrative concreteness. Off the wall hipster lines like “Hooked on necropolis,” “Do the worm on the acropolis” and “Slamdance the cosmopolis” become elliptical references to Arthur Rimbaud, Salvadorian death squads, and Afghanistan before Ginsberg launches into the Buddhist heart sutra over Strummer’s final chorus. The effect is comic, hypnotic, and disorienting, reminiscent of the sample-based electronic collages groups like Cabaret Voltaire and Throbbing Gristle constructed around the same time. It’s such a perfect symbiosis that the song loses much of its impact without Ginsberg’s nutty offerings, I think, though you can judge for yourself in the live, Ginsberg-less version below.

Related Content:

Rare Live Footage Documents The Clash From Their Raw Debut to the Career-Defining London Calling

The First Recording of Allen Ginsberg Reading “Howl” (1956)

William S. Burroughs “Sings” R.E.M. and The Doors, Backed by the Original Bands

Josh Jones is a writer and musician based in Durham, NC. Follow him at @jdmagness

Allen Ginsberg & The Clash Perform the Punk Poem “Capital Air,” Live Onstage in Times Square (1981) is a post from: Open Culture. Follow us on Facebook, Twitter, and Google Plus, or get our Daily Email. And don’t miss our big collections of Free Online Courses, Free Online Movies, Free eBooks, Free Audio Books, Free Foreign Language Lessons, and MOOCs.

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Allen Ginsberg & The Clash Perform the Punk Poem “Capital Air,” Live Onstage in Times Square (1981)

Haruki Murakami’s Passion for Jazz: Discover the Novelist’s Jazz Playlist, Jazz Essay & Jazz Bar

Any serious reader of Haruki Murakami — and even most of the casual ones — will have picked up on the fact that, apart from the work that has made him quite possibly the world’s most beloved living novelist, the man has two passions: running and jazz. In his memoir What I Talk About When I Talk About Running, he tells the story of how he became a runner, which he sees as inextricably bound up with how he became a writer. Both personal transformations occurred in his early thirties, after he sold Peter Cat, the Tokyo jazz bar he spent most of the 1970s operating. Yet he hardly put the music behind him, continuing to maintain a sizable personal record library, weave jazz references into his fiction, and even to write the essay collections Portrait in Jazz and Portrait in Jazz 2.

“I had my first encounter with jazz in 1964 when I was 15,” Murakami writes in the New York Times. “Art Blakey and the Jazz Messengers performed in Kobe in January that year, and I got a ticket for a birthday present. This was the first time I really listened to jazz, and it bowled me over. I was thunderstruck.” Though unskilled in music himself, he often felt that, in his head, “something like my own music was swirling around in a rich, strong surge. I wondered if it might be possible for me to transfer that music into writing. That was how my style got started.” He found writing and jazz similar endeavors, in that both need “a good, natural, steady rhythm,” a melody, “which, in literature, means the appropriate arrangement of the words to match the rhythm,” harmony, “the internal mental sounds that support the words,” and free improvisation, wherein, “through some special channel, the story comes welling out freely from inside. All I have to do is get into the flow.”

With Peter Cat long gone, fans have nowhere to go to get into the flow of Murakami’s personal  jazz selections. Still, at the top of the post, you can listen to a playlist assembled by YouTube user Ronny Po of songs mentioned in Portrait in Jazz, featuring Chet Baker, Charlie Parker, Stan Getz, Bill Evans, and Miles Davis. Should you make the trip out to Tokyo, you can also pay a visit to Cafe Rokujigen, profiled in the short video just above, where Murakami readers congregate to read their favorite author’s books while listening to the music that, in his words, taught him everything he needed to know to write them. And elsewhere on the very same subway line, you can also visit the old site of Peter Cat: just follow in the footsteps taken by A Geek in Japan author Héctor García, who set out to find it after reading Murakami’s reminiscences in What I Talk About When I Talk About Running. And what plays in the great eminence-outsider of Japanese letters’ earbuds while he runs? “I love listening to the Lovin’ Spoonful,” he writes. Hey, you can’t spin to Thelonious Monk all the time.

Related Content:

In Search of Haruki Murakami, Japan’s Great Postmodernist Novelist

Haruki Murakami Translates The Great Gatsby, the Novel That Influenced Him Most

1959: The Year that Changed Jazz

Colin Marshall hosts and produces Notebook on Cities and Culture and writes essays on cities, language, Asia, and men’s style. He’s at work on a book about Los Angeles, A Los Angeles Primer. Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall or on Facebook.

Haruki Murakami’s Passion for Jazz: Discover the Novelist’s Jazz Playlist, Jazz Essay & Jazz Bar is a post from: Open Culture. Follow us on Facebook, Twitter, and Google Plus, or get our Daily Email. And don’t miss our big collections of Free Online Courses, Free Online Movies, Free eBooks, Free Audio Books, Free Foreign Language Lessons, and MOOCs.

The post Haruki Murakami’s Passion for Jazz: Discover the Novelist’s Jazz Playlist, Jazz Essay & Jazz Bar appeared first on Open Culture.

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Haruki Murakami’s Passion for Jazz: Discover the Novelist’s Jazz Playlist, Jazz Essay & Jazz Bar

Wednesday 30 July 2014

An Ivory Coast Cocoa Farmer Gets His Very First Taste of Chocolate

Here is how MetropolisTV, a global collective of young filmmakers and TV producers coming out of Holland, sets up their touching video:

Farmer N’Da Alphonse grows cocoa [in the Ivory Coast] and has never seen the finished product. “To be honest I do not know what they make of my beans,” says farmer N’Da Alphonse. “I’ve heard they’re used as flavoring in cooking, but I’ve never seen it. I do not even know if it’s true.”

It’s great — and yet, in its own way, sad — to watch his face light up as he gets his very first taste…

via Devour

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An Ivory Coast Cocoa Farmer Gets His Very First Taste of Chocolate is a post from: Open Culture. Follow us on Facebook, Twitter, and Google Plus, or get our Daily Email. And don’t miss our big collections of Free Online Courses, Free Online Movies, Free eBooks, Free Audio Books, Free Foreign Language Lessons, and MOOCs.

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An Ivory Coast Cocoa Farmer Gets His Very First Taste of Chocolate

There's A Way To Become An Attorney Without Setting Foot In Law School

A small minority of the thousands of people who take state bar exams each year to practice law don’t have a law degree and haven’t even stepped foot in a law school, The New York Times pointed out in an article Wednesday.

These lucky few complete legal apprenticeships rather than obtain costly JDs.

The apprenticeships, available as an option in only several states, are referred to as law office study and the participants called law readers. Those who choose law office study avoid the debt burdening their counterparts who pay law school tuition to receive law degrees, reports The Times. They also gain valuable experience as members of law offices, where they get to work in courtrooms and with clients rather than studying in classrooms. 

But the few who take that alternative route also face their own difficulties, like searching on their own for a supervisor willing to mentor them and competing for top jobs with those who have graduated from law schools where students are ranked. 

Law office study remains very rare. Law office readers comprised only 60 of the 83,986 people who took state and multistate bar exams last year, according to The New York Times. They are also less likely to pass those exams. Only 28% of the tiny minority of law office readers passed their bar exams last year, compared to 78% of students who attended American Bar Association-approved law schools, reports The Times.

In Virginia, Vermont, Washington, and California, aspiring lawyers can complete law apprenticeships, receiving on-the-job training under the guidance of mentors instead of studying law at a university for three years. New York, Maine, and Wyoming require apprenticeships to be combined with law school.

Below are the general rules they have set for these apprenticeships, according to the Sustainable Economies Law Center blog LikeLincoln:

California

Study in a law office for four years under the supervision of an attorney with at least five years of active law practice in California. The study must involve 18 hours per week, with five hours directly supervised, in addition to monthly exams and bi-annual progress reports submitted to the California State Bar.

Vermont

Four years of study in a law office under the supervision of an attorney with at least three years of experience.

Virginia

Law office study for three years, each year consisting of at least 40 weeks, with a minimum of 25 hours of study each week. At least 18 hours each week must take place in the supervising attorney’s office, who must provide at least three hours of personal supervision over the law reader each week. 

The supervising attorney must have at least a year of experience, and the apprentice is not allowed to be employed or compensated by the supervisor.

Washington

Here the apprentice must be employed by the supervising attorney for four years in a law office, with at least 30 hours of work/study and three hours of direct supervision each week. The supervising attorney has at least 10 years of experience. Apprentices are required to pay a $ 1,500 annual fee.

Maine

At least two years of study at a law school is required, and then one year of law office study.

New York

Law office study can follow at least one year of law school, with the combination of law school and law office study totaling four years. 

Wyoming

A combination of one to two years of law school with one to two years of a law study program.

SEE ALSO: The 11 Best Law Schools In America

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There's A Way To Become An Attorney Without Setting Foot In Law School

Teachers In Some States Make So Little, They Need To Take Second Jobs

A recent report from the Center for American Progress, titled “Mid- and Late- Career Teachers Struggle with Paltry Incomes,” highlights another element in the discussion about teacher pay: even experienced teachers get screwed. 

Among the somewhat depressing findings:

• In their first 15 years of work, elementary school teachers in the U.S see 10% less salary growth than the average elementary school teacher in the rest of the developed world.


• Mid-career teachers responsible for families of four or more in multiple states (including Arizona and North Dakota) qualify for federal aid such as the School Breakfast and Lunch Program. 

• In 11 states, more than 20% of teachers need a second job to make ends meet. In Maine, that number is as high as 25%. The report notes that in these states, “the average base salary for a teacher with 10 years of experience and a bachelor’s degree is merely $ 39,673 — less than a carpenter’s national average salary.”

It’s worth noting that teachers have summers and weekends off, receive pensions and benefits, and can supplement their incomes through other work. 

There are also some notable urban districts like Washington DC and Baltimore that are paying their most effective teachers six figures.

Still, society prioritizes through salaries, and this report suggests we rethink what teachers make. Otherwise a recent headline from The Onion — “High School Student, Teacher Applying For Same Summer Waitressing Job” — feels a lot less funny. 

SEE ALSO: Harvard Is Only The 7th Best College In The Country, According To Forbes

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Teachers In Some States Make So Little, They Need To Take Second Jobs

Watch Mad Magazine‘s Edgy, Never-Aired TV Special (1974)

1974 was a cynical time. That was the year that Nixon resigned after the grueling Watergate scandal, Vietnam War was finally grinding to a halt and, thanks to the Oil Shock of ’73, the economy was in the toilet. It was also a time when TV execs were scrambling to keep up with America’s rapidly changing cultural tastes. Audiences wanted something with a little edge. The TV adaptation of Robert Altman’s lacerating war comedy MASH became a huge hit. As did All in the Family, about everyone’s favorite armchair bigot Archie Bunker. Saturday Night Live was just a year away from premiering. So it isn’t surprising that execs from ABC approached the “usual gang of idiots” at Mad Magazine — that fount of anti-authoritarian satire — about making a series. The resulting pilot, which was later rebranded as a TV special, never aired because it provided way too much edge for the network. You can watch it above.

The show, culled from some of the better bits from the magazine, features art from Don Martin, Mort Drucker, Al Jaffee and Dave Berg – names that will be very familiar to you if you grew up obsessively reading the magazine as a child, like I did – and the animation was supervised by Jimmy Murakami along with Chris Ishii and Gordon Bellamy.

The network claimed that the show was shelved because it had too much “adult” humor. In this post-South Park, post-Family Guy world, the adult humor in this show, by comparison, seems downright tame. What the Mad Magazine TV Special does have in abundance is withering barbs. Something about translating the cynical, adolescent humor of the magazine from the page to screen made its satire feel much, much sharper. During their parody of The Godfather, called the Oddfather, mafia don Vito Minestrone (groan) tells a group of mobsters that their gang war must stop. “We must stop destroying each other and start destroying the plain, ordinary citizens again. Like normal American businessmen.”

The show’s most caustic zingers, however, are reserved for America’s bloated, complacent auto industry where a Walter Cronkite-like journalist interviews auto exec Edsel Lemon. In five or so minutes, the bit unsparingly lays out why GM and Ford eventually lost out to Toyota and Honda – crappy cars, lousy safety, and an upper management that was as mendacious as it was shortsighted. While field testing a new model, which involved coasting the car down a hill, Lemon quips, “If our prototype can go 500 feet without falling apart we’ll put it into production.” This seemingly explains how the Ford Pinto got made.

In the end, the networks squeamishness with the show was more due to its ridicule of an industry with deep pockets than with its toilet humor. As Dick DeBatolo, the MAD’s maddest writer, who penned much of the show noted, “Nobody wanted to sponsor a show that made fun of products that were advertised on TV, like car manufacturers.”

Related Content:

Shel Silverstein Narrates an Animated Version of The Giving Tree (1973)

Watch 1970s Animations of Songs by Joni Mitchell, Jim Croce & The Kinks, Aired on The Sonny & Cher Show

A Short History of America, According to the Irreverent Comic Satirist Robert Crumb

Watch the First Animations of Peanuts: Commercials for the Ford Motor Company (1959-1961)

Jonathan Crow is a Los Angeles-based writer and filmmaker whose work has appeared in Yahoo!, The Hollywood Reporter, and other publications. You can follow him at @jonccrow. And check out his blog Veeptopus, featuring pictures of vice presidents with octopuses on their heads.

Watch Mad Magazine‘s Edgy, Never-Aired TV Special (1974) is a post from: Open Culture. Follow us on Facebook, Twitter, and Google Plus, or get our Daily Email. And don’t miss our big collections of Free Online Courses, Free Online Movies, Free eBooks, Free Audio Books, Free Foreign Language Lessons, and MOOCs.

The post Watch Mad Magazine‘s Edgy, Never-Aired TV Special (1974) appeared first on Open Culture.

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Watch Mad Magazine‘s Edgy, Never-Aired TV Special (1974)

Harvard Is Only The 7th Best College In The Country, According To Forbes

Williams College is the best college in America, according to Forbes’ annual Top Colleges ranking, which this year placed Harvard University at number seven.

Forbes — which combines liberal arts college and research universities on its list — notes that the divide between these two types of institutions reveals a “higher education in flux.” As list author Caroline Howard writes, “This year it comes down to small, student-centric, liberal arts colleges vs. large, brainy, research-oriented universities closely associated with science, technology, engineering and math.”

Increasingly, the debate about a college degree’s usefulness is less about the prestige of the institution, but rather the focus of a student’s studies. However, even as the humanities get pummeled in the public discussion of higher education, Forbes’ list shows that its just as good — if not better — to attend a smaller liberal arts school.

Williams College and Stanford University took the top two spots on Forbes’ list, with highly regarded Harvard University placing seventh, below peer institutions like Princeton University and Yale University. This is actually an improvement for Harvard, which last year placed eighth on Forbes’ Top Colleges ranking.

Howard writes in the Top Colleges’ methodology that Forbes stresses “output” over “input,” setting their sights “directly at ROI.” Forbes created their ranking from five categories — student satisfaction, post-graduate success, student debt, graduation rate, and academic success.

Here are the top 10 colleges on Forbes’ America’s Top Colleges ranking:

1. Williams College


2. Stanford University


3. Swarthmore College


4. Princeton University


5. Massachusetts Institute of Technology


6. Yale University


7. Harvard University


8. Pomona College


9. United States Military Academy


10. Amherst College

Check out the full list here >>

FOLLOW US! Check Out BI Colleges On Facebook

SEE ALSO: The Best Universities In 35 Countries Around The Globe

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Harvard Is Only The 7th Best College In The Country, According To Forbes

The Modern-Day Philosophers Podcast: Where Comedians Like Carl Reiner & Artie Lang Discuss Schopenhauer & Maimonides

The Partially Examined Life, The History of Philosophy Without Any Gaps, Philosophy Bites, Philosophize This!: we’ve featured quite a few entertaining and educational fruits of the still-new discipline of podcasting’s inclination toward the very old discipline of philosophy. But the podcast has proven an even better fit for comedians than it has for philosophers. Even if you’ve never downloaded an episode in your life, you’ve almost certainly heard about the medium-legitimizing successes of intelligent, conversational, highly opinionated, or otherwise unconventional funnymen like Ricky Gervais with The Ricky Gervais Show, Adam Carolla with his also-eponymous podcast, and Marc Maron with WTF. Yet nobody dared to explicitly cross podcasting’s comedic and philosophical strengths until last year, when Danny Lobell launched Modern Day Philosophers (web site – itunes – soundcloud).

Lobell, himself a pioneer in not just philosophical comedy podcasting but comedy podcasting, and indeed podcasting itself, began his comic-interviewing show Comical Radio a decade ago. “As podcasting grew in popularity,” he writes, “many celebrity comedians started doing similar shows to the one I was doing. [ … ] Before I knew it, what I had once felt was a unique and important undertaking now no longer seemed like it served a purpose in the universe for me.” This dark night of the soul saw him move from New York to Los Angeles, this cradle of so many podcasts comedic and otherwise, where he turned his attention back toward the subjects he neglected in school. He paid special attention to philosophy, but struggled to understand the material. “I realized that my friends, stand up comedians, would make great study partners. I’ve often heard us referred to as the philosophers of our day which I figured sounded like a good enough excuse to approach them.”

And so Lobell has produced 40 episodes and counting featuring philosophical discussions conducted with some of today’s sharpest comics, many of them star podcasters in their own right. One recent conversation finds Lobell in conversation about John Cage — a philosophical figure too often dismissed as primarily an artist — with the cerebral, chance-oriented, and somewhat askew Reggie Watts (top). (The pairing makes especially good sense, since Cage influenced Brian Eno, and Watts has publicly discussed Eno’s influence on his own act.) A few months ago, Lobell talked the suicide-minded Arthur Schopenhauer with the once-suicide-minded Artie Lange (middle). And he even brings in elder statesmen of comedy to talk about matters eternal, such as Carl Reiner on religion, prayer and memory as reflected upon by Maimonides (above). Each episode contains a healthy consideration of not just the work of the philosopher in question, but that of the comedian as well. Personally, I can’t wait to hear what Yakov Smirnoff has to say about his fellow Russian artist-philosopher of note, Fyodor Dostoyevsky.

H/T Mark Linsenmayer, a founder of Partially Examined Life

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The Partially Examined Life: A Philosophy Podcast

The History of Philosophy Without Any Gaps – Peter Adamson’s Podcast Still Going Strong

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Philosophize This!: The Popular, Entertaining Philosophy Podcast from an Unconventional Teacher

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Colin Marshall hosts and produces Notebook on Cities and Culture and writes essays on cities, language, Asia, and men’s style. He’s at work on a book about Los Angeles, A Los Angeles Primer. Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall or on Facebook.

The Modern-Day Philosophers Podcast: Where Comedians Like Carl Reiner & Artie Lang Discuss Schopenhauer & Maimonides is a post from: Open Culture. Follow us on Facebook, Twitter, and Google Plus, or get our Daily Email. And don’t miss our big collections of Free Online Courses, Free Online Movies, Free eBooks, Free Audio Books, Free Foreign Language Lessons, and MOOCs.

The post The Modern-Day Philosophers Podcast: Where Comedians Like Carl Reiner & Artie Lang Discuss Schopenhauer & Maimonides appeared first on Open Culture.

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The Modern-Day Philosophers Podcast: Where Comedians Like Carl Reiner & Artie Lang Discuss Schopenhauer & Maimonides

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