Today’s Financial Crisis in a Historical Mirror

Economist and blogger extraordinaire Brad DeLong takes a whirlwind tour of economic history in his recent talk, Today’s Financial Crisis in a Historical Mirror (weblink).
First comes the tale of the Panic of 1825. As DeLong tells it, this was the first time a central bank (Bank of England) intervened to avert a financial crisis by [...]

We think what we speak

Each language has a toolkit to help us learn what to pay attention to.
So argues Stanford psychology professor Lera Boroditsky during this episode of the Stanford University radio show Entitled Opinions (about Life and Literature) (website, iTunes).
Boroditsky studies how the languages we use influence the way we think. And she’s come up with some startling [...]

Doubt and the New Testament

Yale University religion professor Dale Martin has some words of warning for the students in his course Introduction to New Testament History and Literature (website, iTunes):
“De omnibus dubitandum.”
Say it loud, he tells his students. Say it with feeling. “Say it tonight, before you go to sleep. Say it in the morning, when you [...]

Why we stopped foraging and started farming

The invention of agriculture was probably the most important change in human history but scholars argue about why it happened, and propose three main conflicting theories.
These theories, and the difficulties in domesticating plants and animals are the subjects of lectures 14 and 15 in UCSD anthropologist Tara Carter’s great course, Prehistory and the Birth of [...]

Why Americans hate government

When Ronald Reagan said in 1981 “government is not the solution to our problem; government is the problem,” he was tapping into a long history of American suspicion of government.
UCLA political science professor Brian Walker has a theory about where that suspicion came from. He lays out his ideas in the Oct. 10 lecture (download [...]

Music at McGill U

Do you want to hear great musicians and musicologists talk about the music they love? Check out Music (website, iTunes), a video podcast from Montreal’s McGill University.
Unlike a lot of academic podcasts, these videos have great production values: beautiful camera-work and high fidelity sound. You can listen to members of McGill’s faculty and [...]

Two great new anthropology classes

MMW1 Prehistory and the Birth of Civilization (feed), Tara Carter, UC San Diego.
UCSD is presenting three different versions of this course, but Carter’s is my hands-down favorite. She relates the story of hominid evolution and the birth of social organization with infectious enthusiasm. So far the course has brought us up to the [...]

Are we a ‘touch-starved’ culture?

UC Berkeley psychologist Dacher Keltner thinks we Americans are definitely touch-deprived.  In lecture 8 of his excellent course Human Happiness (feed),  Keltner presents evidence that when we touch each other, we feel less stressed, more altruistic and well — happier. He’s talking here about casual everyday touches, everything from a bear hug to [...]

Treasure trove of courses at UCSD

University of California San Diego is offering a record 63 courses available for free download on its podcast website this quarter, enough to fill your mp3 player for months to come. But carpe diem, seize the day. Most of these riches will only stay on the website until the end of the quarter (roughly mid-December), [...]

Human happiness

UC Berkeley psychology professor Dacher Keltner is the real deal — the kind of professor I wish I’d seen more often in my university days. Not only is he a cutting-edge researcher in the field of human emotion, he’s also a gifted teacher, who gives well organized, interesting lectures and who has a flair for [...]