The truth about the Roman gladiator

Are you fascinated by gladiator, that killer-for-hire who entertained thousands back in ancient Rome’s heyday?
Whether you love them or loathe them, you’ll enjoy Pennsylvania State University historian Garrett Fagan’s talk Myths and Realities about the Roman Gladiator (iTunes).
With his Irish brogue and mordant sense of humor, Fagan separates the historical facts from the fanciful fictions [...]

The ‘Game of Life’ and the 1960s Counterculture

I lived through the late 1960s as a student at UC Berkeley, the epicenter of the counterculture and radical chic. And yet somehow I missed the grand intellectual underpinnings of hippie-dom and the Summer of Love. (The people I knew who championed “People’s Park” and wore dashikis were mainly the lazy kids who’d rather [...]

A great Western Civ course from UCLA

Ah, what a joy it is to discover a great teacher! Thanks to podcast reviewer Anne at Anne is a Man, I’ve discovered the truly gifted Lynn Hunt, teacher of UCLA’s History 1C – Western Civilization, 1715-Present (website, audio feed ).
I’m an old hand at online European history courses, having listened my way through UC [...]

Nationalism in Eastern Europe

Here’s a gem I recently discovered while rummaging around in iTunesU.
George Mason University historian T. Mills Kelly has posted 7 lectures from his course Nationalism in Eastern Europe (iTunes), which open a window into an area usually glossed over or ignored in more general European history courses.
Kelly has an engaging teaching style and his interaction [...]

Say hello to your cousin — the yeast!

Among the weird and wonderful factiods in Terrence Deacon’s UC Berkeley course Introduction to Biological Anthropology (website, feed) is this one from lecture 5: we humans are more closely related genetically to yeast then we are to maize. Think of that the next time you eat cornbread or suffer from a yeast infection.
Deacon’s [...]

Introduction to cognitive psychology

You have this sense that when you’re seeing the world, what you see out there is real and that it’s getting into your psyche somehow. And yet there is a gaping hole. Somehow this big object isn’t getting into your minds eye without a lot of extra effort…
That’s UCSD psychologist David Peterzell in lecture [...]

How the transistor transformed pop music

Here’s a puzzle: American popular music from the 1920s to the mid-1950s was all about Broadway and Hollywood show tunes and sentimental love songs in the Bing Crosby crooner style. So what happened circa 1955 to usher in the age of rock ‘n roll, rhythm and blues and country music? Did American tastes suddenly change? [...]

The paradox of thrift and other Keynesian conundrums

Can you stimulate an economy — shock it back into life like a defibrillator acting on an ailing heart? British economist John Maynard Keynes (1883-1946) famously said you could. Pour enough new money into the system via spending and tax cuts, he said, and the “animal spirits” of the moribund patient would revive and he [...]

Knowledge tidbits

I often chance upon tasty tidbits of knowledge as I browse the web’s buffet of podcasts, academic courses and blogs. In this new feature I will serve up some of these intellectual hors d’oeuvres. I invite you to serve up your own tidbits in the comments. I only ask that you provide a reference [...]

Languages and cultures of America

Linguist Max Weinreich wrote, “A Language is a Dialect with an Army and a Navy.” What he was getting at is that the distinction between a dialect in a language is often more political than anything intrinsic to the language itself. A case in point was the Ebonics controversy of the mid-1990s when the [...]