Videos

Still don’t understand the Affordable Care Act? You’re not alone.

I recently stumbled across the site Act of Law, on which an anonymous woman is reading the entire ACA aloud. “I will read the law for two hours each week and post videos of each reading here on this site,” she writes. “It is 906 pages long (table of contents included) and I estimate that it will take about 60 hours to read.”
The most recent video she posted covers hours 23 and 24 of this project. It appears below with permission.

What people know about drugs is wrong

While there have always been norms and customs around the use of drugs, explicit public policies designed to control drug abuse are a more recent phenomenon. Neither a drug-free world nor a world of free drugs seems to be on offer, leaving citizens and officials to face the age-old problem: What are we going to do about drugs?

A good first step might be to learn more about them. In this Bloggingheads.tv video, The New Republic’s John McWhorter discusses the controversial topic with Mark Kleiman,

Simon Winchester on Charles Dodgson

This past weekend saw Oxford’s annual Alice’s Day take place, featuring lots of Alice in Wonderland themed events and exhibitions. With that in mind, today we bring you two videos of Simon Winchester talking about Charles Dodgson (AKA Lewis Carroll) and both his love of photography and his relationship with Alice Liddell and her family.

Marketing in the 21st century

Despite the criticism leveled at marketing, why has marketing continued its inexorable march into every aspect of life? Since the end of World War II, two major trends have been affecting the practice of marketing: customer power and self-service. Both trends have been accelerated by the Internet.

On the future of medical textbooks

By John Firth
Medical textbooks are often spoken of as dinosaurs – they may have dominated the medical world years ago, but things have moved on, and they’re now out-of-date and heading towards extinction with the Dodo. While there is some truth in this, it’s not the whole truth, and it’s my feeling that medical textbooks will continue to play a big part in the future of medical publishing, albeit in a different form.

Courage to Dissent

Much scholarship about the legal aspects behind the Civil Rights Movement centers around the work of Thurgood Marshall and the Supreme Court. In a discussion on this topic, Tomiko Brown-Nagin asks what this history would look like if the Supreme Court wasn’t the main focus, and examines the unsung heroes of desegregation.

Dividing the Spoils

In Dividing the Spoils: The War for Alexander’s Empire Robin Waterfield revives the memories of Alexander the Great’s Successors, whose fame has been dimmed only because they stand in Alexander’s enormous shadow. Alexander’s legacy was turmoil, and in the videos below Waterfield explains firstly what happened to the Empire after Alexander’s death and why the book came to be written, and secondly, the role of women in the war for Alexander’s Empire.

John Swenson on Treme

By Michelle Rafferty

How real is the HBO series Treme? Here John Swenson reflects on what it was like watching the first season as a resident of New Orleans (he has yet to comment on the second, which premiered last night), as well as what the culture of the city means to its people. As a writer for OffBeat Swenson has written about the musicians returning to NOLA after Katrina, and in his forthcoming book New Atlantis: Musicians Battle for the Survival of New Orleans he talks about their crusade to save the endangered city. Swenson himself suggested the song in the video,”Dogs Chase Cats,” from Andy J. Forest’s NOtown Story (2010).

Congratulations, Zhou Long!

Please join us in congratulating composer Zhou Long, as he has been awarded with the 2011 Pulitzer Prize in Music for Madame White Snake. The opera (written by Cerise Lim Jacobs) premiered on February 26, 2010 at Boston’s Cutler Majestic Theatre. Drawing on a Chinese folk tale, this opera blends musical traditions from the East and the West to tell the story of a powerful white snake demon who longs to become human so she can experience love – but she meets with deceit, doubt and distrust.

“I dressed like a farmer.”

By Justyna Zajac and Michelle Rafferty

This week we went to the Berg Fashion Library launch event at the New York Public Library where the talented Ada Calhoun spoke about using Berg for her own fashion research. She co-authored Gunn’s Golden Rules: Life’s Little Lessons for Making it Work and is now working on another book with Tim Gunn, the forthcoming Tim Gunn’s Fashion Bible.

The art of political quotation

‘Politics feeds your vanity and starves your self-respect,’ according to the journalist Matthew Parris. In the video below, filmed by George Miller, Antony Jay discusses what makes a good political quotation.

Mysteries of the OED

There is a lot of mystery behind the Oxford English Dictionary, but I can tell you for sure that it is not compiled in a Gringotts-style castle, all the word slips hidden in secret stone wall compartments, with a team of bearded, vitamin D-deficient lexicographers hunched over great dusty volumes. Today, the OED team is releasing new batch of updates, so I thought I’d share some videos that shed light into the revision process.

In conversation with Peter Atkins

Peter Atkins is the author of almost 60 books, including Galileo’s Finger: The Ten Great Ideas of Science, Four Laws that Drive the Universe, and the world-renowned textbook Physical Chemistry. His latest book is On Being, which is a scientist’s exploration of the great questions of existence. In the below video, Atkins is in conversation about the book with Meet the Author‘s David Freeman.

The Difficulty of Being Good

Gurcharan Das is the author of several books, including the much-acclaimed India Unbound (which has been translated into many languages and filmed by the BBC) and most recently The Difficulty of Being Good: On The Subtle Art of Dharma. He writes a regular column for six Indian newspapers, including the Times of India, and also contributes to Newsweek, New York Times, Wall Street Journal, and Foreign Affairs.

In the two-part podcast below, Das talks with none other than the brilliant Kamla Bhatt.

Michael Scheuer sits down with Stephen Colbert

Michael Scheuer was the chief of the CIA’s bin Laden unit from 1996 to 1999 and remained a counterterrorism analyst until 2004. He is the author of many books, including the bestselling Imperial Hubris: Why the West is Losing the War on Terrorism. His latest book is the biography Osama bin Laden, a much-needed corrective, hard-headed, closely reasoned portrait that tracks the man’s evolution from peaceful Saudi dissident to America’s Most Wanted.

Among the extensive media attention both the book and Scheuer have received so far, he was interviewed on The Colbert Report just this week.

A post-racial NFL?

With Mike Tomlin on his way to his second Super Bowl in three years and with Black History Month upon us, this is an ideal time to examine the movement that broke down the color barrier at the top of National Football League’s coaching hierarchy and transformed the NFL into an unlikely equal opportunity trailblazer. Moreover, as American institutions of all sorts, from the Association of Art Museum Directors to the National Urban League, contemplate the merits of emulating the NFL’s Rooney Rule, it is important to