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Free online lectures: Explore a world of ideas

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ThoughtCast

ThoughtCast is an ideaspace for today’s top thinkers, hosted by Jenny Attiyeh. Its focus is on in-depth conversations with key authors, academics and intellectuals, in audio and video format. ThoughtCast is that rare hybrid - a program that is both informative and engaging - a synergy between mass media and the ivory tower.

www.thoughtcast.org

  • Faculty Insight: Islam in the West-–A Clash of Civilizations?

    Wed, Nov 10, 2010
    Faculty Insight is produced in partnership with Harvard University Extension School and ThoughtCast. This third interview of the series is with Jocelyne Cesari, a level-headed yet astute specialist in contemporary Islamic society. Muslims who live in the Western world today face multiple challenges — suspicion, isolation, ignorance, fear. And post-9/11, of course, they carry the weight of that violent attack. So how are we to move forward, in an enlightened, inclusive manner? How ought we to apply our secular, humanist and individualistic values at such a time? For starters, let’s listen to Jocelyne Cesari. She might not have all the answers, but as the director of the inter-faculty Islam in the West Program, she’s clearly the right person to ask. She is also an associate at the Center for Middle Eastern Studies and the Center for European Studies at Harvard, and teaches in Harvard’s Department of Government, its Divinity School and its Extension School.
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  • Classical Music Impresario Ernest Fleishmann

    Tue, Dec 15, 2009
    Ernest Fleischmann, the former General Manager of the Los Angeles Philharmonic, can be credited with turning this once provincial institution into a world famous orchestra. He was also instrumental in hiring Esa-Pekka Salonen, the famous Finnish music director and composer, and more recently the flamboyant Venezuelan Gustavo Dudamel, who, baton in hand, has taken the classical music world by storm. Now in his 80's, Ernest looks back at his career in a conversation with ThoughtCast, at his home in the Hollywood Hills.
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  • Coral Reefs, Hermit Crabs, and Tube Worms (Part 1)

    Mon, Apr 26, 2010
    Randi Rotjan, a coral ecologist at the New England Aquarium in Boston, shares stories from her time spent studying coral reefs. Randi has been stung by jellyfish, coral, you name it. It's all part of the job, studying coral reefs on location in exotic locales like the Red Sea or the Phoenix Islands, the world's largest marine protected area. She goes face to face with hermit crabs as they line up, after the usual jostling, to form "vacancy chains", waiting to trade in their old shells for newer, larger ones. It's the classic upgrade, and it follows rules--perhaps ones we humans might care to copy. Rules abound undersea--as does death. If the water temperature is too warm, corals bleach, starve, and die. And if the tube worms that thrive near deep sea hydrothermal vents venture too far from the fissure, they'll freeze. But most of the time, they're doing just fine, thank you, feasting on the poisonous spewing gases they're so fond of. Note: this is part 1 of 2 with Randi Rotjan, and it features an audio interview. Part 2 features a short video on the subject of corollivary, the eating of coral by fish.
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  • Rebecca Goldstein: The Atheist with a Soul

    Sat, Jan 30, 2010
    Author and philosopher Rebecca Goldstein discusses her latest work, *36 Arguments for the Existence of God: A Work of Fiction*, which is perhaps best described as a hybrid. It is indeed a novel, with its share of psychology, mathematics, and academic politics, but it concludes with an appendix outlining these 36 arguments, as well as their rebuttals, in the language not of fiction, but of philosophy. So, as in many of Goldstein’s earlier novels, this one manages to fold ideas into art. Rebecca Goldstein received her doctorate in philosophy from Princeton, and went on to teach philosophy before trying her pen at fiction. Her first novel, *The Mind-Body Problem*, was a critical success, and she went on to write five other novels, including *Properties of Light*, *Mazel*, and *The Dark Sister*. She has also written non-fiction studies of the mathematician Kurt Godel, and the philosopher Baruch Spinoza. ThoughtCast speaks with Goldstein in her home in the Leather District, in downtown Boston.
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