Testing testing testing

Coming Soon

Watch this space for new writing and new podcasts, including an interview with Mark Lamster on his book Master of Shadows: The Secret Diplomatic Career of the Painter Peter Paul Rubens.

Beginning in early December, The New Modern will be hosting a series of experiments in live video discussion of ideas, books, history, the arts, and more.

Please check back here in the next couple of weeks for more information (or subscribe to our mailing list).

Anya Kamenetz is the author of DIY U: Edupunks, Edupreneurs, and the Coming Transformation of Higher Education. She’s also the subject of our very first (and very beta) video interview:

DIY U

DIY U is about the future of higher education:

It’s a story about the communities of visionaries who are tackling the enormous challenges of cost, access, and quality in higher ed, using new technologies to bring us a revolution in higher learning that is affordable, accessible, and learner-centered.

For more, be sure to visit the DIY U website and follow Anya on twitter @anya1anya.

We’ll soon post a continuation of this discussion in audio form.

A Treasure of Timbuktu

The legendary city of Timbuktu – a center for trade and learning for centuries and is the home of the oldest library south of the Sahara. Now, African and Saudi donors are joined in a contest to reframe the cultural heritage of a continent:

No one in Timbuktu has forgotten how the Moroccans conquered the city, plundered the libraries and dragged off the best scholars to Fes. Ahmed Baba, the philosopher, in chains! This is a source of embarrassment in Morocco today but the stolen manuscripts have yet to be returned to Timbuktu.

‘We were also colonised by the Arabs,’ says Mohamed Dicko, director of the Ahmed Baba Institute. ‘It was an intellectual, cultural colonisation and it is still at work today in the notion that everything good about Islam came from the Arabs. It is like during the French colonial era when school children were taught only French writers.’ Soon, for the first time, texts in Arabic by native Mali authors will be appearing in textbooks, he says.

Read more about the manuscripts, architecture, and cultural legacy of Timbuktu at Sign and Sight.

Stephen Fry is a quintessential “new modern.” He is comfortable in conversation with figures from the past, even as he embraces the latest modes of discussion. An actor, author, and public figure, Fry speaks in this interview about his literary and philosophical inspirations…

Best extant pop song dramatization of the 20th century… Indochine’s “Little Dolls”

This short video captures, in a striking fashion, a fleeting moment between two strangers…

Some interesting links and short items on Art and Design from The New Modern twitter stream and other sources.

Architecture

• President Obama’s new budget would end Save America’s Treasures and Preserve America for lack of “metrics.” [read]
• Unhappy Hipsters: A new blog invents amusing captions for stark Dwell mag photos [view] via @KateC
• Mies masterpiece Farnsworth house revisited.  A nice series of photos from @DesignApplause of a wonder of modern world architecture, now managed by the National Trust for Historic Preservation. [view]

Design

• Hollywood’s computers: NPR looks at the computer screens shown in films that tell a story in a flash of computer animation. [read/listen]
• A blog entirely dedicated to the beauty of ampersands [view] via @swissmiss
• Beautiful, historic, and/or interesting letterheads enshrined Letterheady [view] via @walterolson
• Why did the modernists love sans serif typefaces? [read] via @thinkaboutart & @ColinPeters

Visual Art

• How art affects the brain, a study/exhibition at the Walters Museum [read] via @davetroy
• Niagara Falls… to American art what portraits of kings are to European art? [read]
• A typically lovely illustration by the legendary Arthur Rackham [view] via @ThinkAboutArt & @EricOrchard