Tuesday, January 26, 2016

Influential Books in Academia

Came across two cool links while browsing  openculture aobut influential books in academia. The first is called "the Open Syllabus Project", by a group that I think is from Columbia University, the Open Syllabus Project took over 1 million syllabi and figured out what were the most commonly studied books in higher educational institutions and made a pretty cool data chart to see it on.

The other link is an article from the Guardian that talks about a UK poll of publishers, librarians and academics about what were the most influential academic books. The number one book was Charles Darwin's "the Origin of Species" and the list of the top 20 in alphabetical order are below:



A Brief History of Time by Stephen Hawking
A Vindication of the Rights of Woman by Mary Wollstonecraft
Critique of Pure Reason by Immanuel Kant
Nineteen Eighty-Four by George Orwell
On the Origin of Species by Charles Darwin
Orientalism by Edward Said
Silent Spring by Rachel Carson
The Communist Manifesto by Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels
The Complete Works of William Shakespeare
The Female Eunuch by Germaine Greer
The Making of the English Working Class by EP Thompson
The Meaning of Relativity by Albert Einstein
The Naked Ape by Desmond Morris
The Prince by Niccolò Machiavelli
The Republic by Plato
The Rights of Man by Thomas Paine
The Second Sex by Simone de Beauvoir
The Uses of Literacy by Richard Hoggart
The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith
Ways of Seeing by John Berger

Sunday, January 24, 2016

MLK Day- Bernie, West, Turner and Killer Mike

This is a pretty relevant weekly talk because of the recent MLK day and the rise of Bernie in the polls. If you do not really know much about what Bernie is running for then check out a video series he does with the rapper killer mike or some interviews he has with vox. Those are good ways to get to know what Bernie Sanders is running for. I mention those, because Sander's proposed policies are not the central theme of this but rather implied and if you don't know what he is calling for then you might not know how he lines up with king.

All in all, just a great panel of speakers and it made me want to get Cornel West's new book "the Radical King", a collection of some of  Martin Luther King's more liberal teachings.