Interview - Jan Wong [History / Politics / Journalism]

Jan Wong is one of the best known journalists in Canada. Some people love her, some people hate her. But no matter which side you're on it's hard not to have an opinion on her.

Her career has sent her from newspapers like 'The Boston Globe' to 'The Wall Street Journal' before finally landing with 'The Globe and Mail.' Wong is possibly best known for her column 'Lunch With Jan Wong' in which she garnered a reputation for being a bit nasty.

Broadcaster Pamela Wallin compared her to Hannibal Lecter, while Fashion magnate Peter Nygard threatened to sue her.

Wong as a new book, 'Beijing Confidential' which is bound to turn heads.

You can watch an interview between Jan Wong and the CBC here.

Furthermore, her work was recently profiled by the American public broadcasting station PBS; this interview can be found here.

University of Berkeley - online lectures

The University of Berkeley has allowed many of its first-year courses to be broadcast over the internet. Topics include physics, biology, computer science, chemistry, peace studies, and more.

Here is the first lecture in a physics course:



You can find hundreds of other lectures at this web location.

Literature / Society - Arts & Letters website

The following website is a catalogue of well-written and thought-provoking articles, dealing with the arts, literature, politics, and society. The site is very text-heavy, as are most of the articles listed. Perseverance brings many rewards, however.

The Arts & Letters Daily site is available here.

Literature - Project Gutenberg (complete books stored online)

Project Gutenberg is a fantastic resource for books in the English language. Project Gutenberg is the first and largest single collection of free electronic books, or eBooks. Michael Hart, founder of Project Gutenberg, invented eBooks in 1971 and continues to inspire the creation of eBooks and related technologies today.

You can visit this site by clicking here.

On the left side of the website is a search area where you can type in the name of an author or book. You can also browse the collection if you do not know what to look for. Books are primarily in the English language, although you can also receive access to several thousand books from other languages (including Chinese).

http://www.gutenberg.org/wiki/Main_Page

Business / Society - The Corporation

The Corporation is today's dominant institution, creating great wealth but also great harm. This award-winning Canadian documentary examines the nature, evolution, impacts, and future of the modern business corporation and the increasing role it plays in society and our everyday lives.



To watch the rest of this film, click here.

History / Geography - The Northwest (Arctic) Passage

In this narrated slide show, see artifacts recovered from British explorer Sir John Franklin's ill-fated expedition to pioneer a passage through the Arctic Ocean. Narrator Russell Potter is an English professor at Rhode Island College whose research interests include Arctic exploration and Inuit culture. He is the editor of the Arctic Book Review, a biannual survey of books on subjects related to the Arctic.

History - Pierre Trudeau visits China

Pierre Trudeau has been to China twice before, but the third time it's as prime minister. Canada and China have recently established diplomatic ties, and Trudeau is hoping to secure access to the Chinese market for Canadian business. On a 1973 tour that includes such highlights as the Great Wall and martial-arts displays, Trudeau gets a last-minute invitation: a visit with Chairman Mao. This CBC-TV clip includes a segment about the meeting from Chinese TV. This was not the first time Trudeau had met Chairman Mao. On his 1960 visit, the pair met briefly in Tiananmen Square in Beijing.

Science/Nature - Astronomy

Let's start with the knowledge that we could do without. Our guide to the farthest reaches of the universe is Rocky Kolb who, despite his un-serious first name, is a most serious astronomer from the University of Chicago. In his talk entitled Beyond Einstein: The Dark Side of the Universe, he raises two awe-inspiring questions: What is the dark matter holding our galaxy together; and, what is the dark energy pulling our universe apart? The answers to those questions involve being able to traverse intellectually the distance between the inner space of the quantum and outer space of the cosmos.

Even if the mind boggles, be assured that Rocky Kolb is as intelligible and unthreatening a navigator as you could wish for, even though he did say that the best way to keep chatty people on an airplane at a distance is to "tell someone you're a theoretical astrophysicist and they quickly turn their attentions back to the in-flight magazines."

MP3: - Rocky Kolb

Opinion - The Oilsands in Alberta, Canada

History - Aboriginal North American stone-age tools

Introduction

Hello!

I would like to use this website to post a variety of online resources. Most of these posts will involve one or several weblinks (URL) to other sites. To facilitate searching through these posts, I will use the following categories within each post title, followed by a more specific description of the content posted:

Music
Film
History
Business
Society
Science/Nature
Opinion
Literature
Philosophy
Visual arts
Performance
News

Please feel free to comment, here on this site, on the usefullness (or lack thereof) of any material posted.

I hope you find this site to be of some use to you,

Quintin Hewlett