TUAW Resolutions: Expand Your Mind
Where do literature, opera, history and art intersect with portable electronic devices? The answer is the iPod. There are those who laugh at the idea of experiencing culture through the lens of consumer electronics. And there are those who will load up their iPods with lectures, great audio books, museum tours and more to take advantage of the huge wealth of cultural entertainment available to iPod owners. Popularity does not negate possibility. Here are several ways you can use your iPod to enrich your mind.
Listen to the classics. The iTunes store offers many classic works of spoken fiction and nonfiction, including Plato and Descartes, Bronte and Hawthorne, Shakespeare and Twain. Librivox is another great source for classics. They provide free public-domain audiobooks read by volunteers. Highlights include Beowulf and Jane Austen, Charles Dickens and Arthur Conan Doyle, Jack London and Robert Louis Stevenson.
Experience Museums. Many museums now offer podcasts that you can load onto your iPod to provide a richer experience when visiting museums or when you want to enjoy exhibits that you're physically too far away to go in person. Highlights include the NY and SF museums of modern art, and the Chateau de Versailles.
View art. The iPod's screen may be tiny, but you can load up your iPhoto collection with masterpieces to enjoy whenever you're on the go. Add an A/V cable and a TV and you create a portable gallery of your favorite art.
Enjoy the opera. Searching for opera-themed podcasts in iTunes produced dozens and dozens of relevant hits. From the San Francisco Opera to the Royal Opera House, if opera is your passion, there are more podcasts to listen to than you probably have free time. You'll find season previews, and individual performances. You can also purchase opera music (as well as symphonies and other culturally enriching music) directly from the iTunes store.
Listen to History. FreeAudio.org offers free spoken texts focused on freedom and the law. You can listen to the Gettysburg Address, the Virginia Declaration of Rights, Thomas Paine's Common Sense, and other historic speeches. American Rhetoric provides free access to many of the greatest examples of American political speech in MP3 format, including MLK's "I Have a Dream", Eisenhower's farewell address, FDR's first fireside chat, JFK's address on the Cuban missile crisis, Elie Wiesel's "The Perils of Indifference", and more. Tinfoil.com is another resource, preserving early recorded sound files (including those recorded on wax cylinders) and providing many free MP3 files. The Library of Congress offers an amazing seven hour MP3 collection of first-person narratives recorded by former slaves in nine Southern states.
Attend class. Apple's iTunes U allows you to listen to real University lectures for free, no matter where you are. Sign up for lectures from major universities like Stanford, Duke and UC Berkeley and more. Listen when you can, and learn on the go.
