“In 1969, a 14-year-old Beatle fanatic named Jerry Levitan, armed with a reel-to-reel tape deck, snuck into John Lennon’s hotel room in Toronto and convinced John to do an interview about peace. 38 years later, Jerry has produced a film about it. Using the original interview recording as the soundtrack, director Josh Raskin has woven a visual narrative which tenderly romances Lennon’s every word in a cascading flood of multipronged animation. Raskin marries the terrifyingly genius pen work of James Braithwaite with masterful digital illustration by Alex Kurina, resulting in a spell-binding vessel for Lennon’s boundless wit, and timeless message…”

This TED talk by mathematician Steven Strogatz “shows how flocks of creatures (like birds, fireflies and fish) manage to synchronize and act as a unit when no one’s giving orders”. The parallels to market behavior and financial panic are implicit but obvious. We often perceive of our decisions during a crisis as unique and self-preservational, but the tendency toward spontaneous order is a powerful impulse. Coordinated reaction to natural threats, be it a hungry seal or predator hawk, can often increase a group’s biological fitness and probility of survival, while a coordinated reaction to financial crises can actually amplify individual risk – like Strogatz’s example of London’s Millenium Bridge – and only make matters worse…

The past, present, and future of Wall Street according to its unofficial biographer…

Over-the-counter gambling on the markets has been around much longer than modern derivatives pundits would have you believe. The New York Times was warning against “casino capitalism” as early as 1905, when side bets on market movements were both commonplace and unregulated, and won the attention of an American government still swaggering after its victory over the mega-trust companies of the late 19th century. The following 60 Minutes segment discusses both the nature of CDS instruments and how they’ve become just as dangerous today as they were in the “bucket rooms” or gambling houses of the 1920s…

After an inhospitable welcome at Columbia University and a defense of Iranian intentions in the halls of the UN, it was up to Charlie Rose to coax a straight answer from the puzzling Persian President and his schizophrenic vacillations between coherence and crusade. Neither Rose nor Ahmadinejad disappoint…

With YouTube now participating in presidential primaries and digital media poised to overtake traditional sources of news and information, it isn’t surprising that virtual political action now poses a serious threat to democratic nationalism. As human rights align across borders and the distance between the world’s poor and basic information technology shrinks, digital advocacy like this “Change the Policy” video is bound to increase — and with dramatic political effect — in what might become the first truly global evolution of human values. Stay tuned…