We're back! This year Mike Rugnetta is teaching you about theater and drama. Are you in drama club? Want to know about the history of theater? Maybe learn some theater history? Have a lot of fun? This is the series for you! Over the next...

Get ready for Russian modernism. Mike is teaching you about the playwrighting of Catherine the Great, Anton Chekhov's plays, the Moscow Art Theater, and the acting theories of Stanislavski. It's all very real, and very modern. From a...

We're going to Broadway, everybody, and it's not going to be that fun. In fact, it's going to be a very serious experience with lots of powerful social commentary and indictments of life in America in the 1950s. So be prepared to look at...

Get ready to get weird. Mike Rugnetta teaches you about the Theater of the Absurd, a 1950s theatrical reaction to the dire world events of the 1940s. You'll learn about Jean Genet, Eugene Ionesco, Samuel Beckett, and the theatrical...

I don't mean it mean, but today we're going to be cruel. It's the fun-loving Theater of Cruelty, which was pioneered by the genius Antonin Artaud in France during the inter-war period in twentieth century. The Theater of Cruelty was...

Music is a tradition nearly as old as humankind itself, so it's no wonder our brains have developed interesting ways of interacting with and responding to it. Here are just a few of the ways music impacts our psychology.

Video games naturally tap into the way we learn: they focus our attention and track our progress as we head toward a clear goal. Kris Alexander, a professor of video game design and passionate gamer himself, thinks the same elements...

How do we make historically exclusive fields like classical music, fine arts or academic research more accessible to everyone? Education equalizer and violist Matthew Garcia thinks one way to remove barriers is to create free, virtual...

Buildings are bad news for the climate -- but they don't have to be. While our structures are currently responsible for a third of global energy consumption and emissions, a future where they create more energy than they consume is...

Nestled in the forests of Canada sits the world's longest beaver dam. This 850-meter-long structure is large enough to be seen in satellite imagery and has dramatically transformed the region, creating a pond containing 70 million liters...

We’ve talked about how broad a concept “the media” really is – and given that, it can be hard to keep track of all the different forces that constitute “the media.” It can be tough, but it’s not impossible. Today we’re talking about how...

In a lyrical talk full of radical imagination, poet Aja Monet and community organizer phillip agnew share the story of how they fell in love and what they've learned about the powerful connection between great social movements and...

Is art worth it? "Hell yeah," says graphic novelist R. Alan Brooks -- art has the power to scare dictators, inspire multitudes and change hearts and minds across the world. Reflecting on his journey to become an artist at a time when the...

Moonlight is a hard-edged yet beautifully made story about a black American dealing with his sexuality in a sometimes unforgiving and violent world. Its director, Barry Jenkins, uses every trick in the filmmaking book to put us in the...

Sebastian Wernicke thinks every TED Talk can be summarized in six words. In this talk, he shows how to do just that -- and less.

Everyone knows, you need a bunch of rules to make good theater. That's what the French thought in the 17th century, anyway. The French Neoclassical revival had a BUNCH of French playwrights following a bunch of rules. Unsurprisingly,...

Why are we so deadlocked on climate, and what would it take to overcome the seemingly insurmountable barriers to progress? Policy entrepreneur TED Halstead proposes a transformative solution based on the conservative principles of free...

Welcome to Crash Course Film Production, our 15 part series on how movies are (generally) made and who does what job and when... it's a lot to cover. Your host, Lily Gladstone, will be taking you through this series so let's get to know...

In 2004, construction began on a new building in Dubai, promising a revolutionary design that would dwarf the rest of the world's skyscrapers. Five years later, the 828-meter Burj Khalifa was complete, surpassing the previous...

Concrete is the second most-used substance on Earth (behind water), and it's responsible for eight percent of the world's carbon footprint. Cement researcher Karen Scrivener shares the research behind a pioneering new kind of cement...

As the New Hollywood gained steam in the late 70s and early 80s, another revenue stream opened its doors: home video. From Betamax to Laserdisc to Bluray to streaming services, home video revolutionized how we ingest movies. In this...

Throughout history humans have come up with lots of different ways to build shelters for themselves. But sometimes, inspiration for better construction materials comes from nature, in structures you might not expect — like the scales on a

Africa, the Middle East, and South America have their own vibrant film communities and filmmakers. From social and political commentary to experimental films, these regions have made some very important pieces of cinema over the last...

When the Museum of Modern Art's senior curator of architecture and design announced the acquisition of 14 video games in 2012, "all hell broke loose." In this far-ranging, entertaining, and deeply insightful talk, Paola Antonelli...