The KONY 2012 video has taken the Internet by storm, with over 50 million YouTube views as of today. Since its release, just about everyone, including celebrities, has tweeted or shared the 30-minute video on Twitter or Facebook. In the video, the director Jason Russell calls for the “arrest” of Lord’s Resistance Army leader, Joseph [...]

So many of our brains are in chains, and we cannot think beyond that which has been propagandized with us in mind. Many of the things that target us are not for our benefit, but rather are intended to provide economic gain for those who scheme to dupe us with the ultimate mind screw. Blacks [...]

The Aurora, Colorado theater massacre has reignited the debate about gun control in the country. There are many people who believe that gun control would have prevented such an occurrence. We live in a society where people blame access to guns for the violent acts that people who use them commit. We came across the [...]

Summary One day in 1968, Jane Elliott, a teacher in a small, all-white Iowa town, divided her third-grade class into blue-eyed and brown-eyed groups and gave them a daring lesson in discrimination. This is the story of that lesson, its lasting impact on the children, and its enduring power thirty years later. Elliott divided her [...]

Summary Slavery by Another Name is a 90-minute documentary that challenges one of Americans’ most cherished assumptions: the belief that slavery in this country ended with the Emancipation Proclamation. The film tells how even as chattel slavery came to an end in the South in 1865, thousands of African Americans were pulled back into forced [...]

Summary Huey Pierce Long, Jr. (August 30, 1893 – September 10, 1935), nicknamed The Kingfish, served as the 40th Governor of Louisiana from 1928–1932 and as a U.S. Senator from 1932 to 1935. A Democrat, he was noted for his radical populist policies. Though a backer of Franklin D. Roosevelt in the 1932 presidential election, [...]

Summary Is there more than one universe? In this visually rich, action-packed TED talk, Brian Greene shows how the unanswered questions of physics (starting with a big one: What caused the Big Bang?) have led to the theory that our own universe is just one of many in the “multiverse.” At the heart of modern [...]

Summary Academic Robert Beckford visits Ghana to investigate the hidden costs of rice, chocolate and gold. And why, 50 years after independence, a country so rich in natural resources is one of the poorest in the world. He discovers child laborers farming cocoa instead of attending school and asks if the activities of multinationals, the [...]

Summary Slovenian philosopher Slavoj Zizek, aka The Elvis of cultural theory, is given the floor to show off his polemic style and whirlwind-like performance. The Giant of Ljubljana is bombarded with clips of popular media images and quotes by modern-day thinkers revolving around four major issues: the economical crisis, environment, Afghanistan and the end of [...]

Summary Super High Me is a 2007 documentary film about the effects of smoking cannabis for 30 days. The documentary stars comedian Doug Benson. The documentary’s name and its poster are plays on the 2004 documentary Super Size Me. Super High Me documents Benson avoiding alcohol and cannabis for a cleansing period and then smoking [...]

Summary A colorful and provocative survey of anarchism in America, the film attempts to dispel popular misconceptions and trace the historical development of the movement. The film explores the movement both as a native American philosophy stemming from 19th century American traditions of individualism, and as a foreign ideology brought to America by immigrants. The [...]

Summary “Zizek!” is a feature documentary exploring the eccentric personality and esoteric work of the “wild man of theory”: the eminent Slovenian philosopher Slavoj Zizek. “Žizek!” trails the thinker as he crisscrosses the globe, racing from New York City lecture halls, through the streets of Buenos Aires, and even stopping at home in Ljubljana, Slovenia. [...]

In the week since the death of Whitney Houston, a lot of things have transpired–the speculation over what led to her death, the Grammys, the public mourning of a music legend, the anguish felt by her daughter Bobbi Kristina, mother Cissy and other family and close friends, the speculations on whether ex-husband Bobby Brown would [...]

Summary The Story of Cosmetics, released on July 21st, 2010, examines the pervasive use of toxic chemicals in our everyday personal care products, from lipstick to baby shampoo. Produced with Free Range Studios and hosted by Annie Leonard, the seven-minute film by The Story of Stuff Project reveals the implications for consumer and worker health [...]

Summary Science writer Rita Carter tells the story of how modern neuroscience has revealed that reading, something most of us take for granted, unlocks remarkable powers. Carter explains how the classic novel Wuthering Heights allows us to step inside other minds and understand the world from different points of view, and she wonders whether the [...]

Summary The Canadian documentary Manufacturing Consent: Noam Chomsky and the Media presents a lengthy, detailed look at the political beliefs of celebrated intellectual Noam Chomsky. Casting only passing glances at Chomsky’s groundbreaking work in the field of linguistics and his eventful life, filmmakers Mark Achbar and Peter Witonick instead focus on his activities as a [...]

Summary For most of our history, we’ve rested easy in the notion that there were three dimensions that have existed throughout time: length, width and height. Ah, the good old days. In the early 20th century, Hermann Minkowski and Albert Einstein connected our comfortable three dimensions with a fourth, time, defining special relativity using a [...]

Summary Whilst Ron Jones’ The Third Wave has received a lot of attention and been dramatised, George Muldoon’s experiments in capitalist democracy involving two groups of seventh graders in Mill Valley, California have seemingly slipped under the political radar… “I said years and years and years ago that the public school system is like a [...]

Summary Malcolm X (May 19, 1925 – February 21, 1965), born Malcolm Little and also known as El-Hajj Malik El-Shabazz[1] (Arabic: الحاجّ مالك الشباز‎), was an African American Muslim minister and human rights activist. To his admirers, he was a courageous advocate for the rights of African Americans, a man who indicted white America in [...]

Summary “I am dying. … There is no sense in trying to deny that fact,” 59-year-old Craig Ewert says of his rapid deterioration just months after being diagnosed with ALS, a motor neuron disorder often referred to as Lou Gehrig’s disease. “I’m not tired of living,” explains Ewert, a retired computer science professor. “I’m tired [...]

Summary Loose Change is a series of films released between 2005 and 2009 which argue that the September 11, 2001 attacks were planned and conducted by elements within the United States government, and base the claims on perceived anomalies in the historical record of the attacks. The films were written and directed by Dylan Avery, [...]

Summary We are bad at making decisions. According to science, our decisions are based on oversimplification, laziness and prejudice. And that’s assuming that we haven’t already been hijacked by our surroundings or led astray by our subconscious! Featuring exclusive footage of experiments that show how our choices can be confounded by temperature, warped by post-rationalisation [...]

Summary The Obama Deception: The Mask Comes Off better known simply as The Obama Deception is an American political documentary film written and directed by radio talk show host Alex Jones. The film was released on March 12, 2009 and distributed by Alex Jones Productions. The film argues that American presidents since the 1960s have [...]

Summary There are 6 billion people on the planet. Every single one of them are unique individual. We each have thoughts and ideas and memories and feelings. What is happening in your brain when talking and listening? This is not about mechanics of speaking, listening and understanding a language. This is about subjective sensation of [...]

Summary Through a secret program called the Counter Intelligence Program (COINTELPRO), there was a concerted effort to subvert the will of the people to avoid the rise “of a black Messiah” that would mobilize the African-American community into a meaningful political force. This documentary establishes historical perspective on the measures initiated by J. Edgar Hoover [...]

Summary Political philosopher and visionary, husband and father, dynamic orator and militant minister. In his lifetime, Malcolm X was many men. Born Malcolm Little, he later became “Detroit Red” and “New York Red” — a hustler, drug pusher, pimp, con man and the head of a Boston robbery ring. After spending time in prison, he [...]

Summary In the early 1970s, Craig Haney, Curt Banks, Carlo Prescott, and Philip Zimbardo conducted a landmark situational study at Stanford University. The experiment tested the fundamental attribution error: our tendency to attribute causes of behavior to personal factors, underestimating the influence of situational conditions. For this study, a small group of college students volunteered [...]

Summary Sudan was the giant of Africa which once represented the greatest hope for peaceful coexistence between Arab and African, Muslim and Christian. That hope is all but gone. As Sudan is split into two, the government of Omar al-Bashir in the North faces growing public resentment over the loss of national pride. To boost [...]

Summary Jacques Ellul was a French theologian/sociologist and anarchist. He first became well-known to American readers when his book The Technological Society was published in English in 1964. This book leveled a broad critique of technique, a term that means more than gadgets and machines – as the English word technology means. For Ellul, technique [...]

Summary The Congress shall have Power To coin Money, regulate the Value thereof, and of foreign Coin, and fix the Standard of Weights and Measures; No State shall make any Thing but gold and silver Coin a Tender in Payment of debts. Find out why some feel the Federal Reserve’s practices are a violation of [...]