Mark Jago, professor at the University of Nottingham, has a wonderful YouTube channel, Attic Philosophy. Here he offers high-quality, university-level mini-lectures on various topics in philosophy and logic. Check it out.
This brilliant page (designed by Moacir P. de Sá Pereira of the NYU English Department) offers an interactive visualization of the spatio-temporal relationships between characters in Episode 10 of James Joyce's Ulysses. The episode, composed of 18 short sections and a final coda, tracks a network of characters moving through Dublin between 2:55 and 4:00 p.m., creating one of the novel's most intricate narrative structures. Here is a terrific passage from the first section:
A listless lady, no more young, walked alone the shore of lough Ennel, Mary, first countess of Belvedere, listlessly walking in the evening, not startled when an otter plunged. Who could know the truth? Not the jealous lord Belvedere and not her confessor if she had not committed adultery fully, eiaculatio seminis inter vas naturale mulieris, with her husband's brother? She would half confess if she had not all sinned as women did. Only God knew and she and he, her husband's brother. (↵) Father Conmee thought of that tyrannous incontinence, needed however for man's race on earth, and of the ways of God which were not our ways.
Here you can play the Game of Life, a cellular automaton created by British mathematician John Horton Conway in 1970. You can experiment different patterns evolving from simple configurations of cells. My favorite is the spaceship, a pattern that reappars after a certain number of generations in the same orientation but in a different position.
In David Foster Wallace's Infinite Jest – one of the best novels you'll ever read – there are around 20 gloriously dense pages (plus footnotes) dedicated to a match of Eschaton, a baroquely structured war game played outdoors. The match takes place on November 8, Year of the Depend Adult Undergarment (Interdependence Day, Gaudeamus igitur). This website offers a role-playing game loosely based on Wallace's Eschaton. All you need to play is a pen, paper, and a calculator. (I haven't had the chance to try it myself unfortunately.) You might be intrigued by what the narrator of Infinite Jest says about the game:
Eschaton is the most complicated children's game anyone around E.T.A. had ever heard of. No one's entirely sure who brought it to Enfield from where. … Its elegant complexity, combined with a dismissive-reenactment frisson and a complete disassociation from the realities of the present, composes most of its puerile appeal. Plus it's almost addictively compelling, and shocks the tall.
If you're interested in cinema, I strongly recomment Critical Eye, an Italian film criticism website founded in 2018 by author and critic Daniele Sacchi. It features a range of thought-provoking reviews on a variety of films.
If you want to practice your skills in natural deduction, check the proof editors here and here. They do not do the job for you: you have to decide how to proceed in the proofs and provide justification for each line. The former proof editor uses a Fitch-style natural deduction system, as found in the excellent logic textbook forall x: Calgary (by P. D. Magnus, Tim Button, Robert Trueman, Richard Zach), which itself is based on another textbook, forallx: Cambridge (by P.D. Magnus and Tim Button) – a textbook I've used in my teaching.
Here two scholars brings us a little closer to experiencing Homer's epic poetry. They stress that the theory underlying the singining is not to be taken as giving an the exact reconstruction of a given melody, but "as an approach to the tecnique the Homeric singers used to accommodate melodic principles to the demands of the individual verse". Enjoy it without understanding anything, unless you are fluent in ancient Greek.
On this YouTube channel, you'll find Cartine Comedy, a brilliantly acted Italian sketch comedy series blending grotesque humor, social satire, and a surreal atmosphere. The series is created by Enrico Riccioni. To stay updated on new videos, be sure to follow the Instagram page.
I'm a first-generation academic, meaning that my parents did not attend university. This background has made me particularly aware of how class and family history shape one's path in academia. I believe we, as academics, must sustain an open and ongoing conversation about these factors and how they intersect with others (such as race, gender, and disability) that more commonly feature in discussions of diversity and inclusion. For this reason, I strongly recommend exploring the resources available here and here – two websites dedicated to the experiences and insights of first-generation philosophers.
A gem for fans of David Foster Wallace's Infinite Jest, as well as for those who want to approach this masterpiece: a character diagram designed by graphic designer Sam Potts (whose official page is this). It maps out every person mentioned in the novel and their connections to others. The diagram is cleverly organised around the three hearts of the plot: the Enfield Tennis Academy, the Ennet House Drug and Alcohol Recovery House, and the Québécois terrorist group Les Assassins des Fauteuils Roulants. It also includes the calendar of Subsidized Time and a brilliant visual rendering of Marathe Steeply's pretense of a pretense of a betrayal of the aforementioned terrorist cell.
Between 1 and 31 July 1995, the first legally recognised genocide in Europe after the Shoah took place in Srebrenica. Before the massacre of more than 8,000 Bosniak Muslim men and boys, the United Nations had declared the besieged enclave of Srebrenica a "safe area" under its protection. This tragedy – and Europe's enduring shame – is powerfully recounted in this podcast by Roberta Biagiarelli and Paolo Rumiz.