New Entertainments

In addition to the blogs below that I follow frequently as well as NPR's Science Friday and Radiolab, here are a few new places I've been finding entertainment:

The History Blog--concentrates on objects in history:
http://www.thehistoryblog.com/

The BBC show In Our Time
http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b006qykl

And to delve into historical fiction:

Penny Dreadful, a magical victorian universe of anatomy, urbanism, vampires, ancient languages, etc. etc.:

And The Knick, a much more realistic medical drama set in early 20th century New York:

On the Color Mauve

The Academic Obsession with Mad Men

First, I would like to point out that Mad Men has some amazing art historical conversations and images throughout. It's hard for an art historian to forget the scene when the underlings sneak in to Cooper's office to see the Rothko, when visitors catch sight of The Fisherman's Wife, etc. And the artworks themselves have spawned a blog just to keep track of them: http://artofmadmen.wordpress.com/

But both academics and libraries have combined a love of mad men with scholarly inquiry. Duke University Library's Rubenstein Rare Book Library has created Mad Men Mondays to use the show as a jumping off point for investigations into parts of collection that corroborate the ideas floating around in the 60s: http://blogs.library.duke.edu/rubenstein/tag/mad-men/

And Duke University Press came out recently with a volume called Mad Men, Mad World: Sex, Politics, Style and the 1960s, edited by Lauren M. E. Goodlad, Lilya Kaganovsky, and Robert A. Rushing