public enemy

The 1990 Public Enemy song 911 Is a Joke from the album Fear of a Black Planet, about slow emergency response.

A Vox explainer from the 2020 election series on why American public transit is so poor. It traces the effect of the interstate highway system on cities and the resulting car dependence.

Richard Ankrom's account of his 2001 guerrilla project, in which he painted and installed a missing freeway exit sign on a Pasadena freeway. The sign matched official standards and stayed up for years before being discovered.

Seven-minute footage of Fred Rogers testifying before a US Senate subcommittee in 1969 to defend federal funding for the new Corporation for Public Broadcasting. A skeptical Senator Pastore starts out abrasive and is won over during Rogers' brief, calm testimony.

Music video for Public Service Broadcasting's "Go!" from the album The Race For Space, built from NASA audio and archival material of Apollo-era voices.

A 1996 documentary on the twentieth-century American decline of public transport and the role of car companies and the highway lobby in it. It is best known for its account of GM's streetcar buyouts.

A one-minute scene from the film Enemy of the State showing absurdly implausible image enhancement, with freezing, rotating, zooming and focusing on a video.

A VICE News piece on China's Social Credit System, including a neighbor-watch pilot where paid watchers record behavior. It covers rewards for high scores and public shaming or restrictions for low ones.

A one-minute UK road safety advert showing a family car crash in which an unbelted rear passenger kills his mother in a head-on collision. It is a notoriously graphic public information film.

Aral Balkan's re:publica 2015 talk argues that people are the product of surveillance-based business models. It makes an ethical case against data monopolies and for privacy as a human right.

Eben Moglen's re:publica 2012 talk argues that media which spy on and data-mine the public threaten freedom of thought, and that free technology and free culture are needed to protect it.

CBS News clip from a 2016 Republican primary debate in which Donald Trump attacks George W. Bush over 9/11 and the Iraq War while Jeb Bush defends his brother. It is a short, heated exchange on national security records.

A short ProPublica video explaining the "Buy, Borrow, Die" strategy wealthy Americans use to cut taxes. They borrow against appreciating assets instead of selling, and the gains are never taxed at death.

Lawrence Lessig's Talks at Google presentation based on his book Republic, Lost, arguing that money in politics corrupts Congress and eroded public trust, and outlining what could be done about it. It supports the argument with data on political donations.

In this TED talk, Lawrence Lessig argues that American politics is corrupted by Congress's dependence on funding from a tiny fraction of citizens. He uses rapid-fire visuals and calls for a bipartisan push to reclaim the Republic.

A 1985 interview by G. Edward Griffin with former KGB operative Yuri Bezmenov. He describes long-running Soviet efforts at ideological subversion and manipulation of US public opinion.

A New York Times Op-Docs short in which actors perform a real legal deposition transcript. A lawyer gets tangled in an absurd argument with a county employee about what counts as a photocopier, in a dispute over fees for public records.

Documentary filmmaker Cassie Jaye explains how making The Red Pill led her, a feminist, to reevaluate her assumptions about the Men's Rights movement. She argues for listening to people you think of as the enemy.

Lawrence Lessig's 2011 Berkeley book talk based on Republic, Lost, arguing that money in politics creates institutional corruption in Congress. He calls it his favorite version of the talk.

Tom Scott explains how in Norway and other Nordic countries tax returns, and so individual incomes, are public. He looks at the effects of wage transparency and whether it is a good idea, with sources listed in the description.

A short clip of George H. W. Bush and Ronald Reagan answering an audience question on illegal immigration at a 1980 Republican primary debate. Both take notably sympathetic positions, including on schooling for undocumented children.

A short Simpsons clip from Who Shot Mr. Burns Part 1 in which Mr. Burns declares the sun his enemy and plans to block it out.

A short video of five people carrying a live, running web server across the city by public transport to a new datacenter. It stayed powered and connected to the internet the whole way, so there was no downtime.

Patrick Winston's long-running MIT lecture on public speaking teaches heuristic rules for talks. It covers how to start, use time and place, boards, props and slides, and how to inform, persuade and finish.

The first part of Adam Curtis' documentary series on Sigmund Freud and his nephew Edward Bernays, who invented public relations. It shows how Bernays used Freud's ideas to link mass-produced goods to unconscious desires and create modern consumer persuasion.

Veritasium explains why a large share of published research findings may be false, covering p-values, p-hacking, publication bias and low replication rates. It draws on John Ioannidis's well-known paper and describes reforms such as preregistration.

A short explainer on the history and mechanics of public key cryptography and the Diffie-Hellman key exchange. It uses a mixing-paint-colors analogy to show how two parties can agree on a shared secret in public.

Jon Ronson's TED talk on public shaming on Twitter, centered on Justine Sacco and others whose lives were upended by online mobs. He argues we have become a baying crowd and should rethink how we treat each other online.

Not Just Bikes argues that people in walkable, bikeable Dutch cities stay healthy because exercise is built into daily life, which he calls the gym of life. It contrasts this with car-dependent cities that require deliberate workouts.

A Bloomberg mini-documentary on how Vienna keeps housing affordable through large-scale public and social housing. It presents the city as a model strategy for others.

A 13-minute OSCON 2010 talk in which Rob Pike argues about what is wrong with mainstream languages like C++, Java and C#, and presents Go as a response. He discusses verbosity and what lightness means in a language.

About Here looks at the housing crisis and argues for non-market solutions such as co-op and social housing, drawing on Vancouver's situation. It discusses how public supply can hold down rents.

Terence Tao's AMS Einstein Public Lecture at UCLA on the cosmic distance ladder, the chain of methods astronomers use to measure distances from the Earth to distant galaxies. It is aimed at a general audience.

Bloomberg's Hello World episode in which Ashlee Vance visits Shenzhen, a hub of electronics manufacturing and cloning. He meets tech-fueled entrepreneurs working under an authoritarian regime.

Rowan Atkinson speaks against the word 'insulting' in the UK Public Order Act, as part of the Reform Section 5 campaign. He argues for robust free speech and against the slippery slope of criminalizing offense.

John Oliver's Last Week Tonight segment on cities spending public money on privately owned sports stadiums, including how tax-exempt municipal bonds subsidize them.

Nina Paley's TEDxMaastricht talk arguing against copyright and for copyleft and free culture. She argues that restricting ideas harms creativity and that culture belongs to everyone.

A short TheStreet clip in which Dr. Anthony Fauci explains the purpose of masks and why guidance on them shifted during early COVID-19. He says masks protect others and offer some protection to the wearer.

A short audio clip of a 1981 interview in which Republican strategist Lee Atwater explains to a political scientist how the party could win racist voters without using overtly racist language. It was published by The Nation with analysis by Rick Perlstein.

Not Just Bikes explains why Swiss trains are considered among the best in Europe and the world, covering frequency, connections and what riding them is like.