DOCUMENTARIES-I-LIKE

Tonight (Saturday, December 22) at 9:00pm ET/PT on Discovery, take a look back at the Frozen Planet documentary, coproduced with the BBC. If you missed it the first time, tonight is a sort of "greatest hits" hour, with some of the best sequences from the

Paul Erd?s was a mathematician. In addition to authoring significant papers himself, he created a series of Erd?s problems in which he offered (often small) cash prizes for solutions to difficult and/or significant mathematical challenges. He also had a

Tonight on the PBS series American Experience, Ric Burns brings us Death and the Civil War, a bleak and wrenching documentary about the 750,000 people who died in the American Civil War. "Never before and never since have so many Americans died in any wa

Image courtesy of Discovery Channel. I'm a big fan of Les Stroud, better known as Survivorman. When his survival show first appeared on Discovery seven years ago, it was a breath of fresh air -- by shooting everything himself (he lugs all the gear with

I've grown up hearing Glenn Gould's two performances of Bach's Goldberg Variations. Gould's first landmark performance was released in 1955, and it was passionate, fast, and popular -- with a runtime of just over 38 minutes, Gould's first performance lef

Designers Charles and Ray Eames built a beautiful house in Los Angeles. They moved in on Christmas Eve 1949, and lived there for the rest of their lives. They called it Case Study House No. 8 (it was one of many "Case Study" houses designed by prominent

Werner Herzog premieres a four-part miniseries tonight (Friday, March 9) on Investigation Discovery at 10pm ET/PT. It's dark, and smart, and well worth your time -- as long as there are no kids in the room. A Question of Retribution On Death Row is

Matt Groening created "The Simpsons," and as we all know, Homer Simpson is the patriarch of the family. Well, Homer was the name of Matt's dad too...but he wasn't a doofus. The late Homer Groening was a documentary filmmaker, a WWII pilot, and a writer,

Self-proclaimed "recreational mathemusician" Vi Hart has posted an excellent short film explaining the science and mathematics of sound, frequency, and pitch. Basically Hart shows us how the chromatic scale was originally measured, how musical instrument

Now here's something special: a 35-minute documentary by Vivian Kubrick (who was then 17 years old) about the making of The Shining. Vivian was Stanley's daughter, and this documentary shows tons of behind-the-scenes material, as she follows actors thro

So I'll go ahead and assume you're aware of King of Kong, the videogame documentary that chronicles an epic struggle to dominate the game of Donkey Kong. Kong was a surprising movie mainly because it was supremely interesting to non-nerds, even though it

NOTE: My interview with Mike Rowe appears below a bunch of discussion of the documentary Human Planet. Jump to the "Interview" heading if that's what you're here for. Human Planet premieres Sunday, April 10 in the US on Discovery. Two episodes air e