Bbenzon
Description
Humankind got its start on the African savannas some hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of years ago. At various times in our cultural history we’ve moved to distinctly new cultural ground, as it were. And so we are moving now, and have been for the past half century. This blog is how I see that move. Intellectually, I'm broadly interested in culture and the brain. Within that compass, anything could show up here. Literature and films (including animation), certainly, music as well, and graffiti. But, other things may show up as well. It's a blog, don't you know, it moves.
MY BLOGS
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New Savanna
http://new-savanna.blogspot.com/
Humankind got its start on the African savannas some hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of years ago. At various times in our cultural history we’ve moved to distinctly new cultural ground, as it were. And so we are moving now, and have been for the past half century. This blog is how I see that move. I'm broadly interested in culture and the brain. Within that compass, anything could show up here. Literature and films (including animation), certainly, music as well, and graffiti. But, other things may show up as well. It's a blog, don't you know, it moves.
LATEST ARTICLES ( 7640 )
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Ezra Klein on the Deep Problem Posed by Social Media
From a conversation with Tyler Cowen: I think that social media and the way we deal with it — and this is true in a lot of places — we end up focusing on, one,... Read more
Posted on 29 January 2020 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
Trump and TV: They Grew up Together
In this episode of Bloggingheads.tv Aryeh Cohen-Wade interviews James Poniewozik, chief TV critic with The New York Times. Poniewozik has just published Audienc... Read more
Posted on 28 January 2020 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
Aligned in the Crosshairs
Posted on 28 January 2020
CULTURE,
PHILOSOPHY,
SOCIETY
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The Current Coronavirus Pandemic is One in a Continuing Series [biology is Bigge...
David Quammen, We Made the Coronavirus Epidemic, NYTimes, Jan 28, 2020. ...this Wuhan emergency is no novel event. It’s part of a sequence of related... Read more
Posted on 28 January 2020 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
Two Modes of Religious Expression and Organization
R.I.M. Dunbar, Religion, the Social Brain and the Mystical Stance, forthcoming in Archive for the Psychology of Religion. Abstract: This paper explores the... Read more
Posted on 27 January 2020 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
Sun Showers
Posted on 21 January 2020
CULTURE,
PHILOSOPHY,
SOCIETY
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The Third 20th-century Revolution in Physics [non-linear Dynamics]
Ashutosh Jogalekar,has an interesting article, The Fermi-Pasta-Ulam-Tsingou problem: A foray into the beautifully simple and the simply beautiful (3 Quarks... Read more
Posted on 21 January 2020 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
Yuval Levin on the Collapse of Institutions in Contemporary America
"Collapse" may not be quite the right word, but read these paragraphs from his current article in the NYTimes, How Did Americans Lose Faith in Everything? Read more
Posted on 19 January 2020 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
Friday Fotos: Random One
Posted on 17 January 2020
CULTURE,
PHILOSOPHY,
SOCIETY
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TwoSet Violin – In Synch and Holding It in
I’ve been watching a lot of TwoSet Violin recently and wanted to bring two rather different videos to your attention. The title of the first is... Read more
Posted on 17 January 2020 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
Thomas Chatterton Williams on Living in the Muddle [abundance]
Thomas Chatterton Williams, An Incoherent Truth, Harper's Magazine, February 2020. Like Nietzsche (and Schmitt), Hannah Arendt argued forcefully that life is... Read more
Posted on 17 January 2020 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
Eat What You Love, Love What You Eat, in Midtown Manhattan
Posted on 14 January 2020
CULTURE,
PHILOSOPHY,
SOCIETY
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Nina Paley on Sex and Life
Nina Paley reflects on sex and her complex experience of it in, My Sex-Positive Memoirs, 4W, January 14, 2020. It's mostly about her years in San Francisco in... Read more
Posted on 14 January 2020 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
Ceaze, Meres – Jersey City Wall of Fame
Posted on 13 January 2020
CULTURE,
PHILOSOPHY,
SOCIETY
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Midnight Diner: Tokyo Stories [Media Notes 31]
I’m now well into the second season of Midnight Diner: Tokyo Stories. It’s one of my favorite series (on Netflix), but I don’t binge it. Rather, I watch an... Read more
Posted on 13 January 2020 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
Hilary Hahn on Daydreaming as a Mode of Practicing Music, of Priming Yourself...
Some time in the last week I discovered TwoSet Violin, a YouTube channel for two Australian violinists, Brett Yang and Eddy Chen. Read more
Posted on 12 January 2020 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
Sky, Trees, Houses
Posted on 11 January 2020
CULTURE,
PHILOSOPHY,
SOCIETY
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Big Tech – The Promised Land No More
A decade ago college grads looked forward to taking a job with one of the big Silicon Valley tech companies as a chance to make a good living while doing good... Read more
Posted on 11 January 2020 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
"Grand Challenges" in the Study of Cultural Evolution
Grand challenges for the study of cultural evolution (PDF) (2017): The founding members of the Cultural Evolution Society were surveyed to identify the major... Read more
Posted on 11 January 2020 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
Clever Hans Does AI – FAKE Performance in Natural Language Processing
Better language models -> more and more subtle forms of overfitting! pic.twitter.com/y8e10jkPs2 — Scott Enderle (@scottenderle) January 11, 2020 Wikipedia:... Read more
Posted on 11 January 2020 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY
