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 ( 7846 )
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Lakota America – Beyond Little Bighorn and Beyond Wounded Knee, Still Vital
Writing in the NYTimes Parul Sehgal reviews Pekka Hamalainen, Lakota America, A New History of Indigenous Power, (Yale 2019): All nations deserve to have their... Read more
Posted on 27 October 2019 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
Protests Have Been on the Rise Since the 1950s, but Success Rate Has Been Doing...
Max Fisher and Amanda Taub, The Interpreter, NYTimes, Oct. 26 2019: The world is changing in ways that make people likelier to seek sweeping political change... Read more
Posted on 26 October 2019 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
Three Cheers for The Kominsky Method, and for Grace and Frankie as Well [Media...
Why? Because they’re about old people, and they depict us [who me? old? well I’m 71] as having interesting and tricky lives, and as growing and looking ahead.... Read more
Posted on 26 October 2019 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
The Computational Envelope of Language – Once More into the Breach
Time to saddle-up and once more ride my current hobby horse, or one of them at least. In this case, the idea that natural language is the simplest aspect of... Read more
Posted on 26 October 2019 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
Martin Luther King: "On the Importance of Jazz"
Listen to these clips as read by artists in the San Francisco Bay area (2 minutes): From Open Culture: As jazz musicians embraced the movement, so the movement... Read more
Posted on 26 October 2019 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
Politics on YouTube: Rar-right Viewership Peaked in 2017
Kevin Munger Joseph Phillips, A Supply and Demand Framework for YouTube Politics, Preprint, October 1, 2019. Abstract: Youtube is the most used social... Read more
Posted on 26 October 2019 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
Lost...amid the Trees...delicious
Posted on 26 October 2019
CULTURE,
PHILOSOPHY,
SOCIETY
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The King’s Wayward Eye: For Claude Lévi-Strauss
I originally published this at The Valve, which seems to have disappeared from the web, in November of 2009, roughly two weeks after Lévi-Strauss had died on... Read more
Posted on 25 October 2019 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
Friday Fotos: Night in Jersey City
Posted on 25 October 2019
CULTURE,
PHILOSOPHY,
SOCIETY
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Given That Some AI Programs Can Be Used for Evil Ends, What Are Responsible...
Rebecca Crootof, Artificial Intelligence Research Needs Responsible Publication Norms, Lawfare, Oct. 24, 2019: After nearly a year of suspense and controversy,... Read more
Posted on 24 October 2019 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
Tap Dancing with Gene Kelly and Sugar Ray Robinson
Enjoy Gene Kelly as he presents Dancing Is a Man's Game on Omnibus on 12/21/1958. This performance features Mr. Kelly dancing with sports legends Edward... Read more
Posted on 24 October 2019 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
INEQUALITY!! Sparks Rising Tide of Protests World-wide [but the Success Rate is...
Declan Walsh and Max Fisher, From Chile to Lebanon, Protests Flare Over Wallet Issues, NYTimes, Oct 23, 2019. LONDON — In Chile, the spark was an increase in... Read more
Posted on 24 October 2019 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
Henry Farrell on Weaponized Interdependence & Regulating the Internet [Tyler...
Tyler Cowen converses with (Crooked Timber's) Henry Farrell on this that and the other, including the internet: COWEN: Now, we’re chatting in early October,... Read more
Posted on 23 October 2019 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
What I Did Before Going to Bed Yesterday, More Photo Madness [sunflower Seeds]
1. The "original", a realistic rendering of the RAW file that came out of the camera. 2. Derived from 1. 3. Derived from 1. 4. Derived from 1. 5. Derived from 1... Read more
Posted on 23 October 2019 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
Heart of Darkness is 16th Most Assigned Text Across a Collection of Seven Millio...
About the Open Syllabus Project: The Open Syllabus Project (OSP) collects and analyzes millions of syllabi to support educational research and novel teaching an... Read more
Posted on 23 October 2019 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
Local Narrative Logic and Global Order, Or How We Get from Here to There in Hear...
Note: This is a stand-in for an idea that needs to be more fully developed. The problem posed by form Not long after I began working on Heart of Darkness I... Read more
Posted on 22 October 2019 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
What I Did This Morning, a Sequence of Photographs
1. First rendering. 2. Grayscale image derived from first rendering. 3. Second grayscale image derived from first rendering. 4. Likely derived from 2nd grayscal... Read more
Posted on 22 October 2019 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
Will Exxon Mobile Finally Pay up for Deceiving Its Investors, and the Public,...
Lee Wasserman, Did Exxon Deceive Its Investors on Climate Change? NYTimes, Oct. 21, 2019. But in internal memos dating back to the 1970s, Exxon predicted that... Read more
Posted on 22 October 2019 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
Whole-brain Network Topology, the Ascending Arousal System, and Information...
Li M, Han Y, Aburn MJ, Breakspear M, Poldrack RA, Shine JM, et al. (2019) Transitions in information processing dynamics at the whole-brain network level are... Read more
Posted on 22 October 2019 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
Technology Adoption
We overestimate how fast technology adoption has historically occurred. Take the transition from animal to mechanical: the first canaries in coal mines were... Read more
Posted on 21 October 2019 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY
