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
-
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 )
-
Listeners Systematically Integrate Hierarchical Tonal Context of Music
Cassano-Coleman, R. Y., Izen, S. C., Piazza, E. A. (2025). Listeners Systematically Integrate Hierarchical Tonal Context, Regardless of Musical Training.... Read more
Posted on 21 February 2026 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
The Molecular Structure of Thought
Bytedance just dropped a paper that might change how AI thinks.Literally.They figured out why LLMs fail at long reasoning — and framed it as chemistry.The... Read more
Posted on 21 February 2026 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
Entry-level Jobs at Big Tech Are Disappearing
Big Tech just quietly repriced the value of a college degree to near zero.The Magnificent Seven (Alphabet, Amazon, Apple, Meta, Microsoft, NVIDIA, Tesla) went... Read more
Posted on 20 February 2026 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
Friday Fotos: A (strange) Variety
Posted on 20 February 2026
CULTURE,
PHILOSOPHY,
SOCIETY
-
Using AI to Improve Our Institutional Infrastructure
Three things that legal and policy wonks should be exploring are how to use AI to improve state capacity, fix liberal democracy, and bust regulatory/legal bloat. Read more
Posted on 19 February 2026 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
Mark Twain on New England Weather, Illustrations by ChatGPT
New England Weather was anthologized in The Literary World Seventh Reader, John Calvin Metcalf, editor (1919). Twain's essay is accompanied by James Russell... Read more
Posted on 19 February 2026 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
India Rising in the World, the Next 30 Years
Ross Douthat interviews Amitav Acharya, NYTimes, Feb. 19, 2026. Douthat's introduction: Right now, 21st-century geopolitics seems like it’s defined by the... Read more
Posted on 19 February 2026 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
Scaling Won't Get You to AGI
Pioneer of causal AI, Judea Pearl, argues that no amount of scaling will get LLMs to AGI.He believes current large language models face fundamental... Read more
Posted on 18 February 2026 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
AGI Has NOT Been Achieved.
In a recent tweet Valerio Capraro explains why recent claims of reaching AGI are wrong: 1) They shift the definition of general intelligence, originally based o... Read more
Posted on 18 February 2026 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
Over and Under the Table
Posted on 18 February 2026
CULTURE,
PHILOSOPHY,
SOCIETY
-
The Future of Computer Programming is Here, and It’s Fun.
Paul Ford, The A.I. Disruption Is Actually Here, and It’s Not Terrible, NYTimes, Feb. 18, 2026. Vibe coding: To vibe code is to make software with prompts sent... Read more
Posted on 18 February 2026 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
Dinner at the Elysian Cafe in Hoboken
Posted on 18 February 2026
CULTURE,
PHILOSOPHY,
SOCIETY
-
Prompt Repetition Improves Non-reasoning LLMs
LLMs process text from left to right — each token can only look back at what came before it, never forward. This means that when you write a long prompt with... Read more
Posted on 18 February 2026 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
Chatbots Have Increased My Sense of Intellectual Agency Such That Being an...
That title links two different assertions: Using chatbots increases my sense of intellectual agency. Because I am an intellectual outsider, being fluent in usin... Read more
Posted on 17 February 2026 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
Across the Hudson from Hoboken
Posted on 17 February 2026
CULTURE,
PHILOSOPHY,
SOCIETY
-
Three Mathematicians Are Not Impressed with the Ability of AI to Do...
Siobhan Roberts, These Mathematicians Are Putting A.I. to the Test, NYTimes, Feb. 7, 2026. Dr. Martin Hairer (Swiss Federal Technology Institute of Lausanne),... Read more
Posted on 16 February 2026 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
Chinese Dancing Robots
đ¤ŻAbsolutely insane. Unitree's humanoid robot team's performance at the 2026 Spring Festival GalaThe significance of the humanoid robot's... Read more
Posted on 16 February 2026 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
3 Hoboken Scenes and 1 Hudson River/Manhattan
Posted on 16 February 2026
CULTURE,
PHILOSOPHY,
SOCIETY
-
Wild Child, Dogs, and Menstruation in Wuthering Heights
Prompt to Claude 4.5: I found the following in my notes. What about the questions I ask at the end? “Take Wuthering Heights, 1847, and the character of... Read more
Posted on 15 February 2026 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
A Slow Boat to the End of the World
Posted on 15 February 2026
CULTURE,
PHILOSOPHY,
SOCIETY
