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 ( 7356 )
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From Distant Reading to Computational Criticism: Canon/Archive @ 3QD [#DH]
As far as I can tell literary studies will remain committed to pre-computational intellectual formations for the foreseeable future and will do so from a... Read more
Posted on 12 December 2017 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
"To the Moon", Trump Said, "and Then Mars"
I don't quite know what I think of this (NYTimes): WASHINGTON — At a time when China is working on an ambitious lunar program, President Donald Trump vowed on... Read more
Posted on 12 December 2017 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
Neuroscience Needs Behavior, and Literary Behavior is Among the Richest There is
Not only that, but it leaves records of its unfolding in the form of texts. Our task is to "reverse engineer" the activity by analyzing the texts. Something mor... Read more
Posted on 11 December 2017 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
Dead Leaves Rainbow for a Monday
Posted on 11 December 2017
CULTURE,
PHILOSOPHY,
SOCIETY
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Touching Males
Andrew Reiner, "The Power of Touch, Especially for Men", New York Times: Of course, it would not be surprising if recent allegations of sexual assault by... Read more
Posted on 11 December 2017 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
Is America Too Large and Diverse for Effective Governance?
Ross Douthat in the NYTimes, "The Baker and the Empire": The United States has the rules of a democratic republic but, increasingly, the cultural divisions of... Read more
Posted on 11 December 2017 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
On the Binding of Word Forms to Structures of Meaning: A Quick Note on...
The basic linguistic process is the binding of word forms to structures of meaning. I think that is an irreducibly computational process. Just how that... Read more
Posted on 10 December 2017 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
Don Giovanni on the Front Page
Writing in Musicology Now, the blog of the American Musicological Society, Kristi Brown-Montesano takes a look at Mozart's Don Giovanni, an opera about a... Read more
Posted on 09 December 2017 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
Friday Fotos: From Yesterday's Shoot
Posted on 08 December 2017
CULTURE,
PHILOSOPHY,
SOCIETY
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Calculating Meaning in “Kubla Khan” – a Rough Cut
In the spring of 1969 I became interested in Coleridge's "Kubla Khan". In the fall of 1970 I began drafting a master's thesis on the poem, hoping to create the... Read more
Posted on 08 December 2017 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
Is the Study of English Lit Going to Implode in the Next Quarter Century?
Competition with Comm / Media Studies could lead English to: 1) Make our engagement with contemporary society more rigorous, or 2) Just cut the anchor connectin... Read more
Posted on 08 December 2017 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
Small Groups and Long Memories Make for Cooperation
At Phys.org: In a new paper, published in the journal Scientific Reports, University of Pennsylvania researchers use game theory to demonstrate the complex set... Read more
Posted on 07 December 2017 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
How the Peculiar Power of Ta-Nehisi Coates Feeds on White Guilt and Despair
Brendan O'Neill, in Spiked: His insights are bleak; they are for the most part an intellectualised version of the 21st-century politics of identity and... Read more
Posted on 06 December 2017 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
Dizzy Gillespie, “21st-century Gabriel”
Writing in The American Scholar David Grogan has given us what is perhaps the best short introduction to the life and achievement of John Birks "Dizzy"... Read more
Posted on 05 December 2017 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
Tim Burke on Contemporary Politics in the USofA
We used to just saddle future generations with deficits climate apocalypse. Now we're more or less forwarding to them ALL the political challenges that we... Read more
Posted on 05 December 2017 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
Hand Style Found in Hoboken
Posted on 05 December 2017
CULTURE,
PHILOSOPHY,
SOCIETY
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Story-telling Among Hunter-gatherers Supports Cooperation
Cooperation and the evolution of hunter-gatherer storytelling Daniel Smith, Philip Schlaepfer, Katie Major, Mark Dyble, Abigail E. Read more
Posted on 05 December 2017 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
Inner Speech, Just Like Outer, Except It's Internal, and Silent to the Outer...
Neurophysiological evidence of efference copies to inner speech Thomas J Whitford, Bradley N Jack, Daniel Pearson, Oren Griffiths, David Luque, Anthony WF... Read more
Posted on 05 December 2017 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
Not with a Bang, but with a Rainbow of Ducks and a Departing Hyperobject
• • • • • • Read more
Posted on 05 December 2017 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
The Long Reach of Disney: Today's Tweets
I saw this: This Is Why Evolution Started Credits: Dan Piraro Bizarro Comics pic.twitter.com/OVdMyEbMUt — Science (@scienmag) December 5, 2017 And replied with... Read more
Posted on 05 December 2017 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY
