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 ( 7628 )
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Getting from HERE to THERE: New York 2140
Science fiction isn’t just thinking about the world out there. It’s also thinking about how that world might be—a particularly important exercise for those who... Read more
Posted on 17 January 2018 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
What's up with the Extended Evolutionary Synthesis (ESS) in Biology?
Kenneth Laland in Aeon: Despite the excitement of all the new data, it’s unlikely to trigger an evolution revolution for the simple reason that science doesn’t... Read more
Posted on 17 January 2018 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
Barbie, Bratz, IP, and #MeToo
Jill Lepore has a fascinating article in The New Yorker about an IP (intellectual property) squabble over Barbie and Bratz dolls, which do billions of dollars i... Read more
Posted on 16 January 2018 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
A Fascinating Visual Illusion
Here's the illusion: pic.twitter.com/thNAPQLZlk — Steven Pinker (@sapinker) January 16, 2018 Look carefully at the coloring on the lines. Read more
Posted on 16 January 2018 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
Language, Computation, and Literary Form
I’ve been making a lot of posts over the past year or so about language, computation, and literary form, with a particular flurry in the last month or two... Read more
Posted on 15 January 2018 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
Alan Jacobs on Adam Roberts on H. G. Wells
Adam Roberts, a British colleague from The Valve, has been blogging his way through the works of H. G. Wells in preparation for writing a literary biography of... Read more
Posted on 15 January 2018 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
Once More, and Thinking of Ring Composition: Why Aren’t Literary Critics...
I keep coming back to this question. Sometimes I think I’ve got an answer, but then, gradually, it goes away. I’m not quite sure what the question is. Read more
Posted on 14 January 2018 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
Fog, Creepy but Not Sinister
Posted on 14 January 2018
CULTURE,
PHILOSOPHY,
SOCIETY
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Let's Get Lost....
Posted on 12 January 2018
CULTURE,
PHILOSOPHY,
SOCIETY
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Ted Underwood on Cultural Analytics and Liberal Education [#DH]
Ted Underwood was scheduled to speak at the 2017 MLA convention at a session on “Varieties of Digital Humanities”. However, his flight to New York got cancelled... Read more
Posted on 12 January 2018 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
Trump, Oprah and the New American Monarchy?
In the wake of assertions that Oprah, you know, should, um, err, run for president, I’ve been thinking about the United Kingdom (aka Great Britain). It’s a... Read more
Posted on 11 January 2018 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
Pope Oprah of the Universal Church of Holistic Gnostic Wellness
Ross Douthat in the NYTimes: We’ve heard about Oprah the entrepreneur, Oprah the celebrity, Oprah the champion of holistic medicine and the enabler of... Read more
Posted on 10 January 2018 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
Tim Morton in a Paragraph, and Some Tomato Sauce
Ted Hamilton reviews Tim Morton's Humankind in the Los Angeles Review of Books. Here's Morton's recent career in a paragraph: Humankind is the latest in a... Read more
Posted on 09 January 2018 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
A Videogame Based on Islamic Geometric Art
Most Western video games about the Middle East involve killing, shooting, and war. This game from Iran, however, is about the beauty of Islamic art. And its cor... Read more
Posted on 08 January 2018 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
Kim Stanley Robinson's Been Reading Object Oriented Ontology
I've been reading Kin Stanley Robinson's New York 2014. Big book, 613 pages. I'm on 399. The title tells you what the book's about. Read more
Posted on 07 January 2018 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
The Difference Between Digital Humanities (DH) and Cultural Analytics (CA)
A tweet stream from this year's MLA Convention, ongoing in New York City. Still thinking about the "Varieties of DH" panel yesterday #mla18 #s347. Read more
Posted on 06 January 2018 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
Psychoactive Drugs and Culture: We Use What We Seek
At the beginning of "Drugs Du Jour" (Aeon) Cody Delistraty points out that Aldous Huxley was opposed to psychoactive drugs in the middle of his career, but... Read more
Posted on 05 January 2018 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
Friday Fotos: Morning Light in Hoboken
Posted on 05 January 2018
CULTURE,
PHILOSOPHY,
SOCIETY
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Daphne Merkin, Publicly, We Say #MeToo. Privately, We Hav...
Daphne Merkin, Publicly, We Say #MeToo. Privately, We Have Misgivings, NYTimes. Near the end: What happened to women’s agency? Read more
Posted on 05 January 2018 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
Youthful Metaphysics
The first guess from one of my 1st graders was “death” and such an awed, somber, reflective hush fell over the class that I didn’t want to tell them that... Read more
Posted on 05 January 2018 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY
