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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"Lawfare" Comes of Age [@lawfareblog]
I first became aware of Lawfare through a wonderful March 3 post by Benjamin Wittes and Quinta Jurecic, What Happens When We Don’t Believe the President’s Oath? Read more
Posted on 14 July 2017 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
Friday Fotos: Five Views of a Painted Reptile on the Rocks
May 7, 2011 May 7, 2011 July 1, 2011 August 7, 2011 July 9, 2017 Read more
Posted on 14 July 2017 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
Once More, a History of American Lit Crit, This Time with Politics
Writing in the LA Review of Books, Bruce Robbins reviews Joseph North, Literary Criticism: A Concise Political History (Harvard 2017). An interesting review of... Read more
Posted on 14 July 2017 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
Walter Murch on Being Immersed in a Film Project and Then Pulling Yourself out
Walter Murch is perhaps best-known for his work on Apocalypse Now, where he did the sound design (for which he won and Oscar) and much of the editing. Read more
Posted on 13 July 2017 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
MAGA: A Conspiracy of Oligarchs Vs. the Rest of Us?
Just a quick take: We know that prior to becoming President Donald Trump was doing business in Russia. We now know that the Trump campaign – DJ Jr. Read more
Posted on 12 July 2017 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
Ted Underwood on Intellectual Genealogies: Distant Reading is Social-Science, No...
Ted Underwood, “A Genealogy of Distant Reading”, DHQ Vol. 11, No. 2, 2017: Abstract: It has recently become common to describe all empirical approaches to... Read more
Posted on 10 July 2017 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
The Insane Confusion About Culture That's Behind Too Much Contemporary Thinking
From an essay by Walten Benn Michaels, The Myth of ‘Cultural Appropriation’: The logic is on vivid display in a TV ad for Ancestry. Read more
Posted on 10 July 2017 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
Green Villain, Ecotrek into the Arches
Posted on 09 July 2017
CULTURE,
PHILOSOPHY,
SOCIETY
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Terrorists, Collateral Damage, and Trolley Problems
Moral philosophers in the analytic tradition like to run thought experiments of a kind known as the trolley problem: There is a runaway trolley barreling down... Read more
Posted on 09 July 2017 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
Collective Computation
Joshua Sokol interviews Jessica Flack at the Santa Fe Institute. She says: Collective computation is about how adaptive systems solve problems. Read more
Posted on 09 July 2017 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
Images and Objectivity
Ryan Cordell has an interesting post, Objectivity and Distant Reading, in which he comments on Objectivity (2010) by Lorraine Daston and Peter Galison:... Read more
Posted on 08 July 2017 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
Friday Fotos: Graffiti Fragments
Posted on 07 July 2017
CULTURE,
PHILOSOPHY,
SOCIETY
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Bill McKibben on the New Nation-states
Writing in The New Republic: But the Paris decision may also reshape the world for the better, or at least the very different. Read more
Posted on 07 July 2017 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
Two Problems for the Human Sciences, and Two Metaphors
For as long as I can remember such things – back to my undergraduate years in the 1960s – humanists have been defending themselves and their work against all... Read more
Posted on 06 July 2017 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
The Soverign State of New York?
Will the citizen's of New York decide to amend the state's constitution to give the state greater independence from the federal government? Read more
Posted on 06 July 2017 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
Blue America is Going Around the Federal Government on Climate Change
David Roberts, in Vox: "States and cities are forming a kind of parallel national government around climate change." In recoiling from Trump, states, cities, an... Read more
Posted on 30 June 2017 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
Friday Fotos: Across the River
Posted on 30 June 2017
CULTURE,
PHILOSOPHY,
SOCIETY
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The Unintelligibilityopacity of AI Systems
In the old days of classical symbolic AI program logic was "hand-coded" and based on expert knowledge of the application domain. Read more
Posted on 28 June 2017 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
Humans as Pattern-seekers
Last week I’d posted a video in which Jeremy Lent sketches out a transformation in which humankind manages to escape climate catastrophe. Read more
Posted on 28 June 2017 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
Multifractals (fractals Within Fractals) in Literary Texts
From Science Daily: James Joyce, Julio Cortazar, Marcel Proust, Henryk Sienkiewicz and Umberto Eco. Regardless of the language they were working in, some of... Read more
Posted on 28 June 2017 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY
