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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Reflections on Entering My Eighth Decade and Why Portends to Be the Most...
In destinies sad or merry, true men can but try. – Sir Gawain and the Green Knight In scientific prognostication we have a condition analogous to a fact of... Read more
Posted on 18 December 2017 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
To Mars, Because We Can, Really
Because right now, we think we can't, build for a future, that is, we're sticking our collective heads in the sand and saying "Oh, noes! Read more
Posted on 18 December 2017 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
Mind Or Machine?
I have, in various posts, expressed skepticism about the long-standing conversation about whether or not the mind is computational. Read more
Posted on 17 December 2017 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
Emotional Intelligence for Artificial Beings? With a Potential Application to...
2AI Labs, Tim Barber and Mark Changizi, has announced a model of emotion: VICTOR Socio-Emotional AI. We at 2ai Labs have spent the last decade deciphering the... Read more
Posted on 16 December 2017 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
Friday Fotos: Snoboken
Posted on 15 December 2017
CULTURE,
PHILOSOPHY,
SOCIETY
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Group Identity
From an essay, The age of white guilt: and the disappearance of the black individual (Harper's, November 1999), by Shelby Steele: The greatest problem in... Read more
Posted on 15 December 2017 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
Structuralists Behaving Badly at Johns Hopkins
The Quarterly Conversation has just published an essay excerpted from Cynthia L. Haven, Evolution of Desire: A Life of René Girard (Michigan St. U. Press 2018). Read more
Posted on 14 December 2017 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
Should I Refuse to Watch a Movie Because Harvey Weinstein Was Involved?
Alas, I'm SOL because I've seen many films he's produced. But going forward? The New York Times has a short story about a publicaly searchable database, Rotten... Read more
Posted on 14 December 2017 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
Peer Review is Known to Be Ineffective in the Sciences
So why is the practice continued? Writing in Times Higher Education, Les Hatton and Gregory Warr identify various problems and then observe: We are not the firs... Read more
Posted on 14 December 2017 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
Teaching World Literature
Martin Puchner, Inside Higher Education: More to the point, world literature is a phenomenon of the southern United States. The 11 southern states contained onl... Read more
Posted on 13 December 2017 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
The Problem of State Capacity in India
Shruti Rajagopalan in LiveMint: Lant Pritchett famously labelled India a flailing state—one where “the head, that is the elite institutions at the national... Read more
Posted on 13 December 2017 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
Sometimes Seeing is Hearing
Heather Murphy in the NYTimes: This week, in an improbable turn of events, the sound of silence went viral. An animated GIF showing an electrical tower jumping... Read more
Posted on 13 December 2017 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
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
