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 ( 7626 )
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Is Online "community" Displacing Real Face-to-face Community in a Way That...
Justin Hendrix, at Medium, Bike lanes and World War II The Facebook Manifesto in a Time of Crisis: The average American consumer spends nearly an hour on... Read more
Posted on 02 September 2017 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
Boundaries and Knowing
The relationship between mother and infant has come up in a discussion over at Crooked Timber, so I decided to boost this 2011 post to the top of the queue.... Read more
Posted on 02 September 2017 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
Friday Fotos: Some Varieties of Water
Posted on 01 September 2017
CULTURE,
PHILOSOPHY,
SOCIETY
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How Mainstream Literary Criticism Hobbles Thinkers Seeking to Understand Literar...
By insisting on purely discursive methods, that’s how. I’ve said this before, in various ways. But I now see it in a different light. Let me explain. Read more
Posted on 01 September 2017 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
The Urban Pastoral
April 1, 2011: Another piece from the old days at The Valve. I figure if we're going to transform our urban environments, we've got to take ownership of them. Read more
Posted on 31 August 2017 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
The Twitter is Taking Potshots at the NYTimes Op-Ed Page
This tweet's from political scientist, Dan Drezner: Hey @nytimes if you'll run this Erik Prince advertorial I got a killer "Why Profs Should Be Worshipped Like... Read more
Posted on 31 August 2017 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
Keeping Track of Myself – Lit Crit, #DH, Prospero, Metagramming, Cultural...
I’ve completed to of the items that entered my to-do list last week: Virtual reading as a path through a multidimensional-dimensional semantic space: This is a... Read more
Posted on 30 August 2017 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
Computer-generated Stories in the 1960s [#DH]
James Ryan, Grimes' Fairy Tales: A 1960s Story Generator, Expressive Intelligence Studio, University of California, Santa Cruz, [email protected] Abstract. Read more
Posted on 30 August 2017 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
LARB Interviews Alejandro Jodorowsky: "The Work is to Live All Our Years at...
I saw Jodorowsky's El Topo when it first toured the States, back in the early 1970s. It blew my mind. I had to see it again, and I did. Maybe even a third... Read more
Posted on 30 August 2017 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
A Biologist Talks About Race
Greg Meyer over at Why Evolution is True: To begin with, race is not a technical term in biology—it is used loosely for any differentiated subdivision of a... Read more
Posted on 29 August 2017 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
Reply to a Traditional Critic About Computational Criticism: Or, It’s Time to...
A couple of weeks ago I posted “In search of a small world net: Computing an emblem in Heart of Darkness” [1], which was about a computational procedure for... Read more
Posted on 29 August 2017 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
Ghost Dancing at 3 Quarks Daily
Jim Culleny’s Monday Poem for Monday, August 28, 2017, is called “Ghost Dancing”. He prefaces it with this brief statement: Wovoka (named Jack Wilson in... Read more
Posted on 28 August 2017 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
Hurricane Harvey Update
Here's a podcast featuring Tim Morton, speaking from the flood. He and his family are OK, though a bit wet. He's discussing the hurricane and philosophy. "But i... Read more
Posted on 28 August 2017 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
Sunday Special: Madam Wayquay's Words to Ponder
Posted on 27 August 2017
CULTURE,
PHILOSOPHY,
SOCIETY
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Instrument Matter in the Musician’s Mind: Part 2, How to Construct a Spirit
Culture has produced some strange things. Supernatural spirits is one of them. I'm bumping this post to the top of the queue just to get it on my mind, as I nee... Read more
Posted on 27 August 2017 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
Virtual Reading as a Path Through a Multidimensional-dimensional Semantic Space...
In my post, In search of a small world net, I speculated about analyzing Heart of Darkness with some appropriate vector space semantic model so that we could... Read more
Posted on 26 August 2017 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
Friday Fotos: Look, up in the Sky...
Posted on 25 August 2017
CULTURE,
PHILOSOPHY,
SOCIETY
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Metagram Software - A New Perspective on the Art of Computation
Back in the ancient days of 1980 or thereabouts my teacher, the late David Hays, got a small grant from the Air Force to study metagramming. What, you may ask,... Read more
Posted on 25 August 2017 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
Donald the Loser: Ben Wittes on Trump as a Security Threat
In March of 2016 Lawfare's Ben Wittes wrote a post in which he evaluated seven liabilities the candidate seemed to have. He's now written a post evaluating... Read more
Posted on 23 August 2017 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
Free Audio Version of Heart of Darkness Online, and It is Excellent
"Reading" and "interpretation" have common meanings that are, at best, secondary or even tertiary to academic literary criticism. Authors sometimes give reading... Read more
Posted on 23 August 2017 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY
