Bbenzon
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 ( 6438 )
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The Rise of the Rest
Pankaj Mishra reviews Niall Ferguson, Civilisation: The West and the Rest (2011) in the London Review of Books. Here's an excerpt: Needless to say, most... Read more
Posted on 18 September 2014 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
Graffiti Aesthetics 2: Learning to See
This originally appeared at The Valve on August 18, 2007. Upon re-reading it I rather like it. I'd forgotten I'd undertaken this kind of analytic and descriptiv... Read more
Posted on 18 September 2014 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
How It's Done, Part 3: Project Management (GVM008)
Whatever the artist wants, the artist gets, coffee in this case: Checking the project plan (notice the relaxed configuration of the ocular photon filter):... Read more
Posted on 18 September 2014 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
Citizen Scholars in the Digital Age
In William G. Thomas, III and Elizabeth Lorang, The Other End of the Scale: Rethinking the Digital Experience in Higher Education: Tufts University Professor... Read more
Posted on 17 September 2014 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
Kidz These Days, Jazz is Corrupting Our Youth...
...and you were there Though it's not identified as such, I think this is a clip from an old TV show called "You Were There", which purposted to re-enact... Read more
Posted on 17 September 2014 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
Graffiti Aesthetics: Five Easy Pieces
First published at The Valve in 2007. Even as Tim Burke had been calling for explicit and focused aesthetic commentary on popular culture, I was thinking of... Read more
Posted on 17 September 2014 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
MacArthur Fellowship Update 2014: Still Favoring Elite Institutions
Last year I wrote a series of posts on the MacArthur Fellowship Program (tagged “MacArthurFP” on New Savanna) in which I argued that they should stop giving... Read more
Posted on 17 September 2014 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
Throw It All Away: American Heartache Sick of Society
It started with an email to Jon Naar: Let’s meet. Naar, as you may recall, did the first book on graffiti. He took the photos back in '72, found a publisher, an... Read more
Posted on 16 September 2014 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
How It's Done, Part 2: Tools and Methods (GVM008)
In the middle we have aerosol cans, the traditional medium of graffiti writers and used by street artists as well. The water is for thinning bucket paint. Read more
Posted on 15 September 2014 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
Do All Evolutionary Roads Lead to Rome?
Emily Singer in Quanta Magazine: In his fourth-floor lab at Harvard University, Michael Desai has created hundreds of identical worlds in order to watch... Read more
Posted on 15 September 2014 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
Versions of Little Nemo
From the caption at YouTube: A bit of history and comparison of Little Nemo in animation. The first pilot, after McCay's original short film, is actually... Read more
Posted on 15 September 2014 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
Does Evolution Have a Direction?
Of course. In press, corrected proof. John E. Stewart, The direction of evolution: The rise of cooperative organization, Biosystems, June 2014, DOI:... Read more
Posted on 15 September 2014 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
Shrine of the Triceratops: A Graffiti Primer
Or: Indiana Jones and the Green Dinosaur, a Tale of Exploration, Deduction, and Interpretation in the Wilds of Jersey City This is the first post I made about... Read more
Posted on 14 September 2014 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
Symposium on Universal Basic Income (UBI)
Appearing in the Boston Review, discussion took place back in 2000. Philippe Van Parijs makes the opening statement and then replies to comments on it. Read more
Posted on 13 September 2014 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
Multimodal Biofeedback Facilitates "inner Harmony"
Thilo Hinterberger at h+ Magazine: The Sensorium is a neurofeedback environment that allows people to experience signals from their nonperceptible body processe... Read more
Posted on 13 September 2014 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
Literature, Emotion, and Unity of Being
I've uploaded a new working paper. Here's the SSRN link: http://ssrn.com/abstract=2495398 Abstract and introduction are below. Read more
Posted on 12 September 2014 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
Friday Fotos: Flowers
Posted on 12 September 2014 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
Dyslexia is Different for Chinese Than for Europeans
From the Economist: Learning to read a language with an alphabet requires learning to sound out words; the visual form maps on to the sound of the word. Read more
Posted on 12 September 2014 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
Has Adulthood Been Demolished?
A.O. Scott in the NYTimes: What all of these shows grasp at, in one way or another, is that nobody knows how to be a grown-up anymore. Adulthood as we have know... Read more
Posted on 11 September 2014 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
TO WAR! Part 2: A Marx Brothers Analysis of America's War Craziness
Another old time good one. The post is from 2011, the movie from 1933. And, at this rate, the movie will still be relevant in 2033. Think we'll be over it by... Read more
Posted on 11 September 2014 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY