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 ( 7623 )
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First Time Out, Obama Never Doubted He Could Get White Support
From an interview with Ta-Nehisi Coates, in The Atlantic: Coates: Did you have doubts? Obama: Yes. Coates: You did have doubts? Read more
Posted on 20 December 2016 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
The New Immediacy, Live Birth
As some of you no doubt know, Facebook now allows you to broadcast live to FB with your smart phone. I've watched a number of these, a friend driving to work,... Read more
Posted on 20 December 2016 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
Ontology and Cultural Evolution: “Spirit” Or “Geist” and Some of Its Measures
This post is about terminology, but also about things – in particular, an abstract thing – and measurements of those things. The things and measurements arise i... Read more
Posted on 19 December 2016 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
A Cultural Evolution Approach to Digital Media
REVIEW ARTICLE Front. Hum. Neurosci., 15 December 2016 | https://doi.org/10.3389/fnhum.2016.00636 http://journal.frontiersin.org/article/10.3389/fnhum.2016. Read more
Posted on 19 December 2016 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
I Don’t Give a Crap About Consilience!
In the spirit of an old post, I don’t give a crap about science. In his 1998 book, Consilience: The Unity of Knowledge, E. O. Wilson introduced consilience... Read more
Posted on 18 December 2016 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
Collective Trauma in the USofA
The NYTimes: Last month’s presidential election has collective trauma written all over it. For working-class white people whose communities had been hollowed ou... Read more
Posted on 17 December 2016 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
Friday Fotos: Hoboken Winter, December 2010
Posted on 16 December 2016
CULTURE,
PHILOSOPHY,
SOCIETY
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Journey into Shakespeare, a Tedious Adventure – Will the Real Hamlet Stand Up?
I’m inching my way toward a decision to take a serious look at Shakespeare’s Hamlet. I’m thinking about doing a book on ring-composition and I need another... Read more
Posted on 16 December 2016 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
Singing Promotes Cooperation in a Diverse Group of Children.
Good, Arla; Russo, Frank A. Social Psychology, Vol 47(6), 2016, 340-344. http://dx.doi.org/10.1027/1864-9335/a000282 Abstract Previous research involving... Read more
Posted on 15 December 2016 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
Darwin Was an Exploratory Forager: Topic Modeling Our Way Through His Notebooks...
Cognition. 2016 Dec 8;159:117-126. doi: 10.1016/j.cognition.2016.11.012. [Epub ahead of print] Exploration and exploitation of Victorian science in Darwin's... Read more
Posted on 15 December 2016 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
At the Core of Statistical Machine Translation, and Other Things (Google)
NYTimes Magazine, Gideon Lewis-Kraus, The Great A.I. Awakening: When you summarize images, you can divine a picture of what each stage of the summary looks... Read more
Posted on 14 December 2016 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
Joseph Henrich on Cultural Evolution, WEIRD Societies, and Life Among Two Strang...
Just around the corner, HERE. On collective thinking: COWEN: Now, another feature of your model, if I understand it correctly, is that you get more rapid or mor... Read more
Posted on 14 December 2016 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
How People Move in Cities Can Be Investigated by Examining Geo-tags on...
Uncovering Urban Temporal Patterns from Geo-Tagged Photography Silvia Paldino, Dániel Kondor, Iva Bojic, Stanislav Sobolevsky, Marta C. González, Carl... Read more
Posted on 14 December 2016 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
Tyler Cowen on Trump the Deal-Maker as President
Writing in Bloomberg View, Cowen explains: One common feature of many real estate deals is that they are based on selling to different groups of people at... Read more
Posted on 13 December 2016 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
King Trump Assembles His Court
I was struck by a passage in a NYTimes editorial for 12.12.16, “Flawed Choices for the State Department”. It was primarily about the choice of Exxon Mobile CEO... Read more
Posted on 13 December 2016 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
Presidential Politics 2016: The Real, the Ritual, and Beyond the Pale – A...
Well, not exactly. But it’s that strange, really it is. Anyhow, I’ve got an essay about it over at 3 Quarks Daily: Prelude and Exordium to the Ordination,... Read more
Posted on 12 December 2016 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
Alan Liu on Birth of the Cool
Yesterday I'd posted about Olivier Morin Alberto Acerbi (2016): Birth of the cool: a two-centuriesdecline in emotional expression in Anglophone fiction,... Read more
Posted on 11 December 2016 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
Two-centuries Decline in Emotional Expression in Anglophone Fiction
Olivier Morin Alberto Acerbi (2016): Birth of the cool: a two-centuriesdecline in emotional expression in Anglophone fiction, Cognition and Emotion,... Read more
Posted on 10 December 2016 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
Friday Fotos: Madam Wayquay's Salon for the Stressed and Distressed
Posted on 09 December 2016
CULTURE,
PHILOSOPHY,
SOCIETY
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The Sins of Steven Pinker: Or, Let’s Get on with It
Over at Crooked Timber John Holbo has recently initiated a discussion with "evolutionary psychology" in the title: Hazards of Evolutionary Psychology, Royalty... Read more
Posted on 09 December 2016 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY
