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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Singing and Social Bonding
Daniel Weinstein, Jacques Launay, Eiluned Pearce, Robin I.M. Dunbar, Lauren Stewart. Singing and social bonding: changes in connectivity and pain threshold as... Read more
Posted on 21 November 2015 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
Bruce Jackson on Authenticity
Bruce Jackson does a number of things. for the purpose of this post let's say he's a folklorist and a photographer. I studied with him at SUNY Buffalo. Read more
Posted on 21 November 2015 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
Cultural Evolution: Pop Music in America 1960-2010
Matthias Mauch, Robert M. MacCallum, Mark Levy, Armand M. Leroi. The evolution of popular music: USA 1960–2010. Royal Society Open Science. 2015 2 150081; DOI:... Read more
Posted on 20 November 2015 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
Friday Fotos: Thursday Morning
I had breakfast yesterday at my favorite diner, the Malibu, on 14th street in Hoboken. Here I'm sitting in my booth looking out at an apartment complex. Read more
Posted on 20 November 2015 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
Problematic Identifications: The Wind Rises as a Japanese Film
When we say that a film is Japanese, what do we mean? First of all, and most fundamentally, we mean that it is made by Japanese artisans in Japan. In that... Read more
Posted on 20 November 2015 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
Piaget, Reflective Abstraction and the Evolution of Literary Criticism
While Piaget is best known for investigating conceptual development in children, he also looked at conceptual development on the historical time scale. Read more
Posted on 19 November 2015 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
The Wind Rises: A Note About Failure, Human and Natural
Horikoshi interacts with Gianni Caproni, the Italian aircraft designer, three times in the film. The first, third, and fourth times seem to involve dream... Read more
Posted on 18 November 2015 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
Disney Landmark: Steamboat Willie Debuted on This Day Back in 1928
On this day back in 1928 Walt Disney released Steamboat Willie. It was the first Disney cartoon with synchronized sound: Disney understood from early on that... Read more
Posted on 18 November 2015 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
Self-awareness, Self-regulation, and Self-transcendence
REVIEW ARTICLE Front. Hum. Neurosci., 25 October 2012 | http://dx.doi.org/10.3389/fnhum.2012.00296 Self-awareness, self-regulation, and self-transcendence... Read more
Posted on 18 November 2015 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
Horikoshi Among Us Today: Sweet Technollogy
This is from a New Yorker profile of Nick Bostrom, who believes that the development of super intelligent machines is inevitable and who worries about what... Read more
Posted on 17 November 2015 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
Astonishing Visuals in The Wind Rises, a Note
The Wind Rises doesn’t have the visual flamboyance of Spirited Away, Princess Mononoke, or even Howl’s Moving Castle. We don’t have all those saturated colors... Read more
Posted on 17 November 2015 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
Fuji, Cherry Blossoms, and Tuberculosis in The Wind Rises
Written the day after I’d written Horikoshi’s Wife: Affective Binding and Grief in The Wind Rises [3QD]. Consider the associations emanating from Naoko Satomi:... Read more
Posted on 17 November 2015 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
An Architecture for Learning Language
A Cognitive Neural Architecture Able to Learn and Communicate through Natural Language Bruno Golosio , Angelo Cangelosi, Olesya Gamotina, Giovanni Luca Masala... Read more
Posted on 16 November 2015 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
Horikoshi’s Wife: Affective Binding and Grief in The Wind Rises [3QD]
01:38:27 I chose to write about Miyazaki’s The Wind Rises for this months column in 3 Quarks Daily: Why Miyazaki’s The Wind Rises is Not Morally Repugnant. Read more
Posted on 16 November 2015 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
Why They Fight for ISIS
Lydia Wilson reports in The Nation, about interviews with captured members of ISIS: At the end of the interview with the first prisoner we ask, “Do you have... Read more
Posted on 16 November 2015 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
The Rise of Secession in the Current World: More and Smaller Nations
Alberto Alesina and Enrico Spolaore write: Since the end of the Second World War, the number of independent states has nearly tripled. Read more
Posted on 14 November 2015 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
Peter Singer on a Darwinian Left
This is a 1998 interview about a book (A Darwinian Left) that Singer would publish a year later: If the left takes account of evolutionary psychology, Singer... Read more
Posted on 13 November 2015 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
Friday Fotos: Time for Anther Trip to the Twilight Zone
Posted on 13 November 2015
CULTURE,
PHILOSOPHY,
SOCIETY
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I Am Multitudes, and So Are You: The Latest Science
In Perspectives on Psychological Science: Humans as Superorganisms How Microbes, Viruses, Imprinted Genes, and Other Selfish Entities Shape Our Behavior Peter... Read more
Posted on 13 November 2015 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
Fabula and Syuzhet in the Tristram Shandy Handbook
To my knowledge there is no Tristram Shandy Handbook, nor a handbook for any other literary text. What do a mean by handbook? I’m imagining a single source... Read more
Posted on 12 November 2015 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY
