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 ( 7105 )
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Kids These Days: Media Use and Parental Fear
My colleague Charlie Keil is worried that kids these days spend too much time with media of one sort or another (as detailed, e.g. Read more
Posted on 24 March 2015 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
Common/mutual Knowledge in the Laboratory
I talked about mutual knowledge in my open letter to Steve Pinker (blog version HERE, PDF version with additional materials HERE). Read more
Posted on 24 March 2015 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
Dogs as Actors
From a NYTimes article about White God, a prize-winning Hungarian film with a cast of 200+ dogs who have to act in sophisticated ways: It took more than five... Read more
Posted on 24 March 2015 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
Free Range Kids in New Zealand, and Lessons from the Māori
Daniel Davies, blogger at Crooked Timber, is going around the world with his family for a year (he made a bit of money in investment banking). They've just spen... Read more
Posted on 22 March 2015 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
The Economic Value of Slaves in Antebellum America: 2nd Most Valuable Capital...
From a 3-year old article on Thomas Jefferson in The Smithsonian Magazine: A startling statistic emerged in the 1970s, when economists taking a hardheaded look... Read more
Posted on 21 March 2015 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
Why is There So Little Opposition to the Hegemony of the Super-rich?
What we have here is a failure of political memory and imagination. Naomi Klein reviews The Age of Acquiescence: The Life and Death of American Resistance to... Read more
Posted on 21 March 2015 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
Where Are the Polymaths of Days Gone By? Who's Going to Make Sense of It All?
Jonathan Haber dove whole-hog into online courses put up by major universities and worked his way through bachelor's worth of courses in a year, documenting... Read more
Posted on 20 March 2015 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
Are We Ruining Our Children by Micromanaging Their Lives?
Clemens Wergin and his family had just moved from Germany to America, where he'd taken a new job. On the family's first day here his 8 year-old daughter... Read more
Posted on 20 March 2015 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
The English Language as Agent of Oppression in Contemporary India
AAatish Taseer in The NYTimes: “English is not a language in India,” a friend once told me. “It is a class.” This friend, an aspiring Bollywood actor, knew... Read more
Posted on 20 March 2015 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
"Intelligence" is Bullsh•t, and AI is Chasing a Mirage
In MIT's Tech Review, a proposal for a revised Turing Test: Riedl agrees that the test should be broad: “Humans have broad capabilities. Conversation is just on... Read more
Posted on 17 March 2015 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
What is Philology?
Eric Ormsby reviews James Turner, Philology: The Forgotten Origins of the Modern Humanities, in The New Criterion. Well into the review we have this paragraph:... Read more
Posted on 15 March 2015 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
Wooly Mammoths Were Around During the Reign of the Pharaohs
i09: We usually think of woolly mammoths as purely Ice Age creatures. But while most did indeed die out 10,000 years ago, one tiny population endured on isolate... Read more
Posted on 14 March 2015 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
Friday Fotos: Irises
George Mantor had an iris garden, which he improved each year by throwing out the commoner varieties. One day his attention was called to another very fine... Read more
Posted on 13 March 2015 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
An Open Letter to Steven Pinker: The Importance of Stories and the Nature of...
Another working paper is now available. URLs: Academia.edu:... Read more
Posted on 13 March 2015 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
Consciousness is Globally Distributed in the Brain
Medical Express reports some work on consciousness at Vanderbilt. You'll need to read the whole article to understand what's going on, but it's not long. Read more
Posted on 13 March 2015 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
A Flickr "favorite", Shooting the Sun
Someone at Flickr just marked this flick as a "favorite": This is one of many photos where I just pointed the camera into the sun and hoped for / counted on... Read more
Posted on 11 March 2015 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
Words as Instruments: Some Passages from Paleopoetics
I recently hosted a “session” at Academia.edu that centered on my open letter to Steven Pinker. One Christopher Collins made some interesting remarks, so I... Read more
Posted on 11 March 2015 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
Amazing: Wet Seal+ and Chuck Close Does Philip Glass
For some reason this photo has proved unusually popular in the last however many hours (it's 4:08 PM, Mar. 10, 2015). Why all the views all of a sudden? Read more
Posted on 10 March 2015 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
What Makes an Interesting, Perhaps Even a Good, Photo?
Here are two recent photos, both of which I like a lot: The first of those has gotten a bit of praise over at Facebook. I haven't even posted the second to... Read more
Posted on 10 March 2015 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
3QD Politics & Social Science Prize (Vote for Me)
Voting is open for the 5th Annual 3QD Politics and Social Science Prize. The rules are explained HERE. Public voting will close on 11 Mar 11:59 pm EST. Kenneth... Read more
Posted on 09 March 2015 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY