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 ( 7334 )
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Ima Put a Computational Hex on You
YouTube: Drawing on literary histories of the doppelgänger and emphasizing the ambivalent dis/enchantments of the algorithmic ordinary, Shaka McGlotten consider... Read more
Posted on 14 May 2025 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
Flowers Are Creatures of Light
Posted on 14 May 2025 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY
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Toward an Esoteric History of “Kubla Khan” and “Xanadu”
As you may know, I’ve spent a great deal of time over the years working on Coleridge’s “Kubla Khan.”[1] Given the remarks that ChatGPT made about Shakespeare’s... Read more
Posted on 13 May 2025 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
Perhaps Trump is Reshaping the Military in a Necessary Way
Ryan McCarthy, New Threats Require a New Army, NYTimes, May 13, 2025: On the last day of April, Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth signed a memo that has the... Read more
Posted on 13 May 2025 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
Is It Love Or Infatuation?
When I was young I read a letter to “Dear Abby” that said, in so many words, “I really like this guy; how do I tell whether or not it’s love or infatuation.” He... Read more
Posted on 13 May 2025 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
Everywhere is the Touch
My sister wrote this some years ago. Johnstown is where we grew up. It was a steel town until the steel industry went belly up. The final stanzas employ Suzy... Read more
Posted on 12 May 2025 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
Full Force Irises! Attack! Attack!
Posted on 12 May 2025 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY
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OpenAI and Microsoft Are Renegotiating the Terms of Their Deal
Makes sense. TechCrunch: OpenAI is currently in “a tough negotiation” with one of its biggest investors and partners, Microsoft, according to the Financial... Read more
Posted on 12 May 2025 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
Cultivate Joy. It's Good for Your Health.
Catherine Pearson, 3 Ways to Cultivate Joy, NYTimes, May 9, 2025. Person opens by talking about co-hosting the “first-ever Well Festival in Brooklyn, which... Read more
Posted on 12 May 2025 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
Music and Tears: Phenomenology, Science, Philosophy
New working paper. Title above, links, abstract, contents, and introduction below. I end with a clip from the Johnny Carson show which is the basis for one of... Read more
Posted on 11 May 2025 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
Peeka-boo and Tulips
Posted on 11 May 2025 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY
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Toward a Tantric Reading of Shakespeare’s “Th' Expense of Spirit in a Waste of...
I was playing around with ChatGPT, as I often do. In particular, I was playing with its ability to create mandalas, highly stylized devotional images in the... Read more
Posted on 11 May 2025 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
The Zuck Amuck: TechBros Take It to the Mat [Fight Club in the Valley]
View this post on Instagram A post shared by Mark Zuckerberg (@zuck) David Yaffe-Bellany, The Tech Guys Are Fighting. Literally. NYTimes, May 11, 2025. Read more
Posted on 11 May 2025 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
ChatGPT Improves Student Learning
Jin Wang Wenxiang Fan, The effect of ChatGPT on students’ learning performance, learning perception, and higher-order thinking: insights from a... Read more
Posted on 10 May 2025 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
Irises, Two of Them
Posted on 10 May 2025 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY
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On the Need for a Society That Honors Homo Ludens
From a recent conversation I had with either ChatGPT or Claude 3.7, I forget which. As always, my remarks in bold face while the chatbot's are in plain face. Read more
Posted on 10 May 2025 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
Ellen Alaverdyan Rocks “Birdland”
From YouTube: Original Music by Joe Zawinul Special Thanks to Burbank Music Center for the location. https://burbankmusiccenter. Read more
Posted on 10 May 2025 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
Reasoning in Long-Form Story Generation
Alexander Gurung, Mirella Lapata, Learning to Reason for Long-Form Story Generation, arXiv:2503.22828 [cs.CL] Generating high-quality stories spanning... Read more
Posted on 09 May 2025 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
Friday Fotos: Five Flower Mandalas
I created these by giving ChatGPT a photograph of a flower and asking it to create a mandala based on that photo. Here are the source photographs, in Read more
Posted on 09 May 2025 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
In What Way, If at All, is Elon Musk Responsible for "killing Children"?
Neil Vigdor, Bill Gates Accuses Elon Musk of ‘Killing Children’ by Cutting Foreign Aid, NYTimes, May 8, 2025. In his sharpest rebuke of the world’s richest... Read more
Posted on 08 May 2025 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY