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 ( 6831 )
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The Birth of New York City
From today's NYTimes: In the 17th century, when it was universally held elsewhere in Europe that a strong society required intolerance as official policy, the... Read more
Posted on 08 September 2014 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
The Malibu Diner at Night
Posted on 07 September 2014 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
Ratatouille and The Hundred-Foot Journey Briefly Compared
I went to see The Hundred-Foot Journey the other day and was struck at how much it resembles Ratatouille, which, though a (mere) cartoon, is a better film.... Read more
Posted on 07 September 2014 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
A Sculpture in the Garden Meets a Spirit
Posted on 06 September 2014 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
"Junk" DNA? Not Really, Or How "selfish Gene" Metaphor Has Gotten out of Control
Itai Yanai and Martin Lercher in Aeon: ENCODE systematically scouted the genome as a whole for specific functions. One function could be coding for proteins;... Read more
Posted on 06 September 2014 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
Friday Fotos: The Day Goes by Outside My Window
IMGP9704 • 9.04.2014 • 6:56:17 AM IMGP9725 • 9.04.2014 • 12:10:20 PM IMGP9726 • 9.04.2014 • 12:10:35 PM IMGP9728 •... Read more
Posted on 05 September 2014 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
Jeff Koons is a Capitalist Tool!
Eric Gibson in The New Criterion: Distasteful as it may be to bestow such an accolade on someone who traffics so brazenly in the shallow, the banal, the... Read more
Posted on 05 September 2014 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
Holland on Howl’s Moving Castle: Psychotherapy and a Woman’s View
Norm Holland has an interesting post on Howl’s Moving Castle: It’s a love story, it’s an anti-war film, and I think it’s about integrating one’s personality... Read more
Posted on 04 September 2014 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
On Benjamin: Mystic, Firebrand, Priest, Libertine
As an unashamed intellectual, Benjamin spent large portions of his life reading, writing, editing, and researching. But he was also a devoted traveler (he... Read more
Posted on 04 September 2014 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
Reading Macroanalysis: Notes on the Evolution of Nineteenth Century...
Matthew L. Jockers. Macroanalysis: Digital Methods Literary History. University of Illinois Press, 2013. x + 192 pp. ISBN 978-0252-07907-8 I've compiled all... Read more
Posted on 03 September 2014 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
Reading Macroanalysis 7: Influence, Or the Evolving Dynamic Integrity of the...
Note: I decided that we needed a more explicit account of how Jockers visualized his 3346-node influence graph. I've inserted that account into the middle of th... Read more
Posted on 03 September 2014 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
Education, Not Just for the Young
We all know that out educational systems are broken in various ways. I want to talk about only one of them: the assumption that education is for the young. Read more
Posted on 03 September 2014 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
Green Villain @ Pep Boys,Newport in Jersey City
Posted on 03 September 2014 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
Seems That Deresiewicz Got It Wrong
Nathan Heller in The New Yorker about William Deresiewicz, Excellent Sheep: The Miseducation of the American Elite and the Way to a Meaningful Life (Free Press)... Read more
Posted on 02 September 2014 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
Robots Lack the Human Touch; Will They Ever Have It?
From the NYTimes: Since the first robotic arm was designed at the Stanford Artificial Intelligence Laboratory in the 1960s, robots have learned to perform... Read more
Posted on 02 September 2014 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
Shooting into the Sun
floods the camera's sensors, almost blinding it. You have to really 'dig' to recover a pleasing image from the captured bits. But digging's fun. The result's... Read more
Posted on 02 September 2014 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
Dance of the Genes, in Three Species, a Insect, a Worm, and Us
From the NYTimes: For the past five years, hundreds of biologists have been recording DNA activity in flies and worms, and systematically comparing the results... Read more
Posted on 02 September 2014 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
When Penn Met Teller
From The New Yorker, Calvin Trillin in 1989: Running along with the musical numbers in an Othmar Schoeck concert were various “bits of business”— often,... Read more
Posted on 01 September 2014 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
Blind from Birth, but Can Now See
What happens when someone who was blind from birth gains the power of sight? Sinha showed me a video in which a teen-age boy, blind since birth because of opaqu... Read more
Posted on 01 September 2014 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
[8] Macroanalysis and Cultural Evolution
The purpose of this post is to recast the work reported in Macroanalysis: Digital Methods Literary History in terms appropriate to cultural evolution. Read more
Posted on 01 September 2014 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY