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 ( 7846 )
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Hierarchy and Equality: The Essential Tension in Human Nature
I'd originally published a longer version of this essay on The Valve in 2010, where it accumulated various comments and addenda. I first republshed it here... Read more
Posted on 25 September 2016 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
Conceptual Metaphor Wiki Online
Available HERE as of August 2016. * * * * * MetaNet Metaphor Wiki Overview The ongoing objective of the MetaNet Project is to systematize metaphor analysis in... Read more
Posted on 25 September 2016 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
The End of Cinema, NOT!
David Bordwell has a column about that film journalism favorite, the article proclaiming the end of cinema. He observes, quite rightly, that it's become a clich... Read more
Posted on 24 September 2016 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
Two Current Flicks: Kubo and the Two Strings, The Magnificent Seven
On Thursday I saw Kubo and the Two Strings. I saw The Magnificent Seven yesterday (Friday). They are very different films, obviously. Seven is live-action and... Read more
Posted on 24 September 2016 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
Chicago's Millennium Park the Summer It Opened (2004)
I bought my first camera, a Canon PowerShot A75, so I could take these photos. Read more
Posted on 23 September 2016 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
In Psychology, the Times They Are a Changin'
Andrew Gelman has a long and very interesting post on the replication crisis in psychology, including a chronology of the major events that goes back to the... Read more
Posted on 23 September 2016 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
23 Big Macs for 2016: More Special Sauce for the Elite Few
Back in 2013 I did a series of articles on the MacArthur Fellows Program (collected as The Genius Chronicles) arguing that the Academy of Big Mac (aka the... Read more
Posted on 22 September 2016 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
Emotional Arousal of a Drama Increases Social Bonding
Royal Society Open Science Emotional arousal when watching drama increases pain threshold and social bonding R. I. M. Dunbar, Ben Teasdale, Jackie Thompson,... Read more
Posted on 21 September 2016 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
Martha Mills: Defending Civil and Voting Rights in Mississippi @3QD
My friend, Martha A. Mills, is a very distinguished trial attorney and judge. Early in her career she worked in Mississippi and later Illinois as a civil... Read more
Posted on 19 September 2016 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
Consciousness, Once More Around the Merry-go-round
HYPOTHESIS THEORY ARTICLE Front. Psychol., 03 September 2013 | http://dx.doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2013.00574 The wild ways of conscious will: what we do, how we... Read more
Posted on 17 September 2016 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
More on Chomsky
From a short note by Michael Covington, "Has Chomsky been blown out of the water?": Chomsky’s first major contribution to linguistics was item 1 in the... Read more
Posted on 17 September 2016 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
Adam Smith on Music and Dance
Courtesy of Colwyn Trevarthen: After the pleasures which arise from gratification of the bodily appetites, there seems to be none more natural to man than... Read more
Posted on 16 September 2016 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
Malick's "Voyage of Time", Was Disney There First in "Fantasia"?
Richard Brody in The New Yorker, "Terrence Malick's Metaphysical Journey into Nature": It’s a sort of vast and visually overwhelming nature documentary, albeit... Read more
Posted on 16 September 2016 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
McWhorter on Shakespeare: Should He Be Rewritten in Modern English?
McWhorter has argued that Shakespeare's language is so difficult that it should be "adjusted" into modern English for modern readers and theatre-goers. I'm... Read more
Posted on 15 September 2016 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
McWhorter on Wolf on Chomsky and Everett: What Color Are the Thoughts of a...
Dan Everett says that John McWhorter's review of Tom Wolf's The Kingdom of Speech is the best review of the book to date. I'll take Dan's word for it. Read more
Posted on 15 September 2016 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
Sound Symbolism is REAL, Folks
We've known about this for some time, but the idea hasn't gotten through. Will it do so this time? From Sci-News: A careful statistical examination of words fro... Read more
Posted on 14 September 2016 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
Communication Stripped to the Barest Minimum?
Hays, D. G. (1973). "Language and Interpersonal Relationships." Daedalus 102(3): 203-216. The following passage is from pp. 204-205: The experiment strips... Read more
Posted on 14 September 2016 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
Baby Let Me Shake Your Tree
The late Rahsaan Roland Kirk is one of my favorite musicians. I’ve never seen a more dynamic performer; I describe one of his performances in “Ecstasy at the... Read more
Posted on 12 September 2016 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
Is Academic Literary Criticism Uniquely Self-critical Among Academic Disciplines?
Is the Pope Jewish? When I first encountered literary criticism as an undergraduate at Johns Hopkins in the late 1960s the discipline was reflecting on the... Read more
Posted on 12 September 2016 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
The Demise of Deconstruction
Sometime back in 1969 or 1970 I was auditing a graduate seminar taught by J. Hillis Miller, who was still at Johns Hopkins. Somehow the Modern Language... Read more
Posted on 11 September 2016 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY
