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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Friday Fotos: Ghosts Along the Hudson
[taken this afternoon] The building in the middle is the church of St. John the Divine, on NYC's upper West Side: The George Washington Bridge in the distance:... Read more
Posted on 03 April 2015 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
Mad Men on the Moon
“That's one small step for [a] man, one giant leap for mankind.” – Neil Armstrong, July 21, 1969 I don't know whether you've been following Mad Men, but I have... Read more
Posted on 02 April 2015 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
Some Fairly Standard Photoshoppery
This photo has been turning up regularly in my "most viewed" stats at Flickr: It's a night-time shot of an industrial building in Jersey City. Read more
Posted on 01 April 2015 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
Documentary About John Von Neumann
Von Neumann was one of the greatest thinkers of the previous century, perhaps best known for his work on computing and game theory. Read more
Posted on 01 April 2015 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
Notes Toward a Natural Philosophy of Cultural Evolution in the Music Domain
The title of my book about music, Beethoven’s Anvil, was suggest by my agent, Richard Curtis. I made up the subtitle (I think): Music in Mind and Culture. Read more
Posted on 01 April 2015 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
Time After Time: Music and Memory in the Group
Or, messing around in one another’s mind space for fun and funk This is about a simple, but profound, matter: that we cannot always and reliably access the... Read more
Posted on 31 March 2015 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
Memetics is Dead but What’s the Study of Cultural Evolution Otherwise About?
In the waning years of the previous century an online journal for serious work in cultural evolution was established: Journal of Memetics - Evolutionary Models... Read more
Posted on 30 March 2015 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
Friday Fotos: Flickr Picks
These are the photos that have been getting attention in the last day over at my Flickr site. Read more
Posted on 27 March 2015 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
Q: Why is the Dawkins Meme Idea So Popular?
I've been reading on cultural evolution, in particular, about Sperber's cultural attractors (which I've criticized in a comment at Replicated Typo) and getting... Read more
Posted on 26 March 2015 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
Beyond the Nation State
Writing in the New York Review of Books, Jessica T. Matthews reviews current books by Henry Kissinger (World Order) and Bret Stephens (America in Retreat: The... Read more
Posted on 25 March 2015 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
Terrified: How Anti-Muslim Fringe Organizations Became Mainstream
This is new from Princeton University Press. I read it as a case study in cultural evolution: Bail, C.A: Terrified: How Anti-Muslim Fringe Organizations Became... Read more
Posted on 24 March 2015 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
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
