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
-
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 )
-
Good Morning, Vietnam & It’s a Wonderful World
I’ve watched this film three times, once when it came out, once some years ago on TV, and then again last night. It was, of course, built around its star, the... Read more
Posted on 05 February 2015 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
Beyond Lévi-Strauss on Myth: Objectification, Computation, and Cognition
Revised and extended from an earlier working paper Another working paper, revised and extended from Lévi-Strauss on Myth: Some Informal Notes. Online at:... Read more
Posted on 05 February 2015 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
Study: Window Sill Objects, Light
What the title says, just objects on my window sill. Stacked at the left edge, a pack of kitchen matches on top of two plastic contains with pens and pencils... Read more
Posted on 05 February 2015 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
The Title “Heart of Darkness”
In the course of writing my open letter to J. Hillis Miller I reviewed the work I’d done on Conrad’s Heart of Darkness and realized that for all I’d written... Read more
Posted on 04 February 2015 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
Trumpet Bell
When I blow a trumpet, this is the trumpet I blow these days. Notice the photographer's hand inside the bell rim just below Read more
Posted on 03 February 2015 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
Humanane Letters and Good Talk: Building Community in a Research Lab
Over at 3 Quarks Daily Jalees Rehman has an interesting post about research life in the life sciences: Literature and Philosophy in the Laboratory Meeting. Read more
Posted on 02 February 2015 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
Some Quick Thoughts on Cultural Evolution
Here are some thoughts I’ve been having on cultural evolution. All of them need fuller exposition, but I don’t have time for that now. 1. Cultural Evolution,... Read more
Posted on 02 February 2015 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
Moral Injury in Iraq
Garett Reppenhagen, writing in Salon about American Sniper: Unlike Chris Kyle, who claimed his PTSD came from the inability to save more service members, most o... Read more
Posted on 02 February 2015 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
Huck Finn and Anxiety About Children
A new book, Huck Finn’s America: Mark Twain and the Era that Shaped His Masterpiece, argues that The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn was not primarily about race... Read more
Posted on 01 February 2015 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
Free Play and Computational Constraint in Lévi-Strauss
This is another post in a series that I’ve devoted to explicating Lévi-Strauss’s work on myth (starting with The King’s Wayward Eye: For Claude Lévi-Strauss at... Read more
Posted on 01 February 2015 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
Paths Not Taken: An Open Letter to J. Hillis Miller
I’ve been thinking about writing a guide to my work in literary and cultural criticism, but there’s so much of it that that has seemed to be no simple task. I... Read more
Posted on 30 January 2015 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
Friday Fotos: The Empire State Building Has Its Moods
I've taken a fair number of photographs of the Empire State Building, all of them from New Jersey, mostly from Jersey City and Hoboken, with a few from... Read more
Posted on 30 January 2015 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
Apple Tops Microsoft in Market Capitalization and is the Largest Company in the...
Not so long ago Apple was a fragile boutique operation dwarfed by Microsoft. Now things are different, says the NYTimes: When Microsoft stock was at a record... Read more
Posted on 30 January 2015 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
"Precision Medicine" – Another Funding Boondoggle?
Obama's decided to spend a pile of money on "precision" medicine. Michael Joyner remarks that we've been down this road before and don't have much to show for... Read more
Posted on 29 January 2015 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
Cultural Beings & Intertextuality; Information
I’ve got two quickish thoughts on cultural evolution, once concerning the concept of cultural beings and the other in my ongoing ‘war’ against the concept of... Read more
Posted on 28 January 2015 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
J. Hillis Miller on the Future of the Profession
From a recent interview from the Australian Humanities Review (2014): A spectacular example of this sort of thing is the State University at Albany where an... Read more
Posted on 28 January 2015 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
Computing and the Mind: ‘Top-down’ Isn’t Natural
Just a short note. This thought may well be tucked away somewhere in one of my posts (HERE?), but I want it here where I can readily find it. Read more
Posted on 26 January 2015 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
Some Varieties of the Artist, and a Deflation
William Deresiewicz has a piece about art and artists in The Atlantic that is both interesting and suspicious: The Death of the Artist—and the Birth of the... Read more
Posted on 25 January 2015 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
Superstition and Uncertainty
I've recently been arguing that cultural evolution is driven by anxiety, by uncertainty That is, over the long term, and in the aggregate, that is what motivate... Read more
Posted on 24 January 2015 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY -
Culture, the Humanities, and the Evolution of Geist
Alex Mesoudi’s 2011 book, Cultural Evolution, says little or nothing about the humanities, about music, art, and literature, though it purports to be synthetic... Read more
Posted on 23 January 2015 CULTURE, PHILOSOPHY, SOCIETY
