World historian William McNeill argued that humans had evolved for synchronous ritual: dancing, chanting, marching in time. The anthropological data seem to support this. For example, researchers recently found that Sufis engaged in the dhikr, […]
Category: Thought
(Sunday Thought) The Best Show On Television
Politics shares many of the characteristics of professional sport. It has teams, complete with owners, managers, and agents. It has a regularly scheduled season capped in contests in which score is kept and a winner […]
The $treet
My buddy in Japan asked me what was going on. This was my description — and why it matters. During the pandemic, a hedge fund called Melvin Capital was short-selling stock of video game retailer […]
(Sunday Thought) What is going on?
In simple terms, the world has gotten big. Since I was a child in the early 1970s, the population of the planet has doubled. Imagine a “Shaft”-era earth, with all the chaos, all the strife, […]
Let Them Fight: Godzilla and Mythic Symbolism
I grew up on Godzilla movies. Well, I grew up on a lot of TV, but those too. As a kid, I often didn’t understand them — some of the plots are pretty outrageous — […]
(Sunday Thought) Same As The Old War
“With an enemy committed to fascism, advocacy—the threats, the words—are not mere dogma. They are themselves weapons—weapons of incitement and intimidation, often as effective in achieving their ends as would be firearms and explosives brandished […]
Cyberpunk III: We Will Not Invade Cyberspace
Like the early internet, AR is mostly a novelty at this point, such as the London art project in the video below, but the applications are legion. Almost anything humans manipulate in the world, from […]
(Art) The Girl in the Glass Tube
If you were a young woman between 1930 and 1960, there was apparently a worrying non-zero chance you’d end up as an experiment inside a giant glass tube. As a visual trope, the glass tube […]
