So, like, what if you mashed up TEDx with The Wicker Man and topped it all with a heaping helping of The Blair Witch Project? Forget the fact that this sounds like an utterly bizarre hypothetical scenario, perhaps one that makes you expect someone to start singing “One of these things is not like the others,”…
Author: Matt Cardin
Teeming Brain founder and editor Matt Cardin is the author of DARK AWAKENINGS, DIVINATIONS OF THE DEEP, A COURSE IN DEMONIC CREATIVITY: A WRITER'S GUIDE TO THE INNER GENIUS, and TO ROUSE LEVIATHAN. He is also the editor of BORN TO FEAR: INTERVIEWS WITH THOMAS LIGOTTI and the academic encyclopedias MUMMIES AROUND THE WORLD; GHOSTS, SPIRITS, AND PSYCHICS: THE PARANORMAL FROM ALCHEMY TO ZOMBIES; and HORROR LITERATURE THROUGH HISTORY.
Julian Jaynes and the dawn of consciousness
Published recently at n+1, a wonderful and compact introduction to the life and thought of Julian Jaynes: Jaynes published only one book, in 1976, The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind, which tells the story of how mankind learned to think. Critics described it as a bizarre and reckless masterpiece —…
The NDAA and America’s looming totalitarian dystopia
Chris Hedges has brought a lawsuit against President Obama for signing into law Section 1021(b)(2) of the National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA). Here’s his explanation of what’s at stake. Read slowly and carefully, the better to take it in. The section permits the military to detain anyone, including U.S. citizens, who âsubstantially supportâ — an…
Book Review: ‘Supernatural: Writings on an Unknown History’ by Richard Smoley
NOTE: This is a longer version of a review that also appears at New York Journal of Books. The book itself was published just today. Supernatural: Writings on an Unknown History, by Richard Smoley. Tarcher/Penguin. Published February 7, 2013. 240 pages. Reviewed by Matt Cardin There’s a handful of writers working today whose books about…
Financial dystopia: “The giant Wall Street firms have taken on lives of their own”
In a review of Why I Left Goldman Sachs: A Wall Street Story, the new (October 2012) book by Greg Smith — who also wrote last year’s bombshell piece “Why I Am Leaving Goldman Sachs” for The New York Times — Michael Lewis makes the following cogent, riveting, and frightening observation about the current world…
Book Review: Wiley-Blackwell’s ‘The Encyclopedia of the Gothic’
A couple of months ago I was invited to join the Reviewer Panel at the online New York Journal of Books. NYJB gives their official blessing and permission to reviewers who want to republish their reviews at their own sites, so that’s something you’ll start seeing here at The Teeming Brain in weeks and months…
From Michael Dirda, “an exhortation to read, read, read”
Over at The American Scholar, Michael Dirda is retiring his wonderful “Browsings” column. (In case you’re somehow unaware of Michael Dirda — a crazy thought — he “is a Pulitzer Prize-winning critic and the author of the memoir An Open Book and of four collections of essays: Readings, Bound to Please, Book by Book, and…
Mass imprisonment in America: A social and spiritual tragedy
The past several years have seen an explosion of public awareness, abetted by a spate of excellent journalism, about the epoch-defining crisis of mass incarceration in America. To take just one notable example, Adam Gopnik, writing in The New Yorker, summarizes the situation in unequivocally stark and apocalyptic language: Mass incarceration on a scale almost…
George Clayton Johnson describes the reality of the ‘Twilight Zone’
Fans of both The Twilight Zone and the realm of philosophical, spiritual, religious, and psychological inquiry represented by the likes of books such as Daimonic Reality and Exploring the Edge Realms of Consciousness — the latter featuring contributions from Teeming Brain teem members David Metcalfe and Ryan Hurd — will find much of interest in…
Is the “brain as computer” metaphor dying?
Yesterday, Edge.org published a long and depth-filled conversation with Daniel C. Dennett — he of Consciousness Explained and Darwin’s Dangerous Idea fame — and it shows the renowned philosopher of mind and consciousness saying some things about the now-ubiquitous model and metaphor of the brain as a kind of computing machine that casts a whole…