AUSTIN, Texas — Reliance on supernatural explanations for major life events, such as death and illness, often increases rather than declines with age, according to a new psychology study from The University of Texas at Austin. The study, published in the June issue of Child Development, offers new insight into developmental learning. “As children assimilate…
Author: The Teeming Brain
The Teeming Brain is a blog magazine exploring the intersection of religion, horror, the paranormal, creativity, consciousness, and culture. It also tracks apocalyptic and dystopian trends in technology, politics, ecology, economics, the arts, education, and society at large.
Recommended Reading 23
This week’s bumper crop of excellent reading and viewing includes: an essay on the past, present, and future of apocalyptic expectations and their measurable impact on real-world religious and secular circumstances, including our present geopolitical prospects; a fine examination by Charles Hugh Smith of the moral-and-monetary corruption infecting not just the “1 percent” but everybody…
Writing, money, art, society, and copyright: A tangled web
Recently in his blog for The New York Review of Books, Tim Parks — novelist, nonfiction writer, translator — has offered some strikingly interesting and cogent reflections on the relationships among and between art, authorship, law, money, ownership, individuals, and twentieth-to-twenty-first century sociocultural realities. Their background is, first, the rise of writing as “a well-defined…
Midway (FILM TRAILER) by Chris Jordan
Midway is, or will be, a film from the MIDWAY media project, and its trailer is one of those rare instances of the form that, like the megatrailer for Cloud Atlas, delivers a powerful experience in its own right. Here’s what it’s all about: The MIDWAY film project is a powerful visual journey into the…
Science in all its mystery
Here’s evolutionary biologist and psychology professor David P. Barash writing an op-ed for the Los Angeles Times and calling out a subtle but significant and damaging deception perpetrated by scientists en masse when they talk to students and the general public. Specifically, he decries the way scientists tend to generate, even if implicitly, the idea…
Our global Ayn Rand moment
In the past half-decade, the name and legacy of Ayn Rand have become the subject of much prominent comment, debate, analysis, and punditry in the English-speaking press, where a swelling sea of multiform journalism examines her enduring and pervasive (some would say insidious and awful, while others would say heroic and wonderful) influence on American…
O (Omicron) (SHORT FILM)
As with “Sight,” the short science fiction film that we highlighted as one of last week’s video offerings, the best way to watch the wonder that is “O (Omicron)” is probably to go into it “blind,” as it were, without knowing anything about it in advance. Both visually and musically, it’s a dazzling and overwhelming…
Rod Serling on writing, creativity, and the source of ideas
In this brief and brilliant excerpt from a series of talks about writing for television (recorded at Ithaca College circa 1972, according to the FAQ at RodSerling.com), Twilight Zone and Night Gallery creator Rod Serling talks about the source of creative ideas. In doing so, he manages to pack more intellectually and creatively stimulating goodness…
Recommended Reading 21
This week’s recommended readings include: a mainstream news article about the distinct possibility of an Armageddon-like solar superstorm; a look at the origin, present situation, and apparently indefinite future of the “Great Recession” by Ambrose Evans-Pritchard; a consideration of the spiritual crisis of capitalism; reflections on the real relationship between writing and money; an autopsy…
Alan Greenspan explains “Fed-speak” and the art of constructive ambiguity
Have you ever listened to the public words of a government official and wondered just what the hell it is that he or she is trying to say? Or rather, not to say? Have you ever suspected that government figures deliberately speak in opaque and confusing terms, the better to “say something” without really saying…