Image courtesy of Salvatore Vuono / FreeDigitalPhotos.net Today’s invocation comes from author and cultural historian Mike Jay, author of last year’s The Influencing Machine, slated for U.S. publication in January 2014 as A Visionary Madness. The article’s tagline states the basic thesis, which articulates an uncanny experience, sensation, and intuition that we’ve all had with…
Category: Society & Culture
Teeming Links – August 16, 2013
Image courtesy of Salvatore Vuono / FreeDigitalPhotos.net Today’s (rather extended) opening word goes to Morris Berman, who was recently interviewed for The Atlantic online in connection with his new book Spinning Straw into Gold: Straight Talk for Troubled Times. Morris first rose to prominence as the author of several books about the evolution of human…
Teeming Links – August 6, 2013
Image courtesy of Salvatore Vuono / FreeDigitalPhotos.net James Howard Kunstler was in rare form in a recent salvo against the pervasive and putatively hopeful (but actually despairingly awful) wish, especially here in America, that techno-industrial society might continue to survive indefinitely instead of doing what it’s actually in the very earliest stages of beginning to…
Teeming Links – August 2, 2013
Image courtesy of Salvatore Vuono / FreeDigitalPhotos.net I invite you to peruse today’s offering of necessary and recommended reading under the overarching emotional/conceptual rubric of this recent rumination about the extreme value of ambivalence and undecidedness amid our present sociocultural circumstance of frenetic and manipulative opinion-peddling and belief-mongering: We live in a society in which…
Sounds of Apocalypse, Part One: Roar of Creation and Destruction
EDITOR’S NOTE: With this post we welcome a new contributing writer to the Teem. Dominik Irtenkauf is a freelance writer of fiction and nonfiction dealing with art, mythology, cultural philosophy, media theory, the occult, and avant-garde music. He also writes about the boundaries between art and science, and recently he has been combining his literary…
Teeming Links – July 26, 2013
Image courtesy of Salvatore Vuono / FreeDigitalPhotos.net As you browse through today’s crop of fascinating, worthwhile, disturbing, and necessary reading, I invite you to consider not just this particular experience but your online experience as a whole in light of writer Benjamin Anastasis’ recent, impassioned, and insightful explanation of why he has abandoned Twitter. Even…
Teeming Links – July 19, 2013
Image courtesy of Salvatore Vuono / FreeDigitalPhotos.net Locking Out the Voices of Dissent (Truthdig) Chris Hedges on how the security and surveillance state, after crushing the Occupy movement and eradicating its encampments, has mounted a relentless and largely clandestine campaign to deny public space to any group or movement that might spawn another popular uprising….
“In Praise of Shadows”: Morris Berman’s acceptance speech for the 2013 Neil Postman Award
Last month Morris Berman delivered a speech titled “In Praise of Shadows” as he accepted this year’s Neil Postman Award for Public Intellectual Activity.
Americans: Wild about apocalypse
This fine little BBC video presents an able summary of the central role that the idea of the apocalypse has played in American history right from its earliest beginnings. It effectively serves as a summary of and introduction to the 2012 book The Last Myth: What the Rise of Apocalyptic Thinking Tells Us about America…
Teeming Links – July 12, 2013
Image courtesy of Salvatore Vuono / FreeDigitalPhotos.net This week, a change in format: The Teeming Brain’s long-running “Recommended Reading” series will henceforth be titled “Teeming Links.” It will also shift to a streamlined format that does away with the former practice of including extensive excerpts and publication information from the linked items. I want to…