This is rather exhilarating news to accompany Ray Bradbury’s imminent birthday (August 22). It also coincides nicely with the the fact that I’ve been listening to a truly outstanding two-hour audio dramatization of his Something Wicked This Comes over the past couple of days (and have been finding that it sharply intensifies my already intense…
Which movies horrify the masters of horror?
Jason Zinoman, a theater reporter for The New York Times, has been showing up virtually everywhere in media land this summer thanks to the publication of his new book Shock Value in July. Subtitled “How a Few Eccentric Outsiders Gave Us Nightmares, Conquered Hollywood, and Invented Modern Horror,” the book has been characterized as the…
The world riots, nations shudder, Cthulhu wakes
What do Lovecraft, Cthulhu, Eckhart Tolle, global economic collapse, Queensryche, Robert Bloch, Rage against the Machine, and proliferating riots around the world have to do with each other? Simple: They herald a period of cosmic, cultural, and human disruption.
40 years on, the Stanford prison experiment continues to disturb
I first heard of the Stanford prison experiment several years ago in a televised lecture by Philip Zimbardo, the psychologist who devised and conducted it. It was a gripping way to learn of it, I can tell you. And wow, does the cultural memory of it, not to mention the lessons from it, continue to…
The Long, Hot Summer of 2011: Time to Get Your Doom On
Long-time readers of this blog are aware that it has gone through several phases — or rather, I have personally gone through several phases — of intense doomerism. Leading up to the global financial crash/panic/mini-apocalypse of 2008, I was fully caught up in the doom meme, with a special emphasis on peak fossil fuels and…
The Devil Went Down to Texas: A supposed surge in “diabolical cults” and demonic possession in the Lone Star State (and across America)
I still feel like a new Texan even though next month will mark three years since I moved here from my home state of Missouri. But given my personal and authorial focus on religion and horror, maybe I’ll begin to feel more fully at home now that serious talk of demonic possession and official Roman…
From Google’s “in-house philosopher,” a beautiful credo in defense of studying the humanities
Here at The Teeming Brain I’ve gone on at some length about the disastrous/dystopian trends in contemporary American education, including, especially, the rise of the techno-corporate consumer model that assigns a purely economic raison d’etre to higher education. (See, for example, my “America’s Colleges at a Crossroads” series and additional articles.) Today I’m fascinated, and…
The Google Effect: New evidence of the Internet’s impact on brain and memory recalls Plato’s ancient warning
It’s not every day you get to note/observe/say something like this: A 2400-year-old warning from Plato has just been confirmed, or at least inadvertently recalled, by newly published research about the cognitive and neurological effects of our now-ubiquitous culture of Internet searching. Here’s the lowdown: Researchers at Columbia University. . . say Google and its…
Fear and trembling in the medical-industrial complex
I’m tempted to exclaim, “Take that, medical-industrial complex! ” On the heels of a recent Atlantic article about the growing mainstream acceptance of “New Age” or alternative medical treatments comes one from The Wall Street Journal about the verifiable benefits of meditation, cognitive therapy, and other psychological interventions for chronic pain. The establishment, naturally, is…
The muse and the pineal gland
For over a month I’ve been pounding away at the third installment in my “Theology, Psychology, Neurology” series of articles over at Demon Muse. It will look at the third element in the series title by considering several possible biological locations of the muse experience. The section on the pineal gland proved unexpectedly slippery to…