Humans evolved a brain with an extraordinary knack for language, but just how and when we began using language is still largely a mystery. Early human communication may have been in sign language or song, and scientists are studying other animals to learn how human language evolved.
http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=129155123
Tagged with language evolution communication science linguistics culture
For the second year running, top honors at the Emmys for best dramatic series went to an AMC cable show set in a New York ad agency in the early 1960s.
The visuals of AMC’s “Mad Men” are all skinny ties and bullet bras — buttoned-down corporate America smoking and drinking and dancing on the edge of what we know would be assassinations and war and 1960s cultural revolution to come.
Its world is white, sexist, racist, homophobic, shadowed by fear of nuclear war — and compelling, right now, in 2009.
This hour, On Point: A conversation with Matthew Weiner, creator of “Mad Men.”
http://www.onpointradio.org/2009/09/mad-men-creator-matthew-weiner
Tagged with tv television culture
At the imperial dawn of the 20th century, there was the “civilized” world and the “savage” or “primitive” world, and one felt free to judge the other.
By the century’s end, the whole idea of primitive man as separate from civilized man was pretty well gone. And with it, the “savage mind.”
Much of the banishing was the work of the towering anthropologist Claude Levi-Strauss. Levi-Strauss has died at 100 in his native France. We are all, he said, driven by deep myth and common structures of thinking — even to our own extinction.
This hour, On Point: The mind and work of Claude Levi-Strauss.
Tagged with claude levi-strauss anthropology humans culture society civilization
Timothy Ferris discusses the Voyager space probe.
From: http://www.nytimes.com/2007/09/05/opinion/05ferris.html
Tagged with voyager space record preservation culture science spacecraft