Where did the creative class come from?

YOUR humble blogger has been absolutely swamped with a cross-country move and writing about pop culture (mostly) for Salon. I hope to never leave CultureCrash fallow for nearly this long.

At least, I’ve got something I’m proud of to post: Here is a piece on the site of the Bay Area music-meets-literature journal Radio Silence. It began as a chapter from my book intended to answer the question: Why, when, and how did human beings start making music, telling stories, painting images?

In the end, this did not make sense as part of Culture Crash the book, but it’s material that continues to fascinate me.

I get into prehistory, shamanism, the Fertile Crescent, singing Neanderthals, and the birth of writing. Please check it out, and drift around the Radio Silence site as well — I love what they are up to and it was an honor to be part of it. Two more installments, by the way, coming over the next few months.