There were some reactions of shock and awe last week as the Milwaukee Public Museum made public its deep deficit, and the draconian cuts and mission-shifting it was making to get out of the hole. The organization is now planning to cut 45 percent (or more) of its payroll, and transition from a research-focused natural […]

One of the baffling qualities of digital media is its liquidity. Once something is encoded in binary code, we have endlessly interesting access to not just single creative works, but multiple works and even databases, along with the ability to search and see the parts and the whole in wonderful and new ways. A new […]

A piece in the New York Times describes two initiatives in Manhattan connecting working artists with vacant commercial office space. Both Chashama’s A.R.E.A. program and the Lower Manhattan Cultural Council’s Swing Space serve as brokers between landlords with extra space and artists or arts groups in desperate need of the same. Landlords benefit by positive […]

The local canoe and kayak emporium has a great radio spot that describes what they do (I’m paraphrasing): We don’t sell canoes and kayaks. We sell something much more valuable: time on the water. Time on your own. Time with your partner. Time to reconnect. The sales pitch shows that this retailer knows what their […]

Thanks to BoingBoing, an exceptionally ecclectic and seemingly endless collection of strange and wonderful links, I stumbled onto the History of Sampling, a project of software/graphic/data designer Jesse Kriss. The History of Sampling is a web-based software program that provides: …a visualizer for the history of music sampling — a timeline with colored dots represents […]

A short piece in the New York Times magazine exposes a common fear: that knowing how something works removes the mystery, or destroys the magic. In this case, the author is talking about recent advances in neuroscience in understanding the human brain: The human brain is mysterious — and, in a way, that is a […]

I have a new favorite catchphrase this week, provided by a unique search function within Amazon.com. It turns out, now that the on-line retailer has access to the inside content of many of its books, it’s been adding more elaborate search functions to its service. One of the more interesting is the algorithm for ‘statistically […]

Technology, science, and trend author Steven Johnson has a new book that strikes to the heart of a traditional argument for nonprofit culture in American communities. Everything Bad Is Good for You: How Today’s Popular Culture Is Actually Making Us Smarter challenges the common assumption that popular culture makes us stupid, which, by extension, challenges […]

Spiked has a great piece featuring short responses from 250 renowned scientists (at least Spiked says they’re renowned, which will have to do). They asked each of these big-brained individuals ”what they would teach the world about science and why, if they could pick just one thing.” Supporting my previous post(s) on the subject, their […]

Last month, I took part in a fabulous leadership roundtable discussion hosted by the Heinz Endowments in Pittsburgh (which inspired me to talk about hammers and sponges). Part of our assignment in advance of the meeting was to draft a short case description of an arts organization that reconsidered its business model in response to […]