Douglas McLennan
Doug is the editor of ArtsJournal
Today’s Great Contemporary Literature Is About The Past
Over the last several decades, a quiet revolution has taken place in American fiction: The novels recognized by major literary prizes have largely abandoned...
Surprise: Alan Cumming To Become Scottish Festival Director
The Pitlochry “theatre in the hills” is known for its unique ensemble and repertory practice: across the summer season actors appear in three or...
Much Beloved Dance Retreat Lost In California Forest Fires
Cohasset, a Butte County community atop a ridge north of Chico, is home to about 400 residents and the site of a 26-year-old annual...
Satellite TV Business Is In Dire Straits
The numbers bear out a dire situation for satellite TV. Just 13 million U.S. households subscribe to it, a decrease of about 15.3 percent...
Why The Traditional TV Business Is Tanking
While subscriber numbers are tanking, programmers prop up revenues by raising carriage fees for their channels—the aforementioned “higher contractual rates.” Instead of making TV...
Once-Lucrative Late Night Talk Shows Are Facing New Austerity
Late night, it appears, is now firmly in belt-tightening mode. Or as one veteran late night producer says, “there’s definitely a new reality when...
Why Is Children’s Experience Of Time Different From That Of Adults
"It's strange that we don't still really know the answers to questions like when do children have a proper distinction between the past and...
Today’s AJ Highlights
Good morning: Over the past week we've collected several stories about the ruling against the Internet Archive over fair use in providing books to...
The Billionaire Composer And His Ability To Buy High-Profile Performers
The composer had seemingly appeared from nowhere. Now he was engaging the world’s best soloists to perform his music—compositions that some musicians and critics...
The Internet Archive Court Loss Traps Libraries In Untenable Position
This decision harms libraries. It locks them into an e-book ecosystem designed to extract as much money as possible while harvesting (and reselling) reader...
How Grassroots Advocacy Remade Arts Funding In St. Petersburg, Florida
“We’re calling ourselves the ‘City of the Arts’ in St. Pete so it’s just the right thing for the city to contribute to that...
Could A Proposed New California Law Rein In AI Development?
Critics have painted a nearly apocalyptic picture of its impact, calling it a threat to startups, open source developers, and academics. Supporters call it...
Spotify Wins Eminem Royalty Fight Over “Billions Of Streams”
A judge in Tennessee has ruled that Spotify will not be liable for any lost royalties, despite finding that Spotify did not have a...
How Disney Turned Deadpool And Wolverine Into A Global Phenomenon
Brand partnerships saw the Deadpool and Wolverine characters shilling for everything from Xbox and Heineken, to Adidas, Aviation Gin (natch), Old Spice, DiGiornio pizzas, and more. - Fast Company
Google Will Create “Fake” Podcasts From Your Notes, Including Hosts Who Banter
Google isn’t making things up when it says the AI hosts will “banter” with each other, either. When trying out Audio Overview for myself,...
Can We Bio-Engineer Higher IQs?
Historically, eugenics and racism have operated in tandem, but neither is reducible to the other. Eugenics attributes socioeconomic inequality—both within and between racially defined...
Ray Kurzweil: We’re Very Close Now To Merging With Machines
“We will extend our minds many millions-fold by 2045,” writes Kurzweil. “We are finally getting to the steep part of a fifty-year-old exponential trend…....
Can Gen Z Save Wikipedia From AI And Chatbots?
As Wikipedia’s visibility diminishes, reduced to mere training data for AI applications, it also loses prominence in the minds of readers and potential contributors. - The...
Today’s AJ Highlights
Good morning. One ongoing theme of the past couple of years is the decline of humanities studies in higher ed. But it turns out,...
Juilliard Gets Big Gift To Span Arts Disciplines
Juilliard announced on Wednesday that it had received a $15 million gift to help expand creative work across music, dance and drama. An additional...
Self Therapy Is Killing The Memoir
In certain bodies, to write about yourself at all is already to be pathologized. But there’s a difference between creative work conferring self-knowledge on...
How The Instagram Photo Dump Is Changing Its Culture
Today’s Instagrammer no longer chooses one representative photo at a time, creating a grid of images just so; instead, users, especially those belonging to...
How Jimmy Carter Supported The Arts
Carter’s appreciation for the arts began at an early age and has expanded over time. In his autobiography, Why Not The Best?, he wrote that his...
200-Year-Old Brooklyn Museum Rebrands
Does introducing a new logo in vibrant colors across various forms of signage, digital campaigns and merchandise equate to a brand reset? Perhaps not...
Turns Out The Humanities Are Hard To Kill
The humanities, as it turns out, are pretty hard to kill—though the twentieth century made a good fist of it. Educational modernizers in England...
