Douglas McLennan
Doug is the editor of ArtsJournal
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...
Noguchi Museum Fires Three Workers For Wearing Keffiyehs
On Sunday, September 8, at least 60 people including former workers and supporters protested outside the Queens institution and handed out flyers to inform...
We May Soon Recover Lost Texts Lost For Millenia. They Could Change How We...
The problem is more complex than the fact that many texts were lost to the annals of history. Most people just see the most...
Is It Time To Change How Boards Work In Arts Organizations?
When the Orchestra needed to take decisive action amid a crisis, the CEO-Board relationship broke down very quickly and led to devastating outcomes for...
Study Of Philosophy Helped Democratize 19th Century America. Now Philosophy Studies Are Dying
The circumstances for studying philosophy in a college or university setting, democratised by the post-Second World War expansion of higher education, are in the...
Today’s AJ Highlights
Good morning: One of the potential intriguing uses of AI for artists is the ability to create AI versions of themselves that can be...
Orlando Fringe Opts For Group Therapy
The new leadership structure is dubbed a "tri-directorate model" with three equal directors at the top each with distinct areas of specialization, as opposed...
Audible Will Allow Authors To AI Clone Their Voices To Read Their Audio Books
Amazon will begin inviting a small group of Audible narrators to train AI-generated voice clones of themselves this week, with the aim of speeding...
Australian Government Proposes Banning Children From Social Media
The government will soon trial age verification technology to restrict children from opening social media accounts by the end of 2024, blocking children from...
How To Create Things? New Movie On Brian Eno Takes On The Question
How should we create things? The word “should” isn’t quite right, since there’s no correct way to be creative; still, when you’re actually creating...
This Year’s National Book Award Longlist
The list includes two début young adult novels, one writer who has been previously honored by the National Book Awards—Randy Ribay, the author of...
