Douglas McLennan
Doug is the editor of ArtsJournal
This Summer’s Movie Box Office Might Just Turn Out Okay
Thanks in large part to Barbenheimer, summer revenue now rests at $3.797 billion, a 16.6 percent spike over the same summer corridor in 2022....
How Hip-Hop Revitalized American Poetry
America is celebrating more than just a musical form. It’s celebrating the moment when rap gave America back its poetry. - The New York...
More And More AI-Written Books Are Getting On Amazon
Searches on Amazon — estimated to control at least half of all U.S. book sales, and an even bigger share of the growing e-book market —...
Describe What You Want: Think Text-To-Image AI Is Cool? Now There’s Text-To-Music
These tools are mainly targeting creators, who can use copyright-free music in their videos or podcasts. The developers are also hoping that musicians notice...
EU Gigs For UK Musicians Have Dried Up Since Brexit
“Work has come to a halt … The offer of European gigs simply dried up … My band simply can’t make any kind of...
Stephen King On Teaching Computers To Write
"Creativity can’t happen without sentience, and there are now arguments that some AIs are indeed sentient. If that is true now or in the...
A Masterclass In Biography-Writing: How Patti Hartigan Got To Know August Wilson
The blood’s memory really coursed through August. You also have to remember that the man read everything ever written—he was an autodidact. But he...
Pre-Inca People Built Floors Like Drums On Which Dancers Stomped Beats
Different layers of soil, ash and guano created a floor that absorbed shocks while emitting resonant sounds when people stomped on it. This ceremonial...
British Museum Knew Of Thefts From Its Collection As Early As 2021
According to the PA news agency, the missing items are believed to have been taken over a "significant" period of time. Some of them...
How AI Can Help Make Books
"For me, generative AI has been instrumental in tasks that previously demanded hours of effort. It’s helped me create engaging and targeted marketing copy...
Is The Revolutionary New Spatial Audio Really That New In Classical Music?
Even before the comparatively meek technology of two-channel stereo sound was standard in every home, Karlheinz Stockhausen and others were using more complex mixes...
How AI Can Be Used To Design Public Art In Public Spaces
Creating interactions in public space turns the urban space into a playful and social venue that could attract residents of all ages. However, there...
Ancient Maps – As Much For Conceiving Of The World As For Finding Your...
"Fra Mauro’s map organized state-of-the-art knowledge about the world beyond Murano, but it was also art for the state. Venice was a mercantile superpower....
Welcome To Our “Polycrisis”
A problem becomes a crisis when it challenges our ability to cope and thus threatens our identity. In the polycrisis the shocks are disparate,...
The Myth Of A Cosmopolitan Europe
The European tendency to mistake Europe for the world – what might be called “the Eurocentric fallacy” – has obscured our understanding of the...
Fighting With Prince Harry: What It Means To Be A Ghostwriter
Rather than the rightness of going after Harry, I was questioning the heat with which I’d done so. I scolded myself: It’s not your...
The Naomi Mix-Up: Klein And Wolf Aren’t Interchangeable
"Most confusingly, we once had distinct writerly lanes (hers being women’s bodies, sexuality, and leadership; mine being corporate assaults on democracy and climate change)....
The Mounting Damage: Ukrainian Cultural Sites Are Going Down
Damage to Ukraine's cultural sites has been extensive, according to Unesco (the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organisation). Its Red List of Cultural...
Is Therapy-Speak Ruining Our Ability To Speak To One Another?
Over the last decade or so, with the vast expansion of social media networks, a new, seemingly sophisticated language sits on modern society’s tongue....
Our Digital Web Is Redefining Our Reality
Digital culture functions today as the Enlightenment cosmopolis once did: as a fantasy in which society reshapes itself along the lines of affinity. “If...
Failure To Engage: Thinking About The Future
"Our frayed relationship with the very idea of the future has worried me for some time. It’s healthy for a society not to be...
Legislatures Are Degrading Public Education Before Our Eyes
Politicians and state officials, often with the help of management consultants, are making liberal arts education scarce in some of the poorest states in...
Scientists Are Getting Close To Being Able To See What The Brain Is Thinking....
In theory, nothing about the brain’s squishy wetware prevents its internal states from being observed. “If you could measure every single neuron in the...
Hey – Theatre Kids Are Running The World!
All of these power-adult former theater kids exist in a moment when the very things that used to make drama-loving teenagers an easy punchline...
Oops: Image Metadata On Christie’s Website Inadvertently Revealed Locations Of Artwork
As was the case with the professor, photos uploaded to Christie’s oftentimes include GPS coordinates for where they were taken; those coordinates are so...
