Douglas McLennan
AI Is One Thing, But AGI (Artificial General Intelligence) Takes It To The Next...
Unlike existing, but newly popular, artificial intelligence (AI) systems which are designed to perform specific tasks such as image recognition, speech recognition, and natural...
Big Sporting Events Are Showing Us The Future Of Our Dystopian Surveillance Society
Sports are a harbinger of a future of surveillance that is more intrusive, multitudinous, and expansive. But they aren’t just showing us the future. Sometimes, they’re...
Surprise – America Finally Built A Good Airport
Perhaps the inspiration for renewal can benefit from, or even require, an awakening humiliation. LaGuardia’s reconstruction was, in some sense, a response to Biden’s...
The Corrosive Effects Of Licensing Culture
The benefits of excessive licensing are unsubstantiated, theoretical, or minimal. But the drawbacks? Those are very real for workers and consumers alike. - The...
Frank Oteri Talks With Kevin Puts
"I just feel like what’s going on right now in this moment, of course you should be open to whatever’s going on, the zeitgeist,...
How Saudi Arabia Is Using Culture To Distract From Government
To hide the precarity of its rule, the government wants to erase its people from political discourse. It has transformed the rich and varied...
New 20 Percent EU Tax Threatens French Art Market
The E.U.-wide rule, which was quietly approved last April but will not take effect until 2025, could impose a 20 percent sales tax on...
How Ukrainians Are Trying To Defend Their Culture
As the one-year anniversary of the deadly 2022 Russian invasion of Ukraine approaches, we take a close look at the ongoing work of hundreds...
MacDowell Artist Retreat Chooses A New Director
Chiwoniso Kaitano is the former executive director of Girl Be Heard, a nongovernmental organization that uses theater and the performing arts to advocate for...
Netflix Is Lowering Subscription Prices Internationally. Why?
“Effective immediately Netflix is to drop monthly subscription pricing in more than 100 territories globally,” but not in North America and Western Europe where...
As Iconic Characters Enter The Public Domain, Cheap Productions Start Making Money
As Winnie the Pooh: Blood and Honey has shown, even if the movie isn’t a critical success, it can still make a hefty profit. Indeed, not...
The Creative Benefits Of Sabbaticals
In recent years, the number of employers offering sabbaticals has grown exponentially. In addition, many more workers, especially employees in managerial and professional roles, are...
Theatres In Ukraine Closed. Theatre Moved Into Homes
Kharkiv theatres closed at the start of the war; by the summer, the city’s famous puppet theatre performed a show about wartime in Bucha....
A History Of Having To Alter The Problematic Roald Dahl
Dahl’s antisemitism was widely reported around the time of his death. His editors had entered discussions regarding the misogyny and racism in some of his...
How Poetry Redirects Us In Language
“Poetry cannot save us, and yet the poets could do a great deal to redirect our minds and senses back to the proper object...
Tyler Cowen: We’re Failing To Make Progress In The Arts
I think in some areas of the arts we’ve moved backwards. It seems to me what you might call the design of neighborhoods, in...
The Failed Simon & Schuster/Penguin Random House Merger Hearings Tell You Everything About The...
"We invest every year in thousands of ideas and dreams, and only a few make it to the top. So I call it the...
How California’s Major New Arts Education Funding Initiative Will Change Things
Proposition 28 creates a guaranteed annual funding stream for music and arts education by setting aside 1% from the state’s general fund. In 2023,...
How Speculative Profit Made The World
Under the increasingly uncontrollable uncertainty of our financialized world, speculation becomes a more productive mechanism to imagine community and collective coping with disorienting volatility....
We Thought AI Would Be Scary Smart. Instead It’s A Facilitator Of Banality
The dreariness of ChatGPT, the soulless works of visual art produced by similar programs seem to confirm that hunch. In the real world, the...
Needed: Commonsense Tools To Protect Creative Work
A report released by Digital Citizens Alliance in August 2020 found that pirated streaming subscription services are used by an estimated 30 million individuals in the...
Is Intelligence Really Our Best Feature? Or Is It Holding Us Back?
Rather than being our crowning glory as a species, is it possible that human intelligence is in fact a liability, the source of our...
AI Is Getting Awfully Good At Designing Buildings. So What Happens To Architects?
Artificial intelligence (AI) is quickly advancing to a point where it can generate the design of a building completely autonomously. With the potential to...
Archaeologists Discover 4,500-Year-Old Palace In Iraq
During a press conference at the Iraq embassy in London on Friday, Tablet Hill was described as the “cradle of civilization” and “one of the most...
Police Link Prominent Now-Deceased Horn Player To String Of Rapes
As a young hornist in the 1970s, he helped launch the first French-horn soloist competition in America, inspired by the performances of European players....