Douglas McLennan
Doug is the editor of ArtsJournal
So You Want To Transform Your Consciousness. Be Careful
Sometimes, the euphoria that accompanies epiphany gives way to disorientation, and self-transcendence can turn into self-deception. It took me years of wrong turns to...
The Essential Concern For AI: What’s The Business Model? (And How Will It Hurt...
We are talking so much about the technology of A.I. that we are largely ignoring the business models that will power it. That’s been...
College Humanities Enrollment Is In Steep Decline. Why?
During the past decade, the study of English and history at the collegiate level has fallen by a full third. Humanities enrollment in the...
How The Shiny New “Future Of Media” News Sites Lost Their Way
The fundamental bet of Vice and its internet-born brethren, that new forms of distribution and content production enabled by the internet would transform media...
Your Daily Music Prescription: How Much You Need For Therapeutic Benefit
We set out to find out whether there was a common dosage for music and how long one needed to listen for a therapeutic...
NYC’s Rattlestick Theatre Hires A New Artistic Director
Davis, who is particularly interested in developing new plays, previously served as artistic director of the American Theater Company in Chicago. He programmed experimental...
Booksellers React To Library Book Bans
“I have seen a rise of book sales, but I think most of those sales are to adults and people who listen to NPR....
Rise Of The Online “Event”
The word event was once reserved for more special occasions. But now Zoom is doing to the word event what Facebook did to the word friend; Just as most...
US Plan To Raise Visa Fees For Artists To $1,615 Will Stop Most Artists...
The US immigration service wants to raise visa costs from $460 (£385) to $1,615 (£1,352) alongside other changes that artists and their managers say...
How Linguistic Diversity Plays Out In English
Polyglot texts (texts using multiple languages) have become increasingly common; they are salvos fired against arrogant monolingualism. Monolingual English speakers would do best to...
Is It Time To Take The Metaverse Seriously?
It’s easy to imagine many productive uses of the metaverse, from educational to virtual meetings to entertainment. And most of these are already underway in some...
We’re All Afraid Of Losing Our Memory. But Remembering Everthing Can Be Debilitating
A ceaseless and faultless archive of mental images is instantly available; every configuration of clouds he has ever witnessed can be compared to the...
Canadian Actor Gordon Pinsent, 92
The Grand Falls, N.L., native and Canadian household name had a storied acting career spanning dozens of films and TV projects over six decades,...
When Dinosaur Encyclopedias Strode The World
From the 18th century to the 21st, the stats keep rising — number of words, number of entries, number of volumes — and the...
Science Fiction Magazines Have Been Inundated With Chatbot-Generated Stories
The editors of three science fiction magazines — Clarkesworld, The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, and Asimov’s Science Fiction — said this week...
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...
