Douglas McLennan
Doug is the editor of ArtsJournal
Can We Transcend Today’s Humanness To Be Something More?
We can imagine “heights of flourishing” that tower above the life we know now, but human minds and bodies are capable of climbing only...
Our Five Senses (Wait, We Actually Have Seven?)
Beyond the traditional five senses, neuroscientific research also examines proprioception (sensing your muscles, their location, and their movements) and the vestibular system, which regulates the sense of orientation...
Do We Have Free Will? (And How Does It Shape Our Identity?)
Human beings may make choices that are not predictable or even completely determined. The hard question of free will is whether, at the time...
How Did The Things Around Us Get So Ugly?
It occurs to us, strolling past a pair of broken BuzzFeed Shopping–approved AirPods, that the new ugliness has beset us from both above and...
Being An Old Artist (It Can Be Liberating)
Many artists have found that old age, for all its physical and emotional burdens, can be a moment of creative liberation comparable to, even...
Czech Museum Returns Beethoven Manuscript To Heirs
The Moravian Museum in the Czech city of Brno has had the original manuscript for the fourth movement of Beethoven's String Quartet n B-flat...
ChatGPT Elevates Interactive Artificial Intelligence To A New Level
ChatGPT feels different. Smarter. Weirder. More flexible. It can write jokes (some of which are actually funny), working computer code and college-level essays. It can also guess at medical diagnoses, create...
Does This New Artificial Intelligence ChatGPT Spell The End Of The Student Essay?
The essay, in particular the undergraduate essay, has been the center of humanistic pedagogy for generations. It is the way we teach children how...
Denver Post’s Investigative Series Into A System That Enables Looted Art Trade
The series highlights the cozy nature between curators, scholars, museums and dealers — and how incentives align to allow the dirty world of the...
Penguin Random House CEO Steps Down After Failed Takeover
As the head of the largest publisher in the country, Markus Dohle oversaw the attempted acquisition of Simon & Schuster, a deal the Justice...
Now That It’s Safe, Gustavo Dudamel Visits Home Again
This was also his first trip to Venezuela in six years. Inciting the wrath of President Nicolás Maduro, Dudamel had become politically persona non...
Canada Doubles Down On Canadian Content Rules For Media
The CRTC's moves toward greater flexibility for radio include introducing new criteria to determine whether a song is Canadian, including refining content categories to...
The Gamification Of Everything Is A Fraud
The application of game design principles like leaderboards, progress bars, points, badges, levels, challenges, and activity streaks to nongame ends has seeped into just...
A Seattle Business Blasts Classical Music To Harass Homeless Encampment
Nearby business owners said the Comcast Service Center has been playing loud music from a surveillance system with a speaker for about a month...
Big Cable Networks Are Failing In The Age Of Streaming
NBCUniversal, Paramount Global and Walt Disney together own dozens of underperforming cable networks that are quickly losing relevance in the age of streaming. -...
Theatre Director Quits After UK Arts Funding Cuts
Roxana Silbert has quit as the north London theatre’s artistic director because of the financial constraints it is facing after Arts Council England’s decision...
Hollywood’s Streaming Ambitions Hit A Business Model Collapse
“It was our belief that cord-cutting losses would be offset by gains in streaming. This has not been the case. We are primarily a...
Qatar’s Unreal New Landscape Of Amazing New Buildings
Qatar spent a reported $220 billion preparing for the tournament, conjuring new buildings, new neighborhoods and even an entirely new city. To be here now...
Behind Disney’s Bob Swap
It’s a story about how to structure a company like Disney. Then you add in the complexity of the shift to streaming, the future...
The Cost Of Over-Selling Products With Ideas
Rather than informing a population of philosophically fulfilled, elevated beings, the ubiquity of all this bite-sized meaning has had an adverse effect, fuelling our...
Canceling “Exotic” In Ballet?
Demanding apologies and cancellation might seem an over-the-top reaction to the staging of this apparently benign ballet staple. However, the representation of many of...
AI-Generated Avatars Are Wildly Popular. Artists Aren’t Happy
Multiple artists have accused Stable Diffusion of using their art without permission. Many in the digital art space have also expressed qualms over AI models producing...
KPOP Musical Closes On Broadway After Only Two Weeks
The wager on “KPOP” hasn’t paid off, ticket sales data show. “KPOP” was one of Broadway’s lowest-selling shows in recent weeks, according to the Broadway League,...
How Post-COVID-Lockdown Dance Has Changed In Los Angeles
After experiencing the tolls of the pandemic — loss, stillness and uncertainty — the work of 2022 introduced new techniques, technologies and narratives that...
A Scientific Analysis Of How Popular Music Has Changed
The study of patterns and long-term variations in popular music could shed new light on relevant issues concerning its organization, structure and dynamics. More...
