Douglas McLennan
Doug is the editor of ArtsJournal
How Your Brain Constructs You
Just as your memory is a construction, so are your senses. Everything you see, hear, smell, taste, and feel is the result of some...
Time To Abandon The Idea Of Generational Cultures
For one thing, there is no empirical basis for claiming that differences within a generation are smaller than differences between generations. - The New Yorker
Stories About Other Worlds Help Imagine Better Futures
Other worlds and other possibilities aren’t just about kind of fantasy possibilities, but actual other worlds that exist alongside us now. And that can...
Netflix CEO Says Net Won’t Remove Dave Chappelle’s Transphobic Special Because It’s Popular
Ted Sarandos wrote that, although some people may find stand-up comedy to be “mean-spirited,” “our members enjoy it, and it’s an important part of...
A Fascinating Group Attempt At Understanding Tolstoy
If the “Internet novel” or “Instagram novel” are ascendant genres in today’s literary marketplace, Tolstoy Together is an impressive nonfiction cousin. It sits merrily on the fence between a type of...
Big Data Research: Left And Right Literally Speak Different Languages
Researchers at Carnegie Mellon University collected more than 86.6 million comments from more than 6.5 million users on 200,000 YouTube videos, then analyzed them...
Innovation And The Great Resignation
It wasn’t so long ago that people were worried that automation would put them out of work. Ironically, instead, people chose to quit jobs...
John Killacky: Arts As A Safe Space For Unsafe Ideas
It is a series of meditations on the social role of art, the sometimes dysfunctional structures of the cultural sector, and the effect that...
The Unprecedented Life Of Paul McCartney
He has navigated a life with little precedent, one in which a few home-town friends played a pivotal role in the rise of rock...
James Bond’s Jazz Roots
Ian Fleming, who introduced the Bond character in his novel Casino Royale, back in 1953, was a devoted jazz fan. His tastes were a bit...
The Difference Between Random And Chaos
Randomness, like cards or dice, is unpredictable because we just don’t have the right information. Chaos is somewhere between random and predictable. A hallmark...
The Real Problem Of Instagram
The platform’s erasure of certain kinds of work has the net effect of discouraging the making and exhibiting of that work. It erases art...
What Are The Rules For Politicians Using Music In Their Campaigns?
The campaigns can buy licensing packages from music rights organisations like BMI and ASCAP, that give them legal access to millions of songs. Some,...
One Billion Users: Time To Take TikTok Seriously
It’s not that social-media platforms aren’t newsworthy—Facebook consistently dominates headlines. But TikTok is all too often regarded as an unserious thing to write or read about. That’s...
Our Complicated Ideas About Work And Identity
Why do we continue to cling so hard to our work-based identities, in spite of an inner nature that tells us not to work...
How COVID Killed Criticism
Pauline Kael would be appalled at the spectacle of film writing nowadays. Journalists meet actors and gasp in awe. The wise editor has given...
Researchers: Hit Pop Music Increasingly Relies On Harmonic Surprise
The researchers found that the most popular songs had a high level of harmonic surprise, including the use of relatively rare chords in verses,...
Why We’re Fascinated By Low-Stakes Literary Disputes
It happens every few months, somewhere or other, with a reliability approaching a new genre. Someone, usually working for a large media company, devotes...
Justifying Why Princeton Should Exist
This is the puzzle of Princeton: How can an institution designed to serve the aspirations of an elite few authentically wrestle with issues of...
How To Explain Trump’s Love Of The Musical “Cats”?
What Trump is soothed by, perhaps, is not the sentimentality of the song alone but a tensile line of steel to which, Betty Buckley...
Why Big Movies Don’t Shoot In Washington State
“For better or for worse, film is an incentivized industry. Around 38 states have programs to incentivize film production. We are always at the...
Maria Ressa Just Won A Nobel – Only The 18th Woman In 126 Years...
With half the world made up of women, the obvious question arises: Why have so few been granted the committee’s most prestigious prize and,...
The Fall Of Rome Didn’t Happen When You Think It Did
The fall of Rome in 476 is a historical turning point that was invented nearly 50 years later as a pretext for a devastating...
The Right To Be Forgotten: Should Newspapers Have To Remove Your Name If You...
“The big concern here is that, basically, news organizations are now willingly performing much more extreme acts of censorship of their own content than...
New Player In Billion-Dollar Music Rights Management
HarbourView is the latest player in what has become a high-stakes contest in the music business: the ownership and control of catalogs of songs,...