Douglas McLennan
Doug is the editor of ArtsJournal
How The Smithsonian Crowdsourced Weather Reports In The 1800s
The Institution handed out weather monitoring equipment to 150 volunteer observers across the country. Each day their reports arrived by telegraph, and the Smithsonian...
Hong Kong’s Art Market Is Flourishing. But New Security Laws Threaten
Never before has the vitality of the market felt so disconnected from the everyday lives of Hong Kong people. - Artnet
Assessing The Pause On Broadway
"I always say the pandemic was the universe telling everyone to go to their room and think about what they’ve done. And while we’ve...
Amazon Wants To Robotize Your Home. Do You Want It?
Science fiction is clearly a leaping-off point for Amazon's next wave of product ideas. Suri Maddhula, director of software for Amazon's Astro, even said as much:...
Netflix Reveals Its Most-Watched Shows
Shonda Rhimes’ “Bridgerton” Season 1 scored as the No. 1 series based on both number of Netflix households and time spent viewing (in the...
TikTok Passes One Billion Users
TikTok’s popularity soared during the pandemic, becoming the most-downloaded app in the world in the first quarter of 2020, with some 315 million downloads in that...
The Case For The Greatness Of “Singin’ In The Rain”
In Singin’ in the Rain, the late Clive James felt he encountered “the absolute concentration of an entire popular culture at its most powerful.” As...
Meet The Boston Symphony’s New Leader
The orchestra has a deep pool of artistic talent, a fiercely devoted following, and Gail Samuel’s predecessor, Mark Volpe, grew the BSO’s endowment to roughly...
Ten Rules For How To Deal With Critics
Here are ten rules I try to live by in my own experiences with harsh feedback. - Ted Gioia
San Francisco, St. Paul, Pilot Minimum Guaranteed Incomes For Artists
Both pilots have received private funding. In San Francisco, after initial city funding, the team raised an additional $3.4 million from #startsmall, a pandemic-relief fund...
This Year’s MacArthur Fellows
"As we emerge from the shadows of the past two years, this class of 25 Fellows helps us reimagine what's possible," said MacArthur Fellows...
Why Remote Work Is The Future
“A remote-first company can access the best talent in the world. An office-first company can only access those who live within a certain radius...
Is Literature “Technology”?
Angus Fletcher claims that fairy tales, free indirect discourse, autobiography, and such are “technology,” and that their primary purpose is medicinal, so that neuroscience...
Why We Need To Get Comfortable With Ambiguity
If freedom-minded people are to rid ourselves of “the habits of paranoia, despair, and policing” that Maggie Nelson believes to be menacing the left...
Facebook Isn’t A Platform, It’s A Country
Facebook is not merely a website, or a platform, or a publisher, or a social network, or an online directory, or a corporation, or...
Melting Glaciers In Mongolia Reveal And Imperil Ancient Artifacts
Frozen heritage is melting from mountain ice in every hemisphere. As it does so, small groups of archaeologists are scrambling to cobble together the funding...
What Graffiti From Venetian Quarantine Facilities Of The 1400’s Tell Us
In their free time, some of the porters wrote on the large walls of the tezon grande, a room over 105 yards long that was...
Why Is This Noted Antiquities Scholar Being Accused Of Theft Of Artifacts?
It is an understatement to say that the dispute over Dirk Obbink and the papyrus has shaken a scholarly world where ancient texts are...
Some Worrying Trends In Fundraising For Public Radio
Since FY16, median new donor counts have fallen 8%. During that time, median sustaining donors have dropped nearly 18%. - Current
Eric Schmidt: How Artificial Intelligence Will Interact With Us
We need to think now of what happens when artificial intelligence is co-resident with us in the world. It lives with us; it watches...
How A Hit Song Behaves Like A Viral Infection
"When a disease breaks into a population you tend to see a sharp increase in infection cases and eventually it will peak at some...
What, Exactly Is “Distinctly British” TV?
Former media minister John Whittingdale had some ideas when he recently announced government plans to require UK public service broadcasters to produce “distinctly British”...
What Happened To Books? Well…
"They became tedious redoubts for the pious certainties of a besieged, over-educated and underemployed intellectual class dissatisfied with – and powerless to change – the mindless,...
Science as A Value-Free Enterprise
It is central to science, and its claims to objectivity, that values do not override facts. An important feature of this view of science...
Behind Yale’s Failed Singapore Venture
Singapore has followed its dismissal of Yale's liberal education by introducing a Foreign Interference Act that, "under the guise of defending national sovereignty, will enable...