Douglas McLennan
Doug is the editor of ArtsJournal
Why Do Some Songs Get Stuck In Our Heads?
Scientists don’t fully understand why earworms are so hard to shake. But certain songs are more likely than others to set up shop in our...
Today’s AJ Highlights
Good morning: Here are today's highlights.
Where Will Sundance End Up? The Sundance Film Festival may be relocating, with Boulder, Cincinnati, and Salt Lake City...
This Week’s AJ Highlights
Good morning. This week we collected 126 stories from across the arts. Here are a few highlights. Full list below.
Cultural Tourism in Australia Becomes...
Today’s AJ Highlights
Good morning: Some weeks events push along swarms of stories that illuminate long term trends. This week it's the collapsing of traditional TV. Long...
AI’s Robot Problem
I have come to believe it will take many, many thousands, maybe even millions of robots doing stuff in the real world to collect...
James Earl Jones: More Than The Voice
The worry is that our remembrance will whittle down Jones’s vast career—spanning sixty years and encompassing more than two hundred turns in the theatre,...
Today’s Great Contemporary Literature Is About The Past
Over the last several decades, a quiet revolution has taken place in American fiction: The novels recognized by major literary prizes have largely abandoned...
Surprise: Alan Cumming To Become Scottish Festival Director
The Pitlochry “theatre in the hills” is known for its unique ensemble and repertory practice: across the summer season actors appear in three or...
Much Beloved Dance Retreat Lost In California Forest Fires
Cohasset, a Butte County community atop a ridge north of Chico, is home to about 400 residents and the site of a 26-year-old annual...
Satellite TV Business Is In Dire Straits
The numbers bear out a dire situation for satellite TV. Just 13 million U.S. households subscribe to it, a decrease of about 15.3 percent...
Why The Traditional TV Business Is Tanking
While subscriber numbers are tanking, programmers prop up revenues by raising carriage fees for their channels—the aforementioned “higher contractual rates.” Instead of making TV...
Once-Lucrative Late Night Talk Shows Are Facing New Austerity
Late night, it appears, is now firmly in belt-tightening mode. Or as one veteran late night producer says, “there’s definitely a new reality when...
Why Is Children’s Experience Of Time Different From That Of Adults
"It's strange that we don't still really know the answers to questions like when do children have a proper distinction between the past and...
Today’s AJ Highlights
Good morning: Over the past week we've collected several stories about the ruling against the Internet Archive over fair use in providing books to...
The Billionaire Composer And His Ability To Buy High-Profile Performers
The composer had seemingly appeared from nowhere. Now he was engaging the world’s best soloists to perform his music—compositions that some musicians and critics...
The Internet Archive Court Loss Traps Libraries In Untenable Position
This decision harms libraries. It locks them into an e-book ecosystem designed to extract as much money as possible while harvesting (and reselling) reader...
How Grassroots Advocacy Remade Arts Funding In St. Petersburg, Florida
“We’re calling ourselves the ‘City of the Arts’ in St. Pete so it’s just the right thing for the city to contribute to that...
Could A Proposed New California Law Rein In AI Development?
Critics have painted a nearly apocalyptic picture of its impact, calling it a threat to startups, open source developers, and academics. Supporters call it...
Spotify Wins Eminem Royalty Fight Over “Billions Of Streams”
A judge in Tennessee has ruled that Spotify will not be liable for any lost royalties, despite finding that Spotify did not have a...
How Disney Turned Deadpool And Wolverine Into A Global Phenomenon
Brand partnerships saw the Deadpool and Wolverine characters shilling for everything from Xbox and Heineken, to Adidas, Aviation Gin (natch), Old Spice, DiGiornio pizzas, and more. - Fast Company
Google Will Create “Fake” Podcasts From Your Notes, Including Hosts Who Banter
Google isn’t making things up when it says the AI hosts will “banter” with each other, either. When trying out Audio Overview for myself,...
Can We Bio-Engineer Higher IQs?
Historically, eugenics and racism have operated in tandem, but neither is reducible to the other. Eugenics attributes socioeconomic inequality—both within and between racially defined...
Ray Kurzweil: We’re Very Close Now To Merging With Machines
“We will extend our minds many millions-fold by 2045,” writes Kurzweil. “We are finally getting to the steep part of a fifty-year-old exponential trend…....
Can Gen Z Save Wikipedia From AI And Chatbots?
As Wikipedia’s visibility diminishes, reduced to mere training data for AI applications, it also loses prominence in the minds of readers and potential contributors. - The...
Today’s AJ Highlights
Good morning. One ongoing theme of the past couple of years is the decline of humanities studies in higher ed. But it turns out,...