Author: Douglas McLennan

What’s Needed To Defeat COVID: Morality Pills?

When someone chooses not to follow public health guidelines around the coronavirus, they’re defecting from the public good. It’s the moral equivalent of the tragedy of the commons: If everyone shares the same pasture for their individual flocks, some people are going to graze their animals longer, or let them eat more than their fair share, ruining the commons in the process. Selfish and self-defeating behavior undermines the pursuit of something from which everyone can benefit. – The Conversation

Charlie Parker at 100

In his too short, too fast, too hard, too brilliant 34 years, Parker transformed an art form, no less than Mozart or Chopin or Gershwin did in their similarly brief time among us. Like those revolutionaries, Parker played his instrument – alto saxophone – with astonishing virtuosity. But Parker also did as much as anyone (and more than most) to forge a musical language, one that dominated 20th century jazz and continues to influence it in the 21st. – Chicago Tribune

How Non-Profit Arts Organizations Measure Their Impact

“The important idea here is this – there is a sharp difference between the meaning of the concept of art (which certainly doesn’t need you to be indispensable) and the meaning of the purpose of the art that your nonprofit performing arts organization produces. When your performing art makes its case by showing intentional measurable impacts, then it too will be indispensable.” – LinkedIn

Canadian Artists Lead Drive For Basic Income

“We can all agree that systemic racism should be eradicated at all levels on all fronts (in every employment sector and other areas), but the arts presents a particularly challenging arena,” he wrote. “Only by ending the inherent funding disparities that have built up over many decades across the country can the not-for-profit arts sector successfully face the challenge that confronts it now.” – The Tyee

How Data Fueled The Progressive Era

Statistics in the Progressive Era were more than mere signs of a managerial government’s early efforts to sort and categorize its citizens. The emergence of statistical selves was not simply a rationalization of everyday life, a search for order (as Robert Wiebe taught a half century of historians to say).2 The reliance on statistical governance coincided with and complemented a pervasive revaluation of primal spontaneity and vitality, an effort to unleash hidden strength from an elusive inner self. The collectivization epitomized in the quantitative turn was historically compatible with radically individualist agendas for personal regeneration—what later generations would learn to call positive thinking. – Hedgehog Review

The Wellness Trap

Once we realize that we cannot find lasting happiness through relying on outer things, we might turn to meditation, but now a new problem can arise. Many people today are drawn to meditation practice for enhancing their own well-being: we would all like to achieve “inner happiness,” but again we are back to the search. The very attempt to seek a happy mind becomes endless, with chasing the happiness leading to more chasing. At the same time, our efforts to get rid of stress can seem to create even more stress. Meditation itself now becomes a new kind of hamster wheel upon which we endlessly run—running but not moving. – Lithub

Great – Time To Practice! But A Musician Gets Restless…

“Some days, I think this glut of time is an offering. More often, however, it’s a force-feeding. To have ideas, you need constraints, which for us were the auditions, rehearsals and performances dribbled across our calendars. Now that those boundaries have evaporated, I have begun to realize how much I depended on them and how much my relationship with music was predicated on feeling present with others, both in the audience and onstage. If a sonata falls in the forest and nobody hears it, did it make a sound?” – Washington Post