Author: Douglas McLennan

There’s A Backlash Against Online Teaching. That May Not Be Fair

“The stereotype that online instruction is less rigorous, or that students cannot be engaged in it with appropriate rigor, isn’t borne out by my experience. Anyone who’s taught an on-the-ground class has looked out into the classroom and seen boredom or disconnection. By comparison, my online students were choosing when to log on to do their work. They seemed very tuned in when they did.”

What You Can Learn Data-Crunching Literature

“By the numbers, the best opening sentences to novels do tend to be short. Prolific author James Patterson averages 160 clichés per 100,000 words (that’s 115 more than the revered Jane Austen), and Vladimir Nabokov used the word mauve 44 times more often than the average writer in the past two centuries.”

 

Why Are There So Few Contemporary Novels About AIDS?

“Do today’s young writers, who live in a time when it is regarded more as a chronic condition than a death sentence, feel unqualified to approach the subject? Is it akin to the recent debates around cultural appropriation in writing, most recently stoked by Lionel Shriver: are writers uncomfortable with their right – or perceived lack thereof – to fictionalise experiences not their own?”

 

Musical Theatre Is Populist. Can It Also Be Political?

“Part of me wonders whether musical theater featuring a call-to-action eliminates nuance — generally scarce in musicals as it is. Indeed, don’t theater makers fear our work being reduced to a message? Perhaps so, but I also don’t think that attempting to convince audiences that we should raise the age of criminal responsibility simplifies the audience’s journey. It’s the opposite — the audience experiences something like what our composers experienced: listening to a story, confronting and bypassing their own judgments about it, walking around with it, letting it spur them to make something from it. For our composers, that ‘something’ is a song. For the audience, collectively, it could be change.”

Turns Out We’re Terrible At Picking Which Scientific Research To Fund (Flip A Coin, Anyone?)

“Science is expensive, and since we can’t fund every scientist, we need some way of deciding whose research deserves a chance. So, how do we pick? At the moment, expert reviewers spend a lot of time allocating grant money by trying to identify the best work. But the truth is that they’re not very good at it, and that the process is a huge waste of time. It would be better to do away with the search for excellence, and to fund science by lottery.”

Inside The Billion-Dollar Battle For The Met Museum

“It’s not a very complicated story,” says a source close to the Met. “Tom was a curator. He was plucked out to run a big job—not just director but director and C.E.O. He forged an agenda with the board. He had some management issues. They together made all these decisions to get ahead on digital. Tom wasn’t on his own. They together decided to invest in modern and contemporary. The place is politically, totally insane. Al

So Now An Album Is A “Playlist”? (Is This Further Corruption Of The Art Form In The Age Of Streaming?)

“As streaming becomes our dominant mode of listening, Billboard has begun measuring success song by song, stream by stream. In turn, pop albums are expanding. The more tracks an album contains, the more coin it can generate, the better the album can perform on the charts. As the container changes shape, so does the stuff that goes inside. And not necessarily for the better.”