Author: Douglas McLennan

How Big Data Has (Is) Transforming The Music Industry

Analysts claim it’s not only possible to see who’s blowing up now, but more importantly, who’s going to be blowing up next. Chartmetric says it can shortlist which of the 1.7 million artists it tracks will have a big career break within the next week. Pandora-owned Next Big Sound reports its patented algorithm can predict which of the nearly 1 million artists it tracks are most likely to hit the Billboard 200 chart for the first time within the next year. – Wired

The Next Big Thing In Streaming? Human Curators

While computer-generated suggestions aren’t going away, companies are increasingly looking for other means to help viewers discover shows and movies they might otherwise have missed in a world where something significant premieres almost every day. The industry calls this “human curation,” which is basically a fancy phrase for describing nonautomated ways of hyping specific content. – New York Magazine

The Remix Decade: Culture Invited Us To Reconsider What We (Think) We Know

“In television, film, literature, and other media over the past ten years, artists have presented information as though it is gospel, then reframed it in ways that force us to reconsider our assumptions. These cultural works challenged us to realize that there’s always something more to learn from every story, even the ones we think we know.” – New York Magazine

The Best Take-Down Reviews Of Terrible Books This Year

“Our friendly neighborhood book review aggregators put on our black hats and seek out the most deliciously virulent literary take-downs of the past twelve months. It’s a ritual blood-letting exercise carried out in an effort appease the Literary Gods, thereby guaranteeing a good book review harvest in the year to come, and we take it very seriously.” – LitHub

The Changing Faces Of America’s Libraries

“If you haven’t been in a public library lately, you probably wouldn’t recognize where you were if you entered one tomorrow. This is no longer, as I wrote early on, your mother’s library. The books are still there, the readers are still there, the librarians are still there. But sharing the same space are children busy with all kinds of active—and sometimes noisy—programs, inventors in maker-spaces, historians and amateurs researching genealogy, job-seekers scouring the internet, homeless people settling in quietly for the day, women and a few men heading to the yoga space, others watching movies, young entrepreneurs grabbing lattes… – The Atlantic

Why Paul Bowles Drew Such A Long Shadow On Morocco

I have tried not to think too often about the long shadow that Paul Bowles casts over Tangier, but this year’s commemorations have made it hard to avoid: the twentieth anniversary of Bowles’s death and the seventieth of The Sheltering Sky’s publication. In Tangier, celebrations to mark this “existential masterpiece” are under way, including balls and masquerade parties. And so I’ve found myself again asking how this genteel American writer came to be so bound up with Morocco, and how, in recent years, he has become a figure of both nostalgia and contention. – New York Review of Books