Author: Douglas McLennan

How Our Brains Know Where We Are (Our GPS)

The recent marriage of neuroscience with the fields of computer science and artificial intelligence that have really strengthened this perspective. Work at this interface has shown that a brain that uses an absolute, invariant model of the world to model and negotiate changing environments requires more computational resources than one that uses relative information.  – Nautilus

Women Are Inventing Their Own Nashville Country Music

Even though the stranglehold of bro country has given way to various softer, smoother gestures, the men of the format still dominate terrestrial, satellite, and streaming playlists. But it’s not like country’s rising generation of women are content to keep following a prescribed promotional path that’s leading only to frustration and a sense of futility. I’ve found it illuminating to consider how the moves that Morris, Cam, Musgraves, and so many others are making count as artistic and professional survival strategies. – Slate

Roxane Gay’s Radical Honesty

It is hard to read the abuse Gay gets for her size. If there is anything useful in the experience it is, she has said, in the way it engenders empathy, for other lives, for difficult lives, for different lives. Reading, she says now, does the same – fiction mostly, but also non-fiction, “because you just think, ‘Oh my gosh, imagine if that were my life, imagine if that were my children, how would I feel?’ – The Guardian

Turkish TV Is Hot. But Can It Export Internationally?

The shows are a phenomenon in the Middle East and Latin America, and have become such a symbol of Turkish soft power that they have been used as counters in political disputes. On March 1, for instance, the Saudi Arabia-based satellite broadcaster MBC abruptly dropped all Turkish drama, cutting off some shows midseason, apparently in response to Turkish support for Qatar.  – The New York Times

You Don’t Own Your Tattoo Art (The Artist Does). That Can Be A Problem

Any creative illustration “fixed in a tangible medium” is eligible for copyright, and, according to the United States Copyright Office, that includes the ink displayed on someone’s skin. What many people don’t realize, legal experts said, is that the copyright is inherently owned by the tattoo artist, not the person with the tattoos. – The New York Times

Theatre And Critics Are Not On Opposite Sides

The artist–critic war of attrition is boring. It’s a cliché — and if there’s a common enemy that all artists and all critics should share, then cliché is that enemy. When people give me that look upon discovering that I’m a critic and I’m a director — that look that says they’re suddenly not sure where to put me, that I must be a traitor to one camp, and which one is it? — I generally laugh it off, as if to say, Yeah, crazy world isn’t it? But what I really want to tell them is that at heart, criticism and directing are the same. – New York Magazine