Author: Douglas McLennan

How Joe Frank Pioneered Narrative Radio

Frank showed producers like Ira Glass the possibility of radio as a narrative artform, but Glass adapted that lesson for the rest of the country. Nearly five million people listen to This American Life each week; at its peak, Frank’s shows reached a fraction of that number. But This American Life traffics in the audio equivalent of glossy longform magazine journalism, not Frank’s uncategorizable radio autofiction.

Robert Venturi Was Supposed To Design The Philadelphia Orchestra’s New Home. Why Didn’t It Get Built?

Venturi was engaged in the Philadelphia Orchestra concert hall for about a decade while the proposal tried to attract funding. Eventually, Venturi, Scott Brown & Associates was, in effect, dropped. When then-Mayor Ed Rendell, developer Willard Rouse, and philanthropist Sidney Kimmel took control and the project was rebranded an arts center, another firm, led by Rafael Viñoly, was chosen. How is it possible that Philadelphia let Venturi and Scott Brown slip through its fingers without ever having extracted from them a large, public downtown building?

What One Speaker Learned While Doing A TED Talk

“Having done the talk I have learned that this is the alchemy of art. Ted Talks are art masquerading as information. I was struggling to express something, not yet a fully formed articulation in my head, but I stuttered it out anyway. Then scientists and other fine humans heard it and spoke it back to me from their experience in a way that has helped me understand my life better.”

Reality According To Google (Like It Or Not We’ve Got To Deal With It)

Whether or not Google ultimately exercises this power depends on its human leaders—and on the digital society Google is so central to building. The company is investing heavily in machine intelligence, committing itself to a highly automated future where the mechanics and, perhaps, the true insights of the quest for knowledge become difficult or impossible for humans to understand. Google is gradually becoming an extension of individual and collective thought. It will get harder to recognize where people end and Google begins. People will become both empowered by and dependent on the technology—which will be easy for anyone to access but hard for people to control.

Old Vic Theatre Works To Rebuild Post-Kevin Spacey

After an investigation, the Old Vic said it had received 20 complaints of inappropriate behavior by Spacey, who led the theater between 2004 and 2015. It said most of the alleged victims had been staff members, and acknowledged that a “cult of personality” around the Hollywood star had made it difficult for them to come forward. In response, the Old Vic trained staff members to act as “confidential sounding boards” to staff members experiencing abuse and unsure about what to do.

Radically Decorous

If decorous action is calm, staid and subdued, then people who are comfortable will inevitably find decorum a lighter burden. Meanwhile, it will weigh more heavily on those who are hurting, dispossessed and justly angry. If this basic inequity is baked into the concept, why not do away with decorum altogether?