Author: Douglas McLennan

Censor Shakespeare? Let’s Be Clear What We’re Talking About

Every generation re-evaluates the art it has received and decides whether or not it is still worthy and relevant to their interests, but it feels like we’re in a moment of particularly intense scrutiny right now. Maybe it’s important to remind Shakespeare-lovers that much of Shakespeare’s work is deeply problematic. But if we’re going to force people to confront Shakespeare’s problems, then what is the point if we’re not allowed to then say, “Actually, you’re right, this is incredibly offensive, hopelessly out of date, and I want to walk out of this play/stop studying this subject/decide never to watch, read, or produce Shakespeare again.” I think that’s a legitimate response, but not the one, I suspect, that people who are most precious about censoring Shakespeare would support.

Podcasts Are The New Documentaries

True crime has outgrown the news magazines in favor of in-depth episodic storytelling. In thinking about whether the stories themselves have changed, it’s important to note the goals haven’t. First and foremost, podcasts, like documentaries, strive to put us in the room, and to explore the context of a murder. True crime audiences need to go deeper than the motives and the method. We’ve seen that summary level story on Dateline for the past twenty-five years.

Time To Retire Beethoven’s Ninth?

“We have the 19th-century ideal of strength in unity — expressed in the “Ode to Joy” — scraping up uneasily against a 21st-century ideal of strength in diversity. The change in perspective makes some people afraid and angry. It makes others hopeful and optimistic. Until we see whether we can achieve a paradigm shift or whether we fall back into something like the genocidal chaos of the mid-20th century, I think we should press pause on Beethoven’s Ninth. I, personally, would be satisfied to never hear it again.”

Study: Widen Definition Of Culture To Engage Young People

The research conducted with 11 to 19 year olds found that young people have a flexible relationship with arts and culture, but one that remains most influenced by their family. It found consuming or creating art was a ‘passion’ for almost half of young people, but that definitions of arts and culture used by the funded cultural sector fail to resonate with young people who have “much wider perceptions”.

Is Hip Hop The Way Forward For The Arts?

Hip hop culture illuminates a way forward within Canadian cultural institutions’ growth, evolution and vibrancy. It may seem that the spontaneity and improvisation of hip hop — cornerstones of the culture’s innovative core threaded seamlessly throughout dance, djing, rhyming and painting — are structurally and policy-wise an impossibility within cultural institutions. But…

What Gets To Be A Science?

The methods used to search for the subatomic components of the universe have nothing at all in common with the field geology methods in which I was trained in graduate school. Nor is something as apparently obvious as a commitment to empiricism a part of every scientific field. Many areas of theory development, in disciplines as disparate as physics and economics, have little contact with actual facts, while other fields now considered outside of science, such as history and textual analysis, are inherently empirical. Philosophers have pretty much given up on resolving what they call the “demarcation problem,” the search for definitive criteria to separate science from nonscience; maybe the best that can be hoped for is what John Dupré, invoking Wittgenstein, has called a “family resemblance” among fields we consider scientific. But scientists themselves haven’t given up on assuming that there is a single thing called “science” that the rest of the world should recognize as such.

Why MoviePass Is A Terrible Idea

Every cent you don’t fork over for each free or super-cheap service you use is balanced by the advertising revenue the service hopes to make off of you. That’s not just true of the app-centric, surveillance-saturated economy of 2018 — it’s basically how the entertainment biz has worked for over a century. If you’re not entirely supported by sales or subscriptions, you’re working with advertisers. MoviePass is no different, but they are a fascinating case study in how, as modern data-driven advertising risks extinction via overdue regulation, the most cynical impulses of “old school” advertising threaten to turn everyone off just as much.