Author: Douglas McLennan

The Technological Take On Expressing Ourselves

“More and more of us now express our emotions through the devices and software we rely on in our everyday lives. E-mail, text messages, social media, video chat—each platform demands of us different expressions of ourselves. And in the near future, we will have a new range of technologies at our disposal—sensors, monitors, and software with the power to track, nudge, persuade, and coerce. What the clock did to time, technologists hope to do to emotion—regulate and regiment it, measure and monitor it. But taming the temperamental beast that is human emotion might prove a challenge that contemporary technology is unfit to take on.”

Does Literature Matter?

Only in America do we ask our writers to believe they don’t matter as a condition of writing. It is time to end this. Much of my time as a student was spent doubting the importance of my work, doubting the power it had to reach anyone or to do anything of significance. I was already tired of hearing about how the pen was mightier than the sword by the time I was studying writing. Swords, it seemed to me, won all the time.

Was The Orpheus Model Of Flattened Orchestra Hierarchy A Success?

Asked whether the principles of the Orpheus Process had any resonance these days, Stanford business professor Jeffrey Feffer replied in an email, “There are various movements that have tried to ‘democratize’ organizations. They mostly don’t work or don’t last. I am a huge believer in the advantages of the Orpheus approach, but it flies in the face of fundamental human psychology. So, no, although the Orpheus experience at one point got some press and attention, I would not say there is much diffusion, even in the music world where the MTT/SF Symphony model is much more prominent.”

Facebook Wants To Make Its User Data Available To Social Scientists. Should It?

In partnership with the non-profit Social Science Research Council, Facebook’s social-science program will put out a call for university scientists to apply for grants to study the effects of social media on democracies and elections, potentially using proprietary Facebook data. The money will come from various foundations known to give to Democrats, Republicans, and journalists.

In A Florid Suit, Collector Sues Jeff Koons For Not Delivering

In the 53-page complaint that includes lines that reference Shakespeare (“Something is rotten in the state of Denmark”) and that are almost Dickensian, New York litigator Aaron Richard Golub charges, “Behind the ostensible façade of Jeff Koons’ art world triumphs and record-breaking auction prices . . . lurks a well-oiled machine, more specifically an established, archaic System as old as the hills applied to the art world to exploit art collectors’ desire to own Jeff Koons sculptures.

Ohio Arts Funding ED Steps Down In “Challenging” Climate

Cuyahoga Arts and Culture CEO and executive director Karen Gahl-Mills has resigned, effective June 7, according to a press release sent this morning, April 18.  In a challenging atmosphere of funding cuts, the leader of one of the nation’s largest public funders of the arts became embattled on several fronts: first in an attempt to address racial inequity in grantmaking to individual artists, and subsequently by  choosing to  significantly reduce operating support to nonprofit organizations all at once, rather than gradually, in the hope of keeping grant amounts stable for a period of years despite a projected continual decline in cigarette tax revenue.