Author: Douglas McLennan

How Tina Brown Revitalized Legendary Magazines

“At Vanity Fair and then at The New Yorker, she expanded readerships. Her editorial appetites were fierce; she raked in news and new writers and cash. Some people found her style unsettling, and her victories did little to alter that judgment. Brown’s legacy remains controversial not because her success is in question but because, for some, too much was lost in her kind of success.”

Why Do We Know So Little About Arts Funding Ecosystems?

“Do major capital campaigns have any effect on fundraising for either their peer groups, or the local field as a whole?  Does the existence of an arguably overcrowded field in a particular discipline, affect the fundraising of all the members of that single class?  What are the variables in a local funding ecosystem that play a role in the success or failure of the fundraising efforts of all those in the area, and in particular, the efforts of each?  Do some efforts result in a cannibalization of scare opportunities, or is the success of anyone a boon to the efforts of all?  Does the power inequity work to the disadvantage of some, or is it irrelevant.”

Berklee College Of Music President Addresses Reports Of Faculty Sexual Misconduct

“Berklee College of Music president Roger Brown on Monday told a packed campus-wide forum that the renowned school has terminated 11 faculty members in the past 13 years for sexual misconduct. The admission punctuated an extraordinary day at the music school, with hundreds of students, many holding signs, marching down crowded Boylston Street at lunchtime to a gathering to discuss sexual assault and harassment at Berklee.”

College Adjuncts Are Poor. It’s Crippling The System

“Academic precarity is the year-to-year or class-to-class, contingent, underpaid and labor-intensive employment status most Ph.D.s now have to navigate while seeking a protected tenure-track position. After, say, eight years of graduate school, this tacks on another two to four to ten years at a $20-$40,000/year salary. We have crossed over into our thirties and forties in sustained poverty, now separated from our graduate communities and parceled into departments and towns in which we have no belonging or protection.”

Disney’s LA Times Movie Critic Ban Provoked Confrontations Between Journalists And Times Ownership

“During a daily meeting attended by roughly a dozen editors, a staff member proposed publicizing the two-part investigative series that had precipitated the ban. But Lewis D’Vorkin, the recently installed editor in chief of The Times, flatly rejected the idea, according to several employees with knowledge of the discussion. Later, some journalists received messages by email and Slack warning them against retweeting any praise of Times stories.”

Hollywood Has Avoided Filming In Greece. Greece Wants To Change That

Visiting the biggest film studios outside Hollywood in Chicago last month, the prime minister, Alexis Tsipras, said the money had been set aside to provide 25% in cash rebates for expenditure by foreign producers in Greece. With the largest unemployment rate in Europe, officials now see the ever-expanding entertainment sector as a valuable source of jobs. Under the weight of its economic crisis, the country has suffered an unprecedented brain drain of its brightest and best.

Why Economists Need The Humanities

Like old-style imperialists, economists assume that other people resemble themselves, regardless of their culture, class or background. Thus, they assume that other people will respond in ways that economists consider rational. They subscribe to the fallacy of an abstract “economic man” — “pre­cultural” person. But, the authors write, people are not organisms first created “and then dipped in some culture, like Achilles in the River Styx. They are cultural from the outset.”