Author: Douglas McLennan

Small Theatres Are Innovating Online In Ways That Will Change The Art Form

Over the last few months, it has been interesting to watch how theatre navigates what, in many cases, is largely new territory: digital space. What began as a free-for-all, with organisations throwing anything they could online, has started to develop into something more interesting, as theatres and companies grapple with questions around the creative possibilities and also how to monetise them, so that artists and organisations have income. – The Stage

Tate, V&A And Pompidou Museums Defend Projects In China

All three are collaborating or consulting on major projects in China with development firms owned by the state. They say that sharing their collections and expertise in this way “can help to foster tolerance and curiosity” (Pompidou); “generates greater understanding between global cultures and communities” (V&A), and helps “increase Chinese people’s access to the possibilities of international art” (Tate). – The Art Newspaper

A Visit With Oracle Jaron Lanier

Lanier finds many things fundamental to living in a society hard, like adhering to concepts relating to time, or receiving or sending mail; one ride in his amusement park brain is “a hamster wheel of pain,” as he mentally repeats to himself whatever menial tasks he needs to do until he does them. He is a voluminous talker prone to distraction; interrupt him mid-thought and prepare to find yourself hundreds of years forward or backward in time, talking about factories or Thomas Pynchon or the origins of the word meme. – GQ

Why Algorithms Are Problematic In Education

“The global pandemic made it difficult to sit exams safely, so a solution needed to be devised. By looking at a combination of teacher’s predictions, past individual performance, and past school performance, grades were generated for every high school student in the UK. But as soon as the grades started to come in, thousands of students and teachers were shocked to see bright students getting poor grades. How it could it be that otherwise diligent and intelligent students from poor backgrounds were getting results which were demolishing ambitions?” – 3 Quarks Daily

Why Are Magazine Artciles Fact-Checked But Books Aren’t?

Most nonfiction books are not fact checked; if they are, it is at the author’s expense. Publishers have said for years that it would be cost-prohibitive for them to provide fact checking for every nonfiction book; they tend to speak publicly about a book’s facts only if a book includes errors that lead to a public scandal and threaten their bottom line. Recent controversies over books containing factual errors by Jill Abramson, Naomi Wolf, and, further back, James Frey, come to mind. – Esquire

Inside The Brains Of Jazz Improvisers

“How do singers such as Betty Carter take command of the present moment, seemingly bending reality to their will? While more romantic notions of creativity might point to Carter, and others like her, being ‘touched by the spirit’, there are less lofty explanations related to the physical dimension of making music with the human body, as well as the singer’s skilful musical interplay with the other musicians and the audience. There are also complex cognitive and psychological processes that drive the ‘real-time’ spontaneous creation of music.” – Psyche

The Future Of Our Lives Indoors

“Multiply your age by 0.9. If you’re forty, you’ve spent thirty-six of your years indoors. About a third of that is time spent sleeping, but still. Most humans who live in the United States and Europe spend more time indoors than some species of whale spend underwater. It may be that the minutes you spent walking to and from the subway on a Tuesday in January tallied up to fewer minutes than a whale spent on the surface, filling its lungs, that same day.” – The New Yorker

Here’s What It’s Like To Visit The Newly Reopened Met Museum

The new rules were evident inside the Met, where staff have installed an elaborate routing system designed to shuffle visitors from room to room without much crossover. Entrance into the Egyptian Wing, for example, brings attendees on a counterclockwise tour of the galleries. This makes for a more linear experience than usual, when meandering through different sections was a possibility. – Artnet

Australia Wants To Charge Google, Facebook For Showing News Stories. Google’s Fighting Back…

Australian regulators say the tech giants benefit from publishing news generated by others, but Google and Facebook are so dominant in search and social, respectively, that publishers can’t make them pay for it. It’s not the first time a country has tried to force Google and Facebook to pay media companies for republishing their news. – Wired