Douglas McLennan
Doug is the editor of ArtsJournal
Why Do Museums Focus So Much On Getting Young People, When Older People Are...
Why have museums not been more attentive to older people? Perhaps we feel anxious that the younger generation will not develop a lifelong habit...
The Pittsburgh Symphony Is Playing Well. But The Audience Is Missing. What To Do?
In the fall, the Pittsburgh Symphony averaged about 1,000 listeners per concert, or less than half of the capacity of Heinz Hall. This is...
An Argentine Man Has Spent Two Decades Reviving An All-But-Dead Indigenous Language
His painstaking work with a linguist has produced a dictionary of roughly 1,000 Chaná words. For people of Indigenous ancestry in Argentina, he is...
Trust In Universities Is Plummeting. There Are Good Reasons For That
The most recent debacle at Harvard, in which large swaths of academia seem to have conveniently forgotten what the term plagiarism means so they don’t have to admit...
The Crisis At Substack Is Of Its Own Making
The company wanted to have it both ways: to exert the cultural influence of a major media company without shouldering any more responsibility (or...
Scammers Are Stealing Artists’ Music And Posting To Streaming Platforms
The streaming ecosystem, say critics, is easily gamed. For $20, artists can buy an annual subscription to a music distributor, a company that can...
The Word Tags That Get You To Click On Netflix Shows
The two- or three-word tags, meant to convey the gestalt of a show or movie, regularly help viewers choose a show from the service’s...
“Memorization” Could Force AI Companies To Rest And Start Over
Although it would set generative AI back in the short term, a responsible rebuild could also improve the technology’s standing in the eyes of...
Young Musicians Are Starting To Follow The Taylor Swift Career Playbook
This recalibration of the rules of engagement between artists and labels is also a result of the democratisation of information about the byzantine world...
Why Is Sondheim More Popular Now Than When He Was Alive?
The hottest ticket on the Great White Way at the moment, judging from what people are willing to pay for it, is Sondheim's notoriously...
How Dance Is Taking Up The Cause Of Black Justice
In 2016, David Roussève’s “Enough?” — with an accelerating choreographic phrase danced to a soundtrack of Aretha Franklin — asked whether dance can be...
Theatre Development Fund’s Deeksha Gaur Talks About The Return Of Theatre In NYC
"If we think that our relationship with our audiences is super transactional, that is a dangerous game to play, as we are finding." -...
Why McGill University Is Contemplating Leaving Quebec
The announcement, last October, that out-of-province students would see their annual tuition fees double comes on the heels of repeated government efforts to chip...
The High Life Of The Emmys Is Over
If last year’s combined 191-day writers’ and actors’ strikes, with all the vitriolic exchange between creatives and management, has not convinced you that television’s...
Why It’s So Difficult To Spot Liars
One reason we are such poor lie detectors may be because we tend to believe others are telling the truth more often than we...
AI Is Great At Creating Personalized Children’s Stories For Your Kids. Here’s The Problem…
The main version of ChatGPT has, since its launch last year, been able to write a children's story, but GPTs allow parents—or anyone, really—to...
Proposal For A New Law To Protect Artists From Being Digitally Cloned By AI
If signed into law, the proposal, called the No AI Fraud Act, could curb a growing trend of individuals and businesses creating AI-recorded tracks using...
Why Scientists Can’t Give Up Their Chalkboards
No one appreciates the power of this venerable technology better than physicists and mathematicians, who infinitely prefer the humble blackboard to its high-tech rivals....
Want To Be The Next Director Of The British Museum? Here’s The Job
Applicants must have a “vision for the future of the British Museum and its purpose as a national and a global museum in the...
Is Teresa de Keersmaeker The World’s Best Dancer?
Arguably the world’s most celebrated dancer and choreographer, De Keersmaeker has produced a vast body of work over four decades, from major theatre productions...
Why You Need To Learn To Think In Probabilities
One of the most important conceptual developments of the past few decades is the realisation that belief comes in degrees. We don’t just believe something...
The Audacious Scheme To Sell The World’s Most Expensive Painting Ever
Of the multiple schemes and fabrications attributed to Bouvier in court the most audacious involved Dmitry Rybolovlev’s acquisition of Leonardo Da Vinci’s Salvator Mundi, which...
Algorithms Are Increasingly Choosing Our Culture. Here’s How They Fail
To build algorithms that more effectively predict user preferences and better enhance consumer well-being and social welfare, organizations need to employ ways to measure...
Britannica Once Published “The World’s 102 Great Ideas.” Ambitious, Yes, But Also A Flawed...
Devised at a time before computers were widely available, the index was certainly an impressive achievement. It had taken 24 researchers some five years...
How Consolidation Has Changed Book Publishing
Up to the immediate post-WWII period, publishing was a fairly local, personal business, with houses founded by whiskered men shipping out books to stores...