Douglas McLennan
Doug is the editor of ArtsJournal
UK Media Industry Is Having A Crisis Of New Workers
The reality is that access to these careers often comes down to personal connections and the kinds of skills that are fostered through private...
How People Focus Attention On Art Has Changed. Museums Need To Change Too
You can see how certain architectures for looking were created in the 19th century to produce what gets called “attention”—museums changing their hanging practices....
Festival Attendance Might Be Down, But Glastonbury Sells Out In 30 Minutes
Fans were "randomly assigned a place in a queue" rather than having to refresh the holding page when the tickets went live. - BBC
How Did Lucy Calkins Become The Scapegoat For America’s Reading Crisis?
Calkins’s critics say that her refusal to acknowledge the importance of phonics has tainted not just Units of Study—a reading and writing program that...
This Was To Be The Year Of The Screens Ban In Schools. How’s It...
The fate of phone restrictions will depend primarily on whether or not principals and superintendents can establish clear rules, stand up for teachers who...
Today’s AJ Highlights
Good Morning: In a delicious irony, the humor publication The Onion has won an auction to buy Alex Jones' InfoWars website. The site said:...
How The Ivy League Broke American Culture
If you control the choke points of social mobility, then you control the nation’s culture. And if you change the criteria for admission at...
Who Wins When A Mega-Event Comes To Town?
Projected economic gains from hosting such events can appear impressive on paper, but questions remain about who ultimately benefits. Several reports in support of...
Forty Years Ago The Celebrity-Fueled Band-Aid Changed Charity Fundraising Forever
Afterwards, fundraising became much more of a spectacle. Donors were re-imagined and empowered as “saviours”. Celebrities began to view endorsement of charities as a...
Is The 20th Century Novel Its Own Genre?
Everyone seemed to know which books the term picked out, what the generic bones of the novel were, and why novels mattered. People talked...
Authenticity Is Not A Feeling. It’s A State Of Being
Authenticity is not a feeling, but an active way of being defined by conscious attention to the fit between who we are and the...
The Tricky Negotiations Of Dark Comedy
Satire is just dark comedy’s alibi, a way for critics to render their attraction to the genre compatible with morality and self-respect. - The Point
We Assume That There’s An Order To “Laws Of Nature.” But…
In short, we assume that, thanks to science, there is a recipe of sorts for how the laws of nature work. - Aeon
Pompeii, Overrun By Tourists, Introduces New Limits
The site welcomed a record-breaking four million tourists this summer alone, and up to 30,000 per day during the peak summer season. Records were...
Today’s AJ Highlights
Good morning:
Theater Festival Brings Solace To Capital Of Troubled Burkina FasoIn Ouagadougou, the festival Récréâtrales offers a glimmer of hope amid political instability and...
Has The Internet Trapped Fiction In A No-Man’s Land?
Even beyond social media, the internet seems to flatten prose. This is likely due to the distinct ways our brains interpret text – or,...
Pacific Symphony Picks A New Music Director
The 45-year-old Englishman enjoys a substantial social media following; he’s a fan of multidisciplinary performances combining music with other art forms; he’s passionately devoted...
Pitchfork Festival Abruptly Pulls Out Of Chicago
New York–based media giant Condé Nast, which owns Pitchfork Media, the longtime online music criticism website, broke the news on Instagram Monday that the festival would...
Constructing A Workable Philosophy For Coping With Hard Times
What is needed is a path forward that allows us to cope with tragedy and injustice without abandoning the value of people we care...
A Stroke Disabled Randy Travis From Singing. Now AI Is Helping Him Sing Again
AI gets so close to replicating Travis’s voice that it has, in a sense, brought him back as a full recording artist. The music...
What Role For The Arts In These Times? Perhaps Critics Are Needed Even More...
Our storytelling is necessarily derivative, since we’re responding to works of someone else’s imagination. And yet in how we frame the plays and operas...
Report: UK Careers In The Arts Are Dominated By The Upper Classes
A report from the Sutton Trust found stark overrepresentation in the arts for those from the most affluent backgrounds, which it defines as those...
How One Artist Uses AI To Collaborate
Mr. Leeman was most struck by the cheeky mischief — like the A.I.-generated snubs of the artist’s show that rotated on a wall display,...
Librarians, Increasingly Under Attack, Are Facing Burn Out
Librarians around the country are struggling to reconcile their desire to serve their communities with their need for self-preservation, especially as libraries have become...
Dance Is Increasingly Finding A Home In Museums
Though museums have long featured dance performances, today choreographers and companies are being given long-term residencies, exhibitions of their own with performance elements baked...