Douglas McLennan
Doug is the editor of ArtsJournal
Nope, Sorry. Cooperation Isn’t Always A Good Thing
We often talk about cooperation in glowing terms, associating it with ideas of virtue and morality. But viewing cooperation solely as a force for...
The News Is Broken. It’s Not Going To Get Better
I am learning to accept that our mainstream media will not adapt to the needs of this moment in our public life. Having talked...
Opera Company In Turmoil? Fort Worth Opera Loses Another General Director
Afton Battle, one of the few Black women to ever run a U.S. opera company, is resigning from the Fort Worth Opera. She will...
Why People Misspeak
This word substitution – and thousands like it – suggests that our mental dictionaries link words with related meanings. In other words, semantic connections...
Alex Ross: The Acoustics Of Lincoln Center’s Geffen Hall Makeover
My initial impressions, after three performances, were mixed. The sound is bright and clean, with excellent separation of instrumental voices. When the entire ensemble...
Theatre-Seat-Maker-To-The-Stars
“If a seat’s good, you don’t notice it,” he said. “You only notice it when it’s bad.” In the world of theater seating, he...
Czech Conductor Libor Pesek, 89
Pesek was a Czech conductor with a solid if unspectacular career when in 1987 he was appointed chief conductor of the Royal Liverpool Philharmonic...
David Remnick: Remembering Peter Schjeldahl
Peter was a man of well-developed opinions, on art and much else. He was someone who, after being lost for a time, knew some...
The Alluring Aroma Of Old Books
There are old books and there are old books. Sometimes opening one that I have innocently purchased for 3.99 plus postage can feel like...
Calculating The Moral Value Of The Distant Future
Unless you think—and some philosophers do think this—that the large-scale future consequences of our practices don’t matter at all, it’s hard to see how...
Reconsidering The Music Groupie
The argument for me as groupie is more complex than the definition of the term. Groupies were women who hung around bands. They were...
Audiences For TV Soap Operas Are Falling Off
One of soap operas' major problems in recent times has been a failure to bring in new fans on top of their existing ones....
Fear Of Cancel Culture Makes Me Wonder…
The experience made me wonder: Why do we assume that cancel culture is a pervasive reality, and what’s the impact of that assumption? - The Atlantic
Why Aren’t Dallas Audiences Returning After COVID?
Audiences are being more selective, according to researchers and arts leaders across the region. Some are scared to gather in crowded indoor venues. Others...
Why Peter Schjeldahl Mattered As A Critic
Schjeldahl was a belletrist as a writer — a once fashionable, now vaguely disreputable genre of fiction, poetry and essay writing with an acute concern for...
When The Stories We Tell About History Change… An Existential Crisis
Though the true past is fixed and unrevisable, stories about that past are not. Palaeontologists understand these stories as theories, but their audiences often...
What Scientists Are Learning About Language From The Grammar Of Artificial Intelligence
The overwhelming majority of the output of these AI language models is grammatically correct. And yet, there are no grammar templates or rules hardwired...
The Growing Book-Banning Coalition
Predicated on “protecting our kids” from the “scourge” of sexual progressivism, the anti-democratic right is forming a powerful religious alliance against secular liberalism. -...
How Social Media Is Changing How We Engage With Art
The internet has always had an expansive capacity to reach some pretty strange and inexplicable places, but with the ever-evolving nature of social media,...
Criticize The Show You’re In? What Does It Accomplish?
Is the mainstream media the place to debate the process of theatremaking? Or does honesty, however it cuts, break the compact of the rehearsal...
When An Actor Criticizes The Show They’re In…
I’ve had artists and members of the theater community reach out after a review — yes, even ones where I didn’t care much for...
Is The Live Entertainment Capital Of America Really Branson?
Few places in the country host a professional show-business destination as quirky and expansive as this Missouri mountain town a few dozen miles north...
Chess Computers Are Now So Dominant, Are Humans Even A Factor In High-Level Play?
In an era when chess engines entirely dominate the game—when they’ve so monopolized human players’ thinking, strategy, and preparation that chess has, in certain ways,...
The Viral Tyranny Of TikTok
This new era of instant, inexplicable attention has also come at a price. In interviews with more than three dozen TikTok creators, many noted...
How The Denver Art Museum Removed Columbus From Its Stories
It is easier to understand objects created during the current downfall of Columbus and those who followed him, if you can see the art...