Douglas McLennan
Doug is the editor of ArtsJournal
Has The Internet Been Abandoned To Bots?
Under your nose, the Internet of real people has gradually shifted into a digital world of shadow puppets. They look like people, they act...
Why Literary Fiction Might Be Dead
Literary fiction might be dead. More precisely, what might have died is literary fiction as a meaningful category in publishing and bookselling. - The Nation
Chicago Theatre Is In Dire Straits: Reacting To An Alarming Report
“An average audience-goer saw 40 or 50 shows or other cultural arts experiences over the course of a year, prior to 2020, going weekly...
Has Progress In Our Culture Come To A Standstill?
"Today culture remains capable of endless production, but it’s far less capable of change. Intellectual property has swallowed the cinema; the Hollywood studios that...
Brexit Has Been A Disaster For UK Musicians
A recent study "found that 27.8% of musicians have had no work in Europe since Brexit. Nearly half of respondents had seen their work...
UK Labour Party Promises A Different Approach To Culture
“We need to protect the cultural spaces we already have. Everybody knows a pub theatre which is about to close down, or a local...
The Iconic Sydney Opera House – 50 Years Later
On a windy spring day on 20 October 1973, Queen Elizabeth II officially opened the venue, drawing an estimated 1 million people to the city’s streets....
AO Scott Returns To The Movies. And Ponders The Wreckage Of Streaming
Just as streaming isolates and aggregates its users, so it dissolves movies into content. They don’t appear on the platforms so much as disappear...
High School Advanced Placement Courses Have Failed Us
The damage is familiar to college faculty across disciplines: writing as a form of Frankfurtian bullshit for which it’s more important to be superficially convincing than...
Seeing Cape Cod Through Thoreau’s Eyes
Much of the coastline Thoreau walked on is now under water. The land he saw was a sandy “wasteland” without trees,which had been cut...
Words Aren’t Merely Words. Context Matters, And Words Processed By Machines Are Changed
We are at a moment of disjunction in the history of reading, driven by a technological shift that already seems to be as consequential...
Why Social Networks Die
“These platforms are fundamentally rooted in users being able to get value, not just from the platform but from each other. If the platform...
The Go-To Website For Vinyl Records Is Endangered
Discogs is a fairly clunky, definitely old-fashioned website devoted to even older technology: a vestige of an earlier, more idyllic internet that has spent...
A Way To Revive The Kitchener-Waterloo Orchestra?
“It’s not that there is no money. There’s a lot of money. It’s just that there must be a reason to spend it. To...
After Popular Vote, Here’s This Year’s Winner Of ArtPrize
Artist Abdoulaye Conde has won the ArtPrize 2023 public vote grand prize for ‘Raining Wisdom,’ a massive, bright and colorful mural depicting elephants in the African...
How French Museums Are Addressing The Mental Health Of Their Visitors
"The aim is not to cure, but to empower, outside of the medical framework." When it comes to relieving depressive episodes, discouraging suicidal thoughts...
Do Movie Awards Still Matter?
Perhaps understandably, the heads of the two organizations who put on the biggest award shows in the film world have put up a solid...
How Ratmansky Became Ratmansky
Prolific and astonishingly versatile, he has absorbed a wide range of Western styles, from the fleet-footedness of Balanchine to the physicality and casualness of...
Conductor Jonathon Heyward’s Rising Star
Heyward, 31, is Baltimore Symphony Orchestra’s first music director of color and the youngest current music director of any major U.S. orchestra. To that,...
Michael Lewis At A Crossroads?
What happens when a writer who is used to rapturous reception, with a knack for shaping stories, collides with an active public drama he...
One Seattle Theatre Adopts Another’s Scene Shop As It Goes Out Of Business
“We’re all trying to figure out what it is that makes people get off their couch, come through the rain and show up at...
Study: Working Conditions At US Museums Are Terrible
68% of art museum workers have considered leaving the field, 74% cannot always cover basic living expenses, and it takes an average of 12...
Remembering Parterre’s James Jorden
Here was a zine, and then a website, dedicated to “remembering when opera was queer and dangerous and exciting and making it that way...
When Theatre Is Ailing, What Should Be The Role Of The Critic?
"I ask myself whether, as so many theater companies grapple with ongoing pandemic-related challenges, I should reconceive my role. What ought arts criticism look...
North Carolina Station Will Air Met Opera Broadcasts After All
“It was a very hard decision,” Emily Moss, the music director of WCPE, a nonprofit station based in Wake Forest, said in an interview....
