Douglas McLennan
Doug is the editor of ArtsJournal
Was Rachmaninoff Really A Radical?
One aspect of Rachmaninoff’s legacy that deserves greater scrutiny is his peculiar resonance with early-twentieth-century American pop music. George Gershwin, the son of Russian...
A Wave Of New Indigenous Dance On Canada’s West Coast
Indigenous dance is always a way to share knowledge and teachings across generations, a way to know and express who you are, and who...
A Lifetime Collecting Books. And Now They Leave Home
My mind wanders back to a final stroll I took through my parents’ library just before the home was sold—acres of empty shelves, a...
Everything Is Boring Now – Our Music, Our Books, Our Theatre. Why?
I can think of no recent novel or film that provoked passionate debate. Public arguments people do have about art — about appropriation and...
NPR Hires An “Audience Editor”
Pablo Valdivia "will collaborate across Newsroom and Programming to identify, develop and distribute content that will appeal to Latinx audiences,” says Emily Barocas, Deputy...
How American And European Musical Tastes Are Diverging
There seem to be several currents in European composition: the heirs of Pierre Boulez, post-serial, and neotonal. Among the younger composers, however, there is...
Next Goal For Artificial Intelligence: Reasoning
The ultimate goal, in Dr. Ferrucci’s view, is that A.I. becomes a trusted “thought partner,” a skilled collaborator at work and at home, making...
A Good Metaphor For Approaching Complexity
The three-body problem is the best metaphor I’ve found for a social complexity that affects us all today—a problem resulting from the interaction of...
Inside Hamburg’s Steinway Factory
A piano has more than 8,000 individual parts. The building process begins with curing the wood, leaving large sheets of maple, beech and mahogany...
Security For Art In Canada Is Lax, Say Experts
However it happened, it's clear those who stole a world-famous portrait of Sir Winston Churchill from the Château Laurier planned the heist meticulously. It...
New Deal: Washington Post As Idea Factory For Hollywood
Two months since the announcement of a “strategic partnership”—in which Imagine will “create scripted and non-scripted film and television properties derived from The Post’s vast archives, current...
Are We Crippled By Mythologies Of “Progress”?
We see others as crippled by ignorance and cowed by superstition; we don't see the extent to which we are, in our own ways,...
Don’t Diss Pessimism. It’s Useful
Given that the world we live in forces us to deal with pandemics, economic problems, wars and climate change it can seem overwhelming that...
My Friend Was A Brilliant Dancer. And Then He Killed Himself
After our time training together in the '70s, Richard went on to join two of the finest ballet companies in the world at the...
San Francisco Art Market Struggles
The Gagosian Gallery closed last year, and Pace will close its Palo Alto gallery next month. Working artists have had to leave their Bay...
The Politics Of Book Banning (Basically, We’re All Against It)
Americans on both sides of the political aisle were opposed to banning books, although it also found stark differences when it came to how...
The Cultural Politics Of Counting People
In theory, counting the population seems so basic, so neutral: a math problem, albeit “a serious slog” of one. But the numerical is political,...
Edmonton Nixes Buffalo Sculpture After 12 Years Debate Over History
“Perhaps the city is not ready for a real dialogue about its colonial past and the condition of coloniality that continues to mark the...
Eco-Writing Gets Real
“We” didn’t cause climate disruption; ExxonMobil did. In these types of, albeit nonfictional, narratives, the push is precisely to rescue the “figure-ground” narrative form...
The Latest Version Of Artworld Fame In NY’s Downtown
These niche-famous people are the types who are living out the latest chapter in what it means to be in this particular corner of...
Documenting Great Music Careers — The Age Of Legacy Recordings
That word “historic” is interesting. You may find that you heard these performances, as they happened. Or reviewed them. Or played them. Which may...
Alan Ayckbourn And His 87 Plays
As one of the UK’s most commercially successful theatre-makers, Ayckbourn might seem an odd figure to focus on. He is not cutting-edge; he is...
The Dismantling Of HBO: Make As Much Money As Possible
David Zaslav’s plan is to focus on making as much money as cheaply as possible. When he joined Discovery in 2006, it was a...
What Is The Internet Hiding From Us?
Does its very immensity undermine its utility as a source of information? How often is it burying valuable data under lots of junk? Say...
What Magic Is This? Disney Making More Money Off Fewer Theme Park Visitors
Even as the company limits the number of visitors and keeps attendance at its U.S. theme parks below prepandemic levels, they are generating record sales...