Douglas McLennan
Doug is the editor of ArtsJournal
What COVID School Closures Really Cost Students
Conventional accounts of the effect of school closures focus on the shift from in-person to online teaching and the academic losses that resulted. This familiar...
After 47 Books, John Grisham On Writing, Hollywood, And Storytelling
"I can’t get a fraction of that today. You can say, Well, we choked the golden goose, but all those films made money. Then...
Shall I Compare Thee To A Summer’s Algorithm?
We Googled the first line, expecting it to be an existing Philip Larkin poem, but we couldn’t find it on the Internet. It was...
What The Toppling Of Public Monuments Says About Our Time
While the recent destruction of statues in the contemporary West ostensibly relates to a racial reckoning, it nonetheless stands in a long lineage of...
Cornell West: America’s Essential Philosophy Is Pragmatism
Pragmatism emerged in the US in the late 1800s as a response to the Enlightenment push for absolute truth. Pragmatists — like William James...
The Purpose Of Comedy?
Comedy is a social corrective exposing the gap between what is (injustice, poverty, environmental disaster) and what some think it ought to be (fairness, equal opportunity, gentle breezes)....
The Meteoric Rise Of Art Star Anna Weyant
It has been a rocket-fueled rise to the top of the contemporary art world for Ms. Weyant—and far from her unassuming start in Calgary,...
Apocalypse Not: The American Mall Cannot Be Killed
Since the 1978 movie Dawn of the Dead, we have been using “the apocalyptic scale, the language and imagery of civilizational collapse” to describe malls....
The Cheech Is A Big Step Forward
The Chicano generation of artists and activists that emerged in the late 1960s knew that self-empowerment requires historical knowledge. The same goes for art,...
How BTS Became A Global Phenomenon To Rival Beatlemania
It was unusual for a K-pop group to start from a base of rap and hip-hop. It was even more unusual for a group...
The Strange Case Of Google’s “Sentient” Artificial Intelligence
Where we’ve arrived instead is somewhere more foreign than artificial consciousness. In a strange way, a program like PaLM would be easier to comprehend...
Where Does Responsibility Lie For Things We Do Wrong?
On the one hand, if we are solely responsible for the things we do wrong, some genuinely malevolent parties get off scot-free. On the...
National Gallery Of Canada Names An Interim Director
She’s taking over from Sasha Suda, who has been at the gallery’s helm for three years but is leaving for the Philadelphia Museum of...
What To Do If You’re Being Canceled
So, this is my answer: if I am being canceled I want my friends — and this includes not only my closest associates, but...
Upending Contemporary Native American Art
Cannupa Hanska Luger’s theory is that it has to do with their trauma of becoming American, which meant severing all ties to their own ancestral...
Screw Up Your Courage. This Is A Great Time To Read “The Greatest Book...
This would be Ulysses, by James Joyce, which came out 100 years ago, and has been commonly heralded as the Best Novel Ever Written. I...
Broadway’s Brooks Atkinson Theatre Is Being Renamed. But First We Should Remember Atkinson
For close to 62 years, the Brooks Atkinson Theatre has stood on West 47th Street, so it did 34 years previously as the Mansfield....
Has Streaming Made Us Forget How To Watch Movies?
That’s how most movies are experienced today. They are not, as they were for most of their history, seen. They are watched—on TVs, computers,...
Way Too Much! (Why Streaming Is Choking)
In the fall of 2019, years after it had revolutionized the industry with a slate of boundary-challenging originals and maybe a little drunk with...
How Artists Are Profiting From Twitter
Beneath Twitter's reputation as a shitposter's heaven, art lovers often prefer it to platforms that promote other forms of content (like Instagram), and artists...
The Whispers Are Growing: Google Search Is Broken
The frustration has become a persistent meme: that Google Search, what many consider an indispensable tool of modern life, is dead or dying. For...
The Most-Played Musician Of 2021 In The UK
The most-played artists charts revealed a closer split between genders, with 60:40 male to female. - The Guardian
The Decline Of The Secondhand Book Business
The increase in online buying has meant a reduction in the number of physical outlets, but those that remain have a beadier eye for...
The Gentle Art Of Rejection Letters
If a writer is to be rejected on grounds of style, it might as well be done stylishly. One publisher brilliantly mimicked Gertrude Stein’s...
Understanding A Science Of Progress
For thousands of years, global wealth – at least our best approximations of it – barely budged. But beginning around 150-200 years ago, everything changed....