Douglas McLennan
Doug is the editor of ArtsJournal
The Shocking Escalation Of Anti-LGBTQ Bills In 2023 In State Legislatures
In 2023, U.S. state legislatures managed to surpass the number of anti-LGBTQ+ bills that were proposed 2022—i.e., what took lawmakers 365 days to achieve...
Pondering Self-Identification Of Race
I wanted to know what percent of all Americans change their race over the span of the panel, what percent of Americans who initially identify as...
What Houston’s Urban Sprawl Gets Right About Housing
It ain’t always pretty, but it is fascinating. As the policy tide turns to the end of single-family zoning and looser housing development regulations,...
Why We Still Need Classic Old Story Ballets
“If it’s lasted more than fifty years, it’s for a good reason. Think Mozart, Beethoven or The Beatles, they’ve stayed with us for a...
A Collector Who Plays His Own Rules
A compact man with a round face, Adam Lindemann, 61, is an unusual character in the art market, combining the passion and obsessiveness of...
NYC’s New Ohio Theatre To Close After 30 Years
The theater, originally known as the Ohio Theater and located off Wooster Street in SoHo, was founded as a nonprofit in 1993, and before...
The Paris Street Artist Who Became Ubiquitous
“I was invading public space with a mosaic of a small character whose role is to invade,” said the artist. A quarter-century later, it...
Art Collectives Were The Next Big Thing. What Happened?
Dreams of collectivity in the financialized and non-financialized zones of the art world have deep roots. But they were usually outside the door of...
Confronting Classical Music’s Burn-Out Culture
By stepping into a conservatory, we are encouraged to maintain packed-out schedules, work beyond the point of exhaustion, and have pristine social media accounts...
How Architects Fixed Geffen Hall’s Acoustics
While getting the sound of the orchestral hall right was a heavy lift, the architects and designers also had to contend with another problem in...
Public Television Is Irrelevant. Let’s Fix It
The time is right to revisit and revise the Public Broadcasting Act. A revised and reauthorized act would identify and direct resources to needs...
Twitter Is Collapsing Because Humans Aren’t Wired To Have That Many “Friends”
The reason the Babel story matters is not that it happened once but that it happens over and over: We Babelize and de-Babelize. The...
Rise Of The Intellectual Influencer Economy
As higher education continues to over-produce PhDs, many have sought an alternative path. This is a new niche of the online info-tainment ecosystem. These intellectual...
Readers Are Just Full Of Pet Peeves About Books
Apparently, book lovers have been storing up their pet peeves in the cellar for years, just waiting for someone to ask. Hundreds and hundreds...
AI Is Pretty Good At Writing Poetry. It Doesn’t Mean Anything
Of course, every Dickinson poem reflects her intention to create meaning. When ChatGPT puts words together, it does not intend anything. Some argue that writings by...
Why Beyonce’s Cultural Heft Exceeds Her Commercial Success
It’s clear that despite her status, in purely commercial terms Beyoncé is not a dominating presence in the music industry, with many artists selling...
Why “Tar” Has Become Something Of A Cult Film
Music, ephemeral in its power over our emotions, is a notoriously demanding discipline, so this film presents exciting possibilities for an exploration of the...
The Tyranny Of Having To Have Stories
Forty years ago, Peter Brooks produced a pathbreaking study, Reading for the Plot, which was part of the so-called narrative turn in literary criticism. Narratology,...
AI Chatbots Will Extend Human Creativity, Not Replace It
There will always be a need for genuine community and human connection, which can be aided by tools like this. We see chatbots being...
Margaret Atwood: Book-Banning In Historical Context
Freedom of expression is a hot potato—freedom for whom and for what, and who decides? The last English writer before the late 20th century...
Why Learning To Write Is About So Much More Than Writing
Learning to write is about more than learning to write. For one thing, it’s about learning to turn a loose assemblage of thoughts into...
Our Kids Are Struggling To Read. Growing Evidence Suggests We Can Teach Them A...
There is growing evidence from neuroscience and careful experiments that the United States has adopted reading strategies that just don’t work very well and that we haven’t relied...
Dudamel And The LA/NY Rivalry
The defection of Gustavo Dudamel from L.A. to conduct the New York Philharmonic reflects more than a switch in energy and show business muscle; the Venezuela-born...
Online Shopping Was Supposed To Improve The Experience. Instead, It’s Getting Much Worse
The search results are full of ads. You can’t come up with the right string of words to get more useful results. The reviews,...
Canada’s Indigo Books Hit By Ransomware
Indigo says it can't process electronic payments, accept gift cards or deal with returns. But at one location in Toronto on Friday, the store...
