Douglas McLennan
Doug is the editor of ArtsJournal
Is Historic Preservation Hurting Our Cities?
As many cities today grapple with unprecedented housing shortages and cost-of-living issues, the degree to which historic-preservation laws can function as a pretext for preventing change entirely...
A Military Expert Defines What A Coup Is
January 6th was an extreme attack. But it was not a coup d’état. Because a coup d’état is not a demonstrative action, where you...
How China Built Enormous Influence Over American Entertainment
China's growing clout in global media extends beyond movies to the entertainment industry generally. Capital investments by U.S. firms in ventures such as the...
Influencer Culture Takes Over Academia
In the persistent wake of the pandemic, the pressure for scholars to self-promote has only intensified. Starved for opportunities to share our latest findings...
Netflix Employees Worry Company Is Unraveling
The company’s response have stirred a mix of angst and uncertainty among many rank-and-file workers. Some are worried that the streaming heavyweight may have...
Fears About Disappearing Ukrainian Culture
Museum curators and conservators are especially worried that because of the amount of un-digitalized catalogues and other existing print materials in archives and libraries,...
Bet You Didn’t Know Hyphens Were Controversial
The hyphen underwent an assault from a different corner in 2007, when Angus Stevenson, an editor of the Shorter Oxford English Dictionary, removed the...
Does Playing Word Games Make Us Better?
At heart, they just expose our funny, brilliant, quirky humanness. We love riddles because they show how we’re “rationalization machines. We are great at...
How Maia Kobabe’s Graphic Novel Became The Most-Banned Book In American Schools
Suddenly, Kobabe was at the center of a nationwide battle over which books belong in schools — and who gets to make that decision....
The Global Phenomenon That Is Seattle’s Indie Music Radio Station KEXP
These days, KEXP has roughly 180,000 weekly listeners on the airwaves, 100,000 listeners online, and a YouTube channel with 2.69 million subscribers and nearly...
Against Performative Activism In The Arts
Signalling in writing or in speech that you’re anti-racist is entirely different to being anti-racist – that is, to doing the work to create workplace cultures...
How Gorecki’s Third Symphony Became A 90s Pop Icon
Unsurprisingly, the recording did not start life intending to keep the company of Madonna and Prince – but in late 1992 the symphony was...
The Links Between Music And Personality Type
The researchers found global correlations between extraversion and contemporary music; between conscientiousness and unpretentious music; between agreeableness and mellow and unpretentious music; and between...
UK Art Dealer: Brexit Has Killed Our International Sales
Since the UK left the EU on 31 January 2020, Shovlar’s income has dropped by 60%. He says trade with the EU, where 99%...
Portrait Of A Small Bookstore (In Film)
Tannenbaum’s GoFundMe didn’t just meet its target – staggeringly, it actually doubled its $60,000 goal in just two days of operations, instantly changing The...
The Fraught Relationship Between Publishers And Social Network Platforms
Despite 20 years of often difficult relations, a clear recognition of the “frenemy” dynamic at play, and the reality of intensifying competition for attention,...
Why Pessimism Is Useful
We are so quick to equate pessimism with passivity or fatalism or despair, and to reject it on that basis – for, of course,...
Why Kids Are Great At Philosophy
Children are sophisticated thinkers, more than capable of abstract thought. They’re creative too. Indeed, in some ways, kids make better philosophers than adults. They...
What Exactly Is TikTok (And How Does It Work?)
What’s surprising is that content fueling viewership only comes from a small subset of TikTok’s user base—a statistic similar to YouTube. Only 33.9 percent of...
The Hugely Successful Musical Created On/Through TikTok
Over the course of creating The Unofficial Bridgerton Musical, Barlow and Bear played to other fans of the show via TikTok: They rehearsed their songs, interacted...
What Happened To Method Acting
In 2022, in our heyday of superhero blockbusters and bingeable story lines, the Method seems to be fading away. - The New York Times
Burying Robert Moses For Good
Invoking Moses is easy shorthand for a legacy of racist urban planning—a shameful history but, like legal residential segregation, one many view as consigned...
That Time In The 80s The Egyptian Government Tried To Ban Music Cassette Tapes
Courtesy of the president’s executive actions, audiocassettes, enjoyed loudly by many Egyptians in public spaces, were no longer simply a nuisance. Noisy cassette recordings...
The Case For The Intrinsic Value Of Art
The question of the intrinsic value of art is one he never expected to need to address. For him, it is a given. For...
Study: Four Times More Male Characters Than Female In Literature
Mayank Kejriwal and fellow researcher Akarsh Nagaraj used data from 3,000 books that are part of the Gutenberg Project, across genres including adventure, science...
