Douglas McLennan
Doug is the editor of ArtsJournal
TokTok Is A Wildly Creative Place. But TikTokers Struggle To Grow Beyond It
What’s become clear is that the skill set that led to big-tent triumph on the app in 2019 and 2020 is, by and large,...
The World Has A Plan To Try To Save Indigenous Languages. Not The US
The U.S. has an incredibly rich heritage of Indigenous languages ranging from Anishinaabe to Cherokee, Navajo to Tewa. But they are almost all endangered, in...
Some Of The Creative People We Lost This Year
Artists, musicians, technologists, actors, innovators and more. - The New York Times
In The 80s Booksellers Took Over A Belgian Town. Now The Tourists Have Left…
A band of booksellers moved into the empty barns and transformed the place into a literary lodestone. The village of about 400 became home...
Michiko Kakutani On Joan Didion
Decades ago, she was already pointing to the startling disconnect between much of the American public and the political and media elites who “invent,...
Kaywin Feldman’s Plans For The National Gallery
“I feel like I was hired with one clear mandate from the board which, they like to say, is to put the ‘national’ back...
Watch: “Music Man” Understudy Kathy Voytko Steps In At Last Minute. Hugh Jackman Pays...
Jackman told the audience "Kathy, when she turned up at work at 12 o'clock could have played any of 8 roles. It happened to...
Painter Wayne Thiebaud, 101
Truth be told, Mr. Thiebaud was not really a Pop painter. Detractors sometimes tried to pigeonhole him as one or as an illustrator. In...
The Calculations Behind A Successful Christmas Movie
Welcome to element philosophy. Scriptwriters use them to tell their story, composers sprinkle scores full of sleighbells and producers use them to influence us to...
The Formula For A Good Christmas Song
Plenty of explicitly Christmas-themed songs will have certain musical characteristics, even though they’re always optional. These include a major key, an accessible pitch range and...
All The Books That Won Big Prizes This Year
From the Pulitzer to the Booker, the Nebula to the Edgar, here are the winners of the biggest book prizes of 2021. - Bookmarks
Why Our Ideological Fights Descend Into Fights About What Words Mean
The well-rehearsed rhetorical drama over this kind of conceptual terminology is only one of the ways in which arguments over definitions and usage have...
In The Middle Of The Night, Hong Kong Authorities Remove Tiananmen Memorial
The 26-foot-tall artwork, known as the “Pillar of Shame,” had stood at the University of Hong Kong for nearly a quarter-century and honored the hundreds, if...
American Contemporary Theatre Closes Its Acclaimed MFA Program
The program consistently ranked as one of the top five graduate acting schools in the country, after more than five decades educating such distinguished...
Man Buys $30 Drawing. Now It Could Be Worth Millions
“It was either a masterpiece or the greatest forgery I had ever seen,” he said. - The New York Times
An Iconic Chicago Building Is Saved
Chicago has a forest of imposing skyscrapers, and nothing else like this squat concoction of glass and steel that looks from the outside like...
Is The Golden Age Of Travel Over?
The old way it was practised, at vast scale, and across increasingly porous borders, has begun to look like it might be a terminal...
Is Paris’ Grand Palais Throwing Out Its Big Art Fair?
RX France is challenging the validity of the process, claiming that it has received two written commitments to the fairs from RMN-Grand Palais, the...
Omicron Shutdown Comes At A Bad Time For Broadway
This selective information release does little to quell anxieties, and resentment toward the Broadway establishment is often triggered. - Washington Post
How The Internet Changed Music This Year
The geeks among you will recognize that the words “decentralization” and “distributed network” invoke a nearly 10-year-old model of equitable Web-based information flow, one that’s currently...
I Think, Therefore I Have Language
So how does language and thought relate, then? And what is “thought”, anyway? Perhaps one way of answering both questions is to determine whether...
British Film Classification Board Rethinks Some Of Its Previous Ratings
Recent rereleases of films such as Raiders of the Lost Ark, The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring and Jaws have led the board to reconsider...
Seriously? Curators Crack The Top Five “Most Trusted” Professions
Curators enjoyed a 4% increase in trustworthiness across gender and political affiliation in 2021. Notably, however, advanced degree holders were much more likely to...
Big Entertainment Comes To Riyadh. But…
Mass entertainment events are no longer a novelty in the once austere kingdom, but there have been reports by local and foreign women that...
Can Machines Measure Common Sense?
Consciousness, thought, creativity, will, imagination, and agency — once considered to be explainable only through philosophical reflection were now reformulated as precisely defined cognitive...