Douglas McLennan
Doug is the editor of ArtsJournal
The Problem With Media Consolidation
Today, the media industry has consolidated under fewer owners than ever before; its labour conditions have grown dire. The undeniable expertise of many journalists...
Redefining Mainstream American Music
“We can perform this music in the concert hall, we can talk about this music. But until people are just hearing it on...
The Rocket Scientist Who’s Also A Principal Ballerina
Kelley Hashemi’s day job is as an aeronautical engineer at NASA’s Ames Research Center in Mountain View, where she leads a research team working...
COVID And The Art Of Party Tents
Last year, as the pandemic isolated us into our respective domestic cocoons, designers took to their AutoCAD to imagine a brave new world of...
An Expertise In Books Gets You…
Literature professors have often had significant difficulty acknowledging their expertise and corresponding difficulty in justifying their status to skeptics, for broadly two reasons. - Public...
Ho-Hum: Golden Globe Nominations Are Out, But Few Seem To Care
There were no press releases sent en masse with statements thanking the HFPA and saluting co-stars and filmmakers. Also absent were the emotional reaction...
Blind To Ideas Of Reality?
If biology can innately limit the mind of a cat, could we humans, also creatures of nature, be subject to a similar destiny? Could...
Trailblazing Black Feminist bell hooks, 69
Her writings anticipated and helped shape ongoing debates about race, gender and class in the United States. - Washington Post
Canon Fodder: Classical Music’s Difficult Reckoning with Race
"More than anything, the artistic questions facing classical music today go well beyond the simple dualism of keeping or tossing the canon; they revolve...
How Elizabeth Alexander Is Transforming The Mellon Foundation
Alexander came to the organization with a specific mandate, she said, of “sharpening the focus—doing all the work, every penny, through a social justice...
Where The Main Thread Of American Opera Ought To Have Gone: “Porgy”
Joseph Horowitz teaches us to stop hearing “Porgy and Bess” narrowly, as a Black opera, or as some sideline oddity called a folk opera....
Los Angeles Review Of Books Turns Ten
A self-described “cockeyed optimist,” Tom Lutz admitted he underestimated the volume of work required to launch the publication — not to mention the costs...
Why Podcasting Might Be A Passing Fad For Media Companies
For several years, a mixture of denial and deep optimism have kept up the facade. News outlet leaders believe that, since others are perceived...
Hong Kong’s M+ Was Ambitious. But Its Time May Already Have Passed
M+ seemed inevitable, so right. But if you looked closely enough, divisions between the city and its various cultural saviours were starting to emerge. -...
The Problem: A Tech Solution To “Solving” Democracy Is Problematic
Optimization cannot reconcile people’s conflicting world views. Though conflict has always been the meat of politics, political differences today mean that people not only...
Great Books And The Purpose Of College
In the old college system there were lists of books that every student was supposed to study—a canon. The canon was the curriculum. In...
Singers Who Have Found New Creative Life During COVID
As devastating as the pandemic has been to lives and livelihoods, a number of opera singers have found themselves emerging back into live performance...
How Paul Winter Redefined Ambient Music
No one in the music world has been more ambitious or creative in exploring the ways musicians can create soundscapes in dialogue with the...
Studies: More Education = Higher IQ For Longer Time
We consistently see that longer education does raise our cognitive abilities: a person’s IQ gains one to five points for each additional year of...
Australian Artist’s Instagram Account Was @Metaverse. Then Facebook Booted Her Off
Early that morning, when she tried to log in to Instagram, she found that the account had been disabled. A message on the screen...
Propaganda? Let’s Be Clear About What It Is
Although the term is less than 400 years old, the phenomenon of propaganda is far older. The pyramids of Egypt, to take one example, are propagandistic,...
Theatre Numbers: 2020 Was Tough, And Yet…
Not-for-profit theatres contributed nearly $2.1 billion to the U.S. economy and attracted 23 million attendees, according to Theatre Facts 2020. SMU Data Arts
The Making Of Tom Stoppard
The creation of Tom Stoppard, the man as well as the artist, began with a kind of extraordinary disappearing act. - The Nation
Dvorak Predicted Black And Indigenous Music Was the Future Of Classical Music. Why Didn’t...
In a depressingly familiar trope, Joseph Horowitz exposes a deliberateness in denying Black and Indigenous composers and musicians their role in America’s classical-music development. -...
New Yorker Writers Choose Their Favorite Books Of 2021
Nuff said. - The New Yorker