Douglas McLennan
Doug is the editor of ArtsJournal
Do You Know About #DarkAcademia?
On Instagram, the tag #darkacademia now has over 1 million posts, and Grazia has named the aesthetic as autumn 2021’s biggest trend. The TikTok generation has keenly...
“Pre-Saving” Music And What That Really Means
When you pre-save a song, it may look like the service you use, like Spotify, is the one requesting information about your account. But...
Nigel Kennedy Pulls Out Of Albert Hall Concert After ClassicFM Won’t Let Him Play...
Kennedy said the “culturally prejudiced” decision amounted to “musical segregation”, with the station he now calls “Jurassic FM” preferring him to play Vivaldi’s Four...
Fourteen Takeaways From This Year’s Emmys
The good, the bad, and the really long and bizarre. - Washington Post
What Does It Mean To Wrap The Arc De Triomphe?
Sebastian Smee: "Wrapping a triumphal arch is a way of creating something beautiful that also says: Enough with your delusions of grandeur. Away with...
Thomas Mann And The Case For Keeping Politics Out Of Art
Thomas Mann was not wrong to worry over democracy’s tendency to enlist art for its own ends, and he was not wrong to call...
Research: Sexual Abuse Is Rife In The Music Industry
Harassment, abuse and violence take place at all levels of the industry – from grassroots DIY scenarios to corporate setups. Even those scenes that...
Just How Many People Have Been Working From Home?
Seventy-three percent of survey respondents who had teleworked because of the pandemic guessed that at least half of Americans had done the same. But the actual...
The Unlikely Rise Of The UK’s New Culture Minister
Many in entertainment have been scathing of a politician who once claimed "left-wing snowflakes" were "killing comedy, tearing down historic statues, removing books from...
Fantastical Tower Proposed For Heart Of Hollywood
The proposed 22-story glass-skinned office tower would create its own bubble-like world with garden levels open to the elements on the 10th and 17th...
San Diego’s New Waterfront Concert Venue Makes A Splash
Of course I am describing a special place, not the kind of home most orchestras could hope to build in their neighbourhood. But the...
Is Social Media Like Alcohol Addiction?
To me, it sounds like alcohol—a social lubricant that can be delightful but also depressing, a popular experience that blends short-term euphoria with long-term...
Wave Of New Plays By Black Playwrights…
The plays are arriving at an existentially challenging moment for Broadway, when theaters have been closed for a year and a half, when the...
Science Works On Explaining How Much Sleep We Need
Although great progress has been made in developing sophisticated models and explaining phenomena such as circadian rhythms, jetlag and details of EEG recordings of...
Body-Shaming In Opera
“Diversity applies to pretty much everybody except fat people,” opera critic Uwe Friedrich tells me. The pressure to conform to a societal ideal of...
Researchers Explore What Juices The Echo Chamber
“You really don’t know whether this person making a good-sounding argument is really smart, is really educated, or whether they’re just reading off something...
How The Pandemic Is Changing How Lincoln Center Works
Usually, our work requires a year or two in advance planning. But now we’re building the plane as we’re flying. So it’s really shown...
Osage Nation Decries Sale Of Important Prehistoric Cave Art
The two-cave system is nestled within a 43-acre stretch of land in Missouri, about 60 miles west of St. Louis. Scholars have called it...
School Mural Altered In LA After Community Complaints
The artwork was part of a 2016 project to place murals around the campus. Two years later, the Wilshire Community Coalition, a group led by...
Why This Musicologist Quit Academia
In recent years the dogmatic mode of thinking, in which uncritical commitments are enforced by mechanisms involving public humiliation, no-platforming, and attempts to have...
Dudamel’s Conducting Fellowship Program Is Paying Off Big Time
The main thing these former fellows may take home from L.A. is indoctrination. New music here is part of the daily diet. Dudamel’s curiosity...
See The Six Architecture Finalists for This Year’s Stirling Prize
A bridge, a museum, a mosque... Here's where the best of UK architecture is in 2021. - BBC
Report: Hollywood Streaming Companies Hire More Women Than Traditional Studios
The long-running industry report card finds that in the 2020-21 television season, women accounted for 52% of major characters on streaming programs were women,...
Our Notions Of Privacy Are Ancient. Do They Fit In Our Modern World?
The evolutionary biologist E O Wilson once said of the source of human challenges in the 21st century that ‘we have palaeolithic emotions; medieval institutions; and god-like technology’. - Psyche
Minoru Yamasaki – The Architect Weighed Down By The World Trade Center
His long career has become, for many, a caricature or outright failure, the stuffing wedged between the two disasters of the Pruitt-Igoe housing complex...