Douglas McLennan
Doug is the editor of ArtsJournal
How COVID Killed Criticism
Pauline Kael would be appalled at the spectacle of film writing nowadays. Journalists meet actors and gasp in awe. The wise editor has given...
Researchers: Hit Pop Music Increasingly Relies On Harmonic Surprise
The researchers found that the most popular songs had a high level of harmonic surprise, including the use of relatively rare chords in verses,...
Why We’re Fascinated By Low-Stakes Literary Disputes
It happens every few months, somewhere or other, with a reliability approaching a new genre. Someone, usually working for a large media company, devotes...
Justifying Why Princeton Should Exist
This is the puzzle of Princeton: How can an institution designed to serve the aspirations of an elite few authentically wrestle with issues of...
How To Explain Trump’s Love Of The Musical “Cats”?
What Trump is soothed by, perhaps, is not the sentimentality of the song alone but a tensile line of steel to which, Betty Buckley...
Why Big Movies Don’t Shoot In Washington State
“For better or for worse, film is an incentivized industry. Around 38 states have programs to incentivize film production. We are always at the...
Maria Ressa Just Won A Nobel – Only The 18th Woman In 126 Years...
With half the world made up of women, the obvious question arises: Why have so few been granted the committee’s most prestigious prize and,...
The Fall Of Rome Didn’t Happen When You Think It Did
The fall of Rome in 476 is a historical turning point that was invented nearly 50 years later as a pretext for a devastating...
The Right To Be Forgotten: Should Newspapers Have To Remove Your Name If You...
“The big concern here is that, basically, news organizations are now willingly performing much more extreme acts of censorship of their own content than...
New Player In Billion-Dollar Music Rights Management
HarbourView is the latest player in what has become a high-stakes contest in the music business: the ownership and control of catalogs of songs,...
When Jan Swafford Was Asked To Review An AI-Written “Beethoven Tenth” Symphony
“Not for me,” I said. “I know pretty much what I’ll think about it, and my review could get snarky.” “If so, that would...
Of Poetry, Plagiarism, And Artistic Influence
Where were the limits exactly, in what was deemed to be a case of poetry plagiarism? How many lines that emerged while writing, any...
The Transformative Conductor: David Alan Miller @ 30 Years Leading The Albany Symphony
“The orchestras I've worked with have been a bit like ocean liners. Very big, little hard to turn around. And I would say the...
The New Musicology: Beethoven Was Just an “Average White Composer”?
"These various controversies are far from simple disputes between ‘conservatives’ and ‘progressives’ but emblematic of a discipline in which some protagonists lack a sense...
Edward Snowden: Balancing Risk, Reality And Facts
The true challenge is not to enumerate the risk, but to live with it; to stake out the resilient middle ground between denying danger altogether and...
Afghanistan’s Cultural Sector Goes Underground
“In Afghanistan, work in the field of arts and culture is probably one of the hardest jobs.. but we did it because we loved...
Composer Bright Sheng Removed At University Of Michigan After Showing Olivier Othello Film
“To show the film now, especially without substantial framing, content advisory and a focus on its inherent racism is in itself a racist act,...
Why The Oxford English Dictionary Has Added 6 Korean Words
"They show how Asians in different parts of the continent invent and exchange words within their own local contexts, then introduce these words to...
The Odd Contortions Of Hollywood’s New Movie Museum
The Academy has created spaces that, as it declared last year, would “prioritize the experience of traditionally underrepresented or marginalized people.” Unfortunately, this embrace...
Andras Szanto: The Permeability Of Ideas Versus Our Institutions
"To what extent does the artistic institutional system become distanced from primary creativity? The system of scientific institutions is no less problematic. Sooner or...
Capturing The Movement Of Starlings As Art
Kathryn Cooper first films the starlings in 4K resolution. Then, working with clips that range in length from less than a second to more...
How San Francisco’s Last Video Store Survives
“Part of why I work so hard doing this is that I believe people should have access to more than what’s just currently in...
Performative Diversity?
The current emphasis on diversity and inclusivity, however warranted, endangers or distorts a cultural canon that we cannot (in fact, must not) wholly jettison....
Are Audiobooks Superior To Paper?
Audiobooks aren’t cheating. They aren’t a just-add-water shortcut to cheap intellectualism. For so many titles in this heyday of audio entertainment, it’s not crazy...
Streaming Has Killed Music Genres. That’s A Real Loss
Musical genres have long had a peculiar imaginative power and participatory quality. They aren’t just labels imposed by an industry; they’re shaped by passions...