Douglas McLennan
Doug is the editor of ArtsJournal
‘Sesame Street’ Was A Radical Experiment
"It's easy to forget now, given the show's 52-year ubiquity, that the original program was a shot in the dark – the first show...
Technology In The Arts After COVID
Rachel Moore: "Performing arts organizations experienced a steep learning curve that dictated a digital competency most probably never aspired to. Whether this new learning...
How Data Science Is Analyzing The Arts
"Computer scientists are writing algorithms to identify the emotional arcs of novels. Sociologists are building statistical models to analyze why certain works of visual...
“Multitasking” Is A Lie
The American Psychological Association has reported that even brief mental blocks created by shifting between tasks can cost as much as 40% in productivity....
The Moral Imperative For Releasing The Patents On Vaccines
"The pharmaceutical industry and the governments of several vaccine-producing countries, including the United States and the United Kingdom, as well as the European Commission,...
Celebrate Napoleon? Well, It Is His 200th Birthday…
This isn’t the first time that commemorating Napoleon or the events of his reign has posed a problem. In 2005, the then president of...
Fifty Years Ago Photography Was Barely Considered Art. Now…
"There are now more galleries showing contemporary art than those devoted to the entire rest of art history, with sales at auction houses following...
Great Writers On Their Best- And Least-Loved Punctuation Marks
F. Scott Fitzgerald and Tom Wolfe on exclamation points, Garielle Lutz and Toni Morrison on commas, Norman Mailer on hyphens, Cormac McCarthy on periods,...
Cuomo: Broadway To Reopen Sept. 14
New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo has announced that Broadway will reopen on Sept. 14, with some tickets going on sale beginning tomorrow. Theaters will...
The World’s Longest-Running Play, Coming Back From Its First Closure In 69 Years
The producers of Agatha Christie's The Mousetrap in London's West End have "employed two casts who will rehearse and work completely separately, and appear...
The Rage Fueling The New Campus Novels
A life made, or half-made, under conditions of academic precarity is often a paranoid, anxious, stupefying life—stupefying in part because, in some sense, you...
New AI System Makes Dubbing Of Films In Foreign Languages Less Awful
"The process begins with recording an actor speaking the dialog in the required language, as one would in a dubbing process, explains co-founder and...
What If The Idea Of “The Tragedy Of The Commons” Is All Wrong?
Nobel Laureate Elinor Ostrom believed so. "While conservation almost always carries at least some short-term costs, researchers have found that many community-based conservation projects...
The First Opera Written For And Produced In Virtual Reality
"What is most radical about Current, Rising is not the technology but how the creative process has been flipped. Rather than the composer setting...
A Mysterious Group Of Ancient Monuments In Saudi Arabia Older Than The Pyramids
Scattered across 77,000 square miles of desert in northwest Arabia, the mustatils (the name comes from the Arabic word for “rectangle”) were built between 8,500...
UK Threatens To Cut Funds For University-Level Arts Education By 50%
"Under proposals put forward earlier this year by Gavin Williamson, the education secretary, funding from the Office for Students — the independent regulator of...
New York Times Dance Critic On Writing About People’s Bodies
Gia Kourlas: "Generally, it doesn't feel fraught, but at the same time I am aware of the sensitivity it takes to write about the...
Meet The Detective Who’s Recovered Half A Billion Dollars’ Worth of Stolen Art
" Marinello is one of a handful of people who track down stolen masterpieces for a living. Operating in the grey area between wealthy...
W. Royal Stokes, Washington Post Jazz Critic, Dead At 90
"A onetime professor of classics who became a major presence in jazz as a Washington-based radio disc jockey, journalist and author known for his...
Britain’s Reopening, But A Quarter Of Its Summer Rock Festivals Are Cancelled. Why? Insurance.
"According to the Association of Independent Festivals (AIF), which has been tracking festivals taking place in Britain this year, 26% of all festivals with...
How France Is Managing Reopening Of Arts Venues
Roselyne Bachelot, the culture minister, has outlined the planned stages of reopening and rules that will be in place beginning May 19: for instance,...
UK’s Cinema Chains Are Reopening, Despite Shortage Of New Films To Show
"The UK's biggest cinema chain, which is sweetening its £9.99 monthly all-you-watch subscription scheme to get punters back indoors as summer nears, will...
Plexiglass, Screens, Headphones — A Return to Theatre Spaces?
In these uncertain, transitional days, theater companies remain perplexed about how and when to open their doors, and so many potential ticket-buyers fret over...
How A John Denver Song Inspired A Generation Of Asian Immigrants
Over the past half century, Denver’s Appalachian anthem has also lodged in the hearts of many families in Asia, thousands of miles away from...
Carey Perloff Remembers Olympia Dukakis
She was an astonishing teacher, spending hours and hours in the classroom every time she came to ACT, and back home in New York,...