Douglas McLennan
Doug is the editor of ArtsJournal
Why The Music Catalog Market Is Setting New Records
New investors, including private equity firms, have poured billions of dollars into the market, viewing music royalties as a kind of safe commodity —...
America Out Of Ideas? No – But Our Market For Ideas Is Broken
Two weeks ago, I wrote that the U.S. needed a revitalized culture of experimentation. Now I think that what we really need is more...
How Twitter Distorts Intimacy (And Context)
The frequency of context-destruction is no accident. Twitter rewards high-context speech, and then gives us the perfect tool to decontextualize that speech. Twitter is...
Apple Streaming Has Been Crap For Classical Music. So It Bought An Expert
With a view to improving that experience, presumably, Apple acquired dedicated classical music streaming service Primephonic in August 2021. In a press release, the company...
The Further Adventures In Testing Whether Hybrid Performances Of Theatre Draw Audiences
"The show sold a bit below their historical average—which the company anticipated, not least because of the rising concern around yet another COVID variant—but...
The Problem With Grand Narrative Histories Of Humanity
By producing an overarching story of life, Big History is meant to fill the void that was left by the processes of secularisation that...
Is The Sackler Disgrace A Warning To Other Potential Museum Funders?
The resulting glare is sure to have a dampening effect on future donations from individuals or families whose wealth derives from practices today considered...
Movie Musicals Flopped This Year. Is The Genre Dead?
Studio executives and box-office pundits expected audiences to show up for In the Heights, Dear Evan Hansen and West Side Story, and not just...
San Francisco’s Golden Gate Bridge Has Been Singing Since June. Now A Fix
“After studying this phenomenon extensively, we’ve determined that the sound comes from new and more aerodynamic railing that we installed on the west sidewalk....
Health Care, Hospitals And Design Choices
The basic trajectory of hospital design has, so far, been toward buildings that are ever bigger, more complex and more sealed off from the...
Was Modernist Architecture Really The Product Of Brain Damage?
Why should it matter that the people who gave us modern architecture in the 20th century had traumatic brain damage and disorders? For one, the...
China Cracks Down On The Dancing Grannies
Under legislation to update China’s noise pollution ordinances, to be sent to lawmakers next week, dance enthusiasts will face limits on the volume of...
Do Computers Need To Be As Smart As Humans? Probably Not
Will deep learning eventually become “artificial general intelligence” (AGI), matching human intelligence in every way? I don’t believe it will happen in the next 20...
The YouTuber Working To Reinvent Philanthropy
Kevin Scally, chief relationship officer at Charity Navigator, the world’s largest nonprofit evaluator, says MrBeast is part of an encouraging trend of social media influencers using...
Do We Need To Save Journalism Or Reinvent It?
Platforms like Google and Facebook have transformed the way we consume and share news, but the digital revolution hasn’t yet revealed an equivalent breakthrough...
New Record: Bruce Springsteen Sells His Catalog For $500 Million
In March, Bob Dylan sold his catalog to Universal Music for a reported $300 million. Earlier this week, Primary Wave purchased James Brown’s music...
Painting Is Stolen, Then Replaced With Smaller Painting, Which Is Also Stolen…
A controversial painting was stolen from the Catholic University of America campus last month. When it was replaced by a smaller copy of the...
Lessons From Hollywood’s Digital Transition
While digital transformation was creating abundance in the scarce resources that had previously defined market power, it was also creating a new scarce resource,...
The 1920s Russian Novel That Anticipated Totalitarianism
People don’t have proper names; they are marked by a combination of letters and numbers, like the inmates of Nazi camps. They wear identical...
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...
