Douglas McLennan
Doug is the editor of ArtsJournal
Why Are People Hating On This Year’s Pantone Color Of The Year?
Today alone, people have been coming out in droves to express their deep-seated hatred for or utter confusion about Mocha Mousse in various comments sections. USA Today even insinuated...
Here Are 2025’s Golden Globe Nominations
On the TV side, FX/Hulu’s “The Bear” continues its trophy domination with the most nominations for any series; that’s five for the restaurant-set dramedy....
Canva Changed How Ordinary People Design. Can Canva Survive AI?
Canva’s vision has always been to enable you to take your idea and turn it into a design, and reduce the friction between those...
Taylor Swift’s Finally-Completed Tour Took In An Astonishing $2 Billion
Through its 149th and final show, which took place in Vancouver, British Columbia, on Sunday, Swift’s tour sold a total of $2,077,618,725 in tickets. That’s...
Why The Novel Matters
It does not have to be clear or obscure. In the voyage out between these binaries – between the oil spills, thistles and phantoms...
The Creative Work That’s Coming Out Of Copyright This Year
Copyright will expire on Buck Rogers, Captain Easy, Horace Horsecollar, Tintin, Hal Foster's first Tarzan comic strips and, yes, Popeye. - Creative Blog
Those Cursed “Best Of” Lists? They’re Actually Valuable
Detractors of year-end lists argue that they too frequently reward work that has already been heavily promoted and acclaimed, especially in a category like...
When Barnes & Noble Bought One Of This Country’s Most-Storied Independent Bookstores
"When Barnes & Noble took over they were saying, 'Hey, this is the Tattered Cover. The name Barnes & Noble will be nowhere in...
Why AI Is Cognitively And Creatively Exhausting
"In the early days of GenAI tools, I would share these bullet-point lists of ideas with my team, and it would be met with...
Have We Damaged Philanthropy By Trying To Optimize It?
A report this year, from nearly 200 philanthropic leaders, noted that as 20 million households dropped out of giving, from 2010 to 2016, the organizations...
How We Got To Brain Rot
Brain rot is marked by a “supposed deterioration of a person’s mental or intellectual state, especially viewed as a result of overconsumption of material...
Americans Aren’t Reading Memoirs. Why?
This paucity of first-person storytelling is striking. Among the best writing of our current century, have so few people written well enough about their...
Deal Close On Return Of Parthenon Marbles To Greece?
It came as Sir Keir Starmer and his Greek counterpart met for talks in Downing Street on Tuesday - though it is unclear whether...
The Amazon Review Artist
Kevin Killian published over a million words on Amazon, across almost twenty-four hundred reviews, before his death, in 2019. The products he evaluated included...
How Games Are Shaping Our World
Play is something that predates humans. It’s fundamental to how animals engage in and understand the world. It’s how we test and figure out the...
Writers Demand Giller Prize Funder Divest From Arms Company
Some Giller winners state that “the only way to remedy what has been a deeply divisive period in Canadian arts is for the chief funders...
How Did We Lose Our Excitement For The Future?
As a child, I felt lucky to be born in 1960. I’d be only 40 in the year 2000 and might live half my...
Is The Era Of AI, Is There A Future Teaching Writing?
It turns out that there is some benefit to working in an industry that is clearly contracting but has not yet died. It forces...
If You Can’t Tell If The Music Is Created By AI, It Doesn’t Matter
Background music for commercials, once the domain of human composers, can now be generated by AI in minutes, meeting technical and emotional requirements at...
Has BookTok Passed Its Prime?
We’ve had enough of endless, disappointing BookTok recommendations that promise payoff, not to mention its other cons. So are we finally at the end of BookTok’s chapter?...
Report: Podcast-Listening Continues Strong Growth
While podcasts’ popularity grows overall, the strongest momentum is with watchable podcasts. The data shows four in ten say they like actively watching a...
Lessons Learned From A Century Of Hollywood Box Office Flops
There are three rules for avoiding a cinematic flop.Rule one: don’t pick a title that is boring, misleading or hard to pronounce. - Literary Review
Workers Found More Than 1000 Artifacts Under Notre Dame
It would have been unfathomable to dig up the famous cathedral before the fire. However, archaeologists now had the chance per a French law...
Anonymous Donor Gives Millions To Milwaukee Museum To Make Admission Free To Kids
The gift will enable the museum to establish a endowment that will fund the admission waiver in perpetuity. The gift went into effect the...
How Our Weird Obsession With Youth And Beauty Blinds Us To Real Meaning
With a crazed sense of humor and geysers of gore, these works demand recognition of simple and obvious facts: that looks aren’t everything and...