Douglas McLennan
Doug is the editor of ArtsJournal
This Is What The Power Shift At The Kennedy Center Really Looks Like
Probably the most searing impact of the takeover has been the exclusion of small, local groups for whom the Kennedy Center gig was the...
Big Fight Over UK AI Copyright Transparency Bill
An amendment to the data bill requiring AI companies to reveal which copyrighted material is used in their models was backed by peers, despite...
Public Radio As An Empathy Machine
Public radio had been explicitly understood as an empathy machine since the dawn of This American Life in 1996. If we allow synonyms for empathy, radio...
What We Learn From Close Reading
We all pretended that we knew what close reading meant. We not only talked about it but we did it. We knew it when...
Why We Should Learn To Be More Skeptical… Of Our Own Ideas
Even our educational institutions often teach critical thinking as a weapon to dismantle others’ arguments rather than a tool for examining our own. The...
These Are The Nine Artists Elle Magazine Says Are Shaping Culture This Year
These nine visionaries have released Grammy-winning albums; performed in nearly every major concert hall and to packed audiences from the stage; won record-setting Tony...
Corporation For Public Broadcasting Denies Access To DOGE
CPB leaders denied that request, citing federal law that establishes the independent nonprofit outside of the control of the federal government. The request comes...
Library Of Congress Staffers Refuse Entry To Trump Officials
Trump appointed Todd Blanche, his former defense lawyer, as librarian of Congress after abruptly firing Carla Hayden. Library staff resisted, insisting Congress must be...
Clooney Play Says It Has Recouped Its $9.5M Investment In Only Seven Weeks
The acclaimed new play broke history many times over and recently announced that it holds the all-time record for the highest grossing play in...
How Trump’s Attacks On Funding Culture Are Changing The Landscape
For decades, there has been a nationwide artistic and cultural infrastructure receiving bipartisan support, including through the first administration of Donald Trump. Now that is...
How The Ancient Greeks Filled The Parthenon With Light
It was long thought the giant reflective pool in front of the statue of Athena acted as a mirror, sending light shimmering across its...
The Existential Battle Behind The Copyright Office Firing
The timing was extraordinary: the office had released a report just two days earlier (on Friday, May 9), concluding that many current AI training practices likely...
Universities Are Debating AI. But There’s Not Much Consensus
There are many in the humanities, and even more outside the humanities, who would argue that what is important to assess are thoughts, ideas,...
Cannes Film Fest Director On Trump Movie Tariffs: We’re Always Reinventing
“There’s something we noticed the year and months after Covid: There were fewer American films in the world; therefore local production –national production–became more...
The New Literature: Substack?
Their outputs are a mélange of the passion and experimentalism of the amateurs with the polish and ambition of the pros, and they often...
Has The US Government Given Up On Education?
“Right now, there are no education goals for the country,” said Arne Duncan, who served as President Barack Obama’s first secretary of education after...
Literary Criticism In The Changing University
In some ways we’re moving backwards from the model of the lay reader versus professional literary critic. Today there are far fewer lay readers...
Dance Music Is Having (Another) Moment. Here’s What’s Different
Festival lineups are jam-packed with D.J.s, while some of the biggest names in pop music (including Beyoncé, Drake and Charli XCX) have made dance...
Billionaire Collector Fight Pulls Back Curtain On Shadowy Art Market
The Chinese crypto entrepreneur Justin Sun and the American entertainment executive David Geffen are slinging written accusations at each other in federal court in...
AI Is Killing The Current Web Publishing Model
“Today, 75 percent of the queries… get answered without you leaving Google.” - SearchEngineLand
Has Asia’s Classical Music Boom Busted?
New piano sales fell from a pre-Covid peak of 400,000 in 2019 to 200,000 in 2022. China’s imports of pianos—mainly high-end instruments for conservatory...
The Met Gala And What It Reveals About The Unfairness Of Tax Breaks
The charitable tax deduction is distorting American philanthropy. It doesn’t just shape where dollars go; it also warps the way that nonprofits behave. Let’s...
Extraterrestrial Languages Could Be So Much Stranger Than We’ve Ever Imagined
The space of possible languages is vast, and full of exotic languages that are much weirder and stranger than any we have yet imagined....
Why AI Can’t Be Your Friend
Sycophancy is a common feature of chatbots: A 2023 paper by researchers from Anthropic found that it was a “general behavior of state-of-the-art AI assistants,” and that...
The Sheer Dopiness Of Thinking You Could Tariff International Movies
Today, international markets account for more than 70% of Hollywood’s box office revenue. Ironically, Hollywood is one of the few places where the US...
