Douglas McLennan
Doug is the editor of ArtsJournal
Deadpool And Wolverine Has Biggest Box Office Weekend For An “R”-Rated Movie
The movie brought in $205 million in its first weekend domestically at the box office, according to Comscore estimates. It cost $200 million to...
How The Enrollment Industrial Complex Is Harming Higher Ed
“The concept is to award financial aid in a way that results in the maximum total amount of net tuition revenue for the institution.”...
A Performance Artist Steals A Coin From The British Museum. Is It Art?
The central focus of the project was the coin, its removal from its display and its deposition in a donation box at the museum....
What I Learned Memorizing A Poem A Day
Because the process is as simple as it is stultifying, memorizing a poem always begins as a crime. The tedium of repetition reduces the...
Remembering Lewis Lapham
His goal: “to ask questions, not to provide ready-made answers, to say, in effect, look at this, see how much more beautiful and strange...
Report: People Are Posting Less On Social Media
Billions of people access social media monthly, but users are posting less and favoring a more passive experience, surveys of users and research from...
The Woman Who Invented The Apple Dance
The dance was dreamt up by Kelley Heyer, a New York-based actor and content creator who decided to film herself making it up “on a...
What Orwell Would Have Thought About Cancel Culture
“Orwell would have been more disturbed by the mendacity of those claiming to have been canceled than he would have been by the decision...
“Brat” Summer And The Emptiness Of Zombie Publicity
Something about this “Brat” summer we’re living through gets me down — something about our eagerness to replace the seasons of our lives with...
Sonos CEO Admits Enormous Failure Of App Update
I am having trouble thinking of an app update fiasco large enough to compare it to this one, because in my time as a...
Leonard Slatkin At 80
Few currently active conductors have developed such a natural affinity with the recording studio. The independent producer Andrew Keener, who collaborated on his UK...
Study: Memory For Music Doesn’t Degrade With Age
Research has shown that many aspects of memory are affected by ageing, such as recall tasks that require real-time processing, whereas recognition tasks that rely...
Astonishing French Department Stores Changed Cities. Can We Learn From Them?
Inspired by opera houses, the grands magasins were astonishing spectacles, built on a pharaonic scale. A new exhibition in the French capital charts the golden age...
US House Fends Off Cuts To NEA, NEH Budgets
As of June 28, the House of Representatives has approved $203.9 million each to the NEA and the NEH, evenly distributing the Biden-Harris administration’s...
Musing On Dance And Addiction
A dancer's day is all about discipline, be that in relation to movement or intake (even healthy, appropriate eating: food is fuel etc). So...
Why The TV Experience Sucks Right Now
As viewers, we’re being flattened by a fire hose of programming — and the experience of watching TV feels like a ritual of submission,...
How Memes Are Helping Redefine Kamala Harris
The popularity of memes means they have become an important vehicle for political communication. In my research, I have identified four roles of memes:...
Struggling To Explain The Enormity Of AI
The great discoveries of humanity have always taught us that we are not masters in our own house: Copernicus removed the Earth from the...
David Dorfman And The Zen Of Dance
When you’re dancing with another person, or folk-dancing in a big group circle, or country line-dance, or disco dance—that’s how I started—you’re concentrating on...
New Live Recordings By Louis Armstrong
This month, with the release of a new album of live recordings, fresh material has been added to the ongoing debates about Armstrong's contradictions. -...
Study: Most UK Adults Don’t Read For Pleasure
The study, commissioned by the charity the Reading Agency, saw 15% of adults reporting that they have never been regular readers, and 35% saying...
Cultural Phenomenon: “Inside Out 2” Overtakes “Barbie” Box Office
The film, which follows the first film’s heroine as she hits puberty, has just overtaken Barbie in terms of global ticket sales, as well as becoming...
The Culture-War Math On Attacks On Libraries
Though book bans have been a familiar tactic in culture wars, today we’re witnessing an attack on libraries themselves as social institutions. There’s a...
Why Kids Aren’t Reading Books
In the first half of 2024, print sales of middle reader books, intended for children ages 9 to 12, dropped by 5 percent from...
Perusing Editor Robert Gottleib’s Books
When Mr. Gottlieb, who died last June at 92, wasn’t heartlessly lancing thousands of words out of Robert Caro’s biographical volumes or marking up...
