Douglas McLennan
Doug is the editor of ArtsJournal
The World Shunned The Taliban. So Why Do They Seem To Be Thriving?
In January, the Taliban announced a new criminal code that, among other provisions, allows domestic violence and the corporal punishment of children and appears...
Ohio Comedian Jailed For Making Fun Of Police
Comedian Anthony Novak was nabbed by Parma police, tossed into the county jail and charged “with a felony punishable by up to 18 months...
Can A Rhythmic Beat Be Copyrighted?
The case, known as the Fish Market dispute, asks whether a looping beat widely associated with reggaeton can be protected by copyright. More than 150...
Who Is Championing Adventure In Classical Music?
Up-and-coming composers, looking for a break-out moment with their immense musical feel and depth, probably have their arms and tapping their feet wondering to...
Should Our Museums Be Responsible For Healing Us?
Like many other words that have been “problematised” using post-structural approaches in the humanities, “care” is no longer simply a benign building block of...
How Trump Gamed Approval For His Ballroom
“It’s sad that a majority of the commissioners lack expertise in art and architecture,” the person told CNN. “There is only one architect, yet...
A Major Project To Revive Indigenous Languages
Chicago’s Newberry Library has received $4 million from the Mellon Foundation that will help widen access to Indigenous languages, some of which have been...
Trump Administration Restores Philadelphia Slavery Exhibition After Court Order
The stories and images that had been on display for two decades were abruptly removed last month following an executive order by President Donald Trump. The...
Are We Falling Out Of Love With Our AI Confidants?
There are good reasons why people, at least at first, feel positive about their relationship with an AI companion. But new research is showing...
Attention Spans Are A Design Problem
The same teenager who supposedly lacks attention span can maintain game focus for hours while parsing a complex narrative across multiple storylines, coordinating with...
Why A Small Artist Group Decided Not To Canel Its Kennedy Center Dates
There were the contractors it had hired to build an ice rink on the center’s plaza, and the work visas that took a year...
Almost Everything We Knew About Mayan Culture Turns Out To Be Wrong
Outsiders’ power over the story of the Maya is written into the people’s very name. After their arrival in the early 1500s, the Spanish...
Outsourcing Publishing Decisions To Influencers
Bindery Books, a startup founded by publishing veterans, uses social media book influencers as acquiring editors to champion underrepresented authors and build engaged reader...
Children’s Vocabularies Are Shrinking In Shift From Reading To Screens
“So many children are now falling behind,” Dent said. “The vocabulary gap is getting bigger and there is a real perception that vocabulary development...
V&A Museum Acquires First-Ever YouTube Video
“The V&A has acquired a reconstructed early webpage and the first video ever uploaded to the platform by co-founder Jawed Karim,” a V&A spokesperson...
Marketing To Chatbots
The rise of chatbot marketing is happening as A.I. tools like ChatGPT, Claude and Gemini hit mass adoption. OpenAI has said that 800 million...
Metaphor? Leader Of US Constitution Center Steps Down As America’s 250th Birthday Begins
The first and only museum dedicated to the US constitution has been plunged into turmoil over the sudden departure of its president, a legal scholar widely...
Without Big New Musicals This Broadway Spring Will Look Different
In the first third of 2026, we’ll see 11 plays and only six musicals on Broadway. And many of the musicals that will open share a...
Taliban Burn Hundreds Of Musical Instruments
Afghanistan’s National Television, a broadcaster controlled by the Taliban, reported on Tuesday that morality police in Parwan had gathered the instruments over the past...
Recent US Post Office Delays Are Hitting Publishers Hard
Recent USPS service problems aren’t exclusive to newspapers. But for a business where timeliness is baked into the value proposition, they can be uniquely...
How Ukrainian Musicians Think About Russian Music
For some Ukrainian musicians, the new reality they have chosen is “no Russian words from my lips, no Russian music from my hand”, as...
Workers At Hollywood’s Writers Guild Union Strike Against The Union
The union maintained that “Guild management has surveilled workers for union activity, terminated union supporters, and engaged in bad faith surface bargaining, showing no...
An Evolving Notion Of Literacy That Explains Everything
Literacy literally restructured our consciousness, and the demise of literate culture—the decline of reading and the rise of social media—is again transforming what it...
Why Frederick Wiseman Was The All-Time Best Documentary-Maker
Between 1967 and 2023, he made forty-seven features (nearly one a year), many of them running considerably more than two hours. His body of...
How Consolidation Has Wrecked Publishing
Here’s the problem: Those Big Five control over 80% of the trade publishing market. Indie publishers exist, but they need more support—a lot more...
