Douglas McLennan
Doug is the editor of ArtsJournal
How NPRs Tiny Desk Concerts Became Mighty Desk Concerts
The Tiny Desk series became a prime venue for artists seeking an authenticity baptism. The series built its audience organically, getting bigger bookings and...
Experiments In Streaming: Music Streamers Tweak How Royalties Go To Artists
Streaming has thrown together two old business models (retail and radio) and thrown them into one pot, pretending lean-back and lean-forward consumption are the...
British Museum Scandal Enabled By Cataloging Deficiencies
That perhaps half of the British Museum’s mammoth collection of some 8 million objects was never fully catalogued has become a matter of keen...
Amazon Drops Its Periodicals Program; Small Publishers Panic
Last March, Amazon stated that it was dropping all of its print and Kindle magazine and newspaper subscriptions. Since that announcement, independent publishers have been scrambling...
How The Internet Has Changed How We Write (And Read)
Over the course of the last generation, the Internet has changed our common reading experience; now, as a teacher of creative nonfiction at the...
When American Government Encouraged Artists To Critique
Clear-eyed, truthful portrayals of American history and contemporary affairs have long been disfavored as beneficiaries of public funding — though the movement to strip...
Decline Of The British Museum?
Although the British Museum might have regarded itself as too big to fail, its false sense of exceptionalism has now jeopardized its future as an institution...
How The Harris Theatre (Now 20 Years Old) Changed Chicago Arts
During its two-decade existence, the 1,500-seat theater has become an essential downtown venue, with performances, rehearsals and other events taking place there an average...
What It Takes To Write A TV Show: That’s What The Strike Is About
“I fear a future in which they can only hire one writer. They’ll have an AI, you know, churn out a script based on...
Seattle Is In The Midst Of A Generational Change In Arts Leadership
In the last two years, ArtsFund has informally tracked at least 47 new hires or open positions at the senior leadership level among its...
Weston Sprott Talks About Racism In American Orchestras
“At the end of the day, whether you’re working in an orchestra or a hospital or a government institution, people are people. The various...
Acropolis Is The Latest To Restrict Visitors Because Of Over-Touristing
The new “Visitor Zones” program requires visitors to book a time slot through its online platform. On arrival, visitors will scan a QR code on...
Great Puzzle: Why Did Brandeis University Cut Its Highly-Regarded Music Ph.D Program?
Of 15 PhD-granting departments in Brandeis Graduate School of Arts and Sciences, the music department ranked as one of the best. It had the...
Woman Buys $4 Painting Because She Liked The Frame. Turns Out The Painting Is...
It quickly became clear that the simple frame was of much lesser value than the striking scene within, which was revealed to be by...
Using Numbers To Unlock Shakespeare’s Words
Corpus linguistics is a branch of linguistics which uses computers to explore the use of words in huge collections of language. It can spot nuances...
Pondering The Thinking Machine
Few believe that LLMs are truly sentient, but some argue that they show signs of genuine intelligence and of having a conceptual understanding of...
Requiem For Another Theatre
Experimental work was the soul of the New Ohio, a producer and presenter that closed for good on Aug. 31. The publicity line has been that...
Granular Study Of Australian Arts Ecosystem Maps Economic Structures
Australia is the first nation to estimate sources of income and investment for the cultural and creative industries using a new classification system or...
The Webb Telescope Has Cosmologists Thinking Our Ideas About The Universe May Be Wrong
It’s not just that some of us believe we might have to rethink the standard model of cosmology; we might also have to change...
How Early Humans Learned To Count, A History
At first, our hominid ancestors probably did not count very high. Many body parts present themselves in pairs—arms, hands, eyes, ears, and so on—thereby...
An Online Library At The Heart Of A Battle Over AI And Copyright
For critics, Books3 isn’t a boon to society—instead, it’s emblematic of everything wrong with generative AI, a glaring example of how both the rights...
A Statistical Profile Of Artists In Ontario
The 81,800 professional artists who reside in Ontario account for 40% of the 202,900 artists in Canada. As a percentage of the overall labour...
Model Collapse? Spotify Is Desperate To Find New Ways To Charge Subscribers
The company is on the hunt for anything it can do to get users to pay up. After pouring billions into podcasts and audiobooks...
The Smithsonian’s Natural History Museum Has A Human Remains Problem
The Natural History Museum has at least 30,700 human bones and other body parts. Responding to The Post’s reporting, Smithsonian Secretary Lonnie G. Bunch...
Research: Our Brains May Sort Memories By Practical Necessity
A new theory proposes the brain sorts memories by how likely they are to be useful as guides in the future. Memories of predictable...
