Douglas McLennan
Doug is the editor of ArtsJournal
We All Believed In Santa. But At What Age Should You Stop Believing?
Children start to distinguish fantasy from reality around preschool, but a belief in Santa Claus or Father Christmas usually lasts longer, to around seven...
Widespread Body Shaming In UK Dance Schools
In total, the BBC has now spoken to more than 100 former dancers who attended UK schools from the 1990s through to the present...
National Theatre Wales Dismayed By 100 Percent Funding Cut
Arts Council of Wales (ACW) previously announced that the theatre charity's £1.6m support was to be cut down to nothing following an investment review....
UK Trend: More Standing Ovations In The Theatre
"Like all exuberant behaviour, it takes you off the scale, so if you are really overwhelmed you have nowhere to go aside from making...
Chrissie Hynde On The State Of The Music Business
"Honestly, the majority is always wrong. Music is just the backdrop to their life. I’m not saying that mainstream music isn’t important to them,...
And Now… Parties Where People Get Together And… Read
The parties, which began in May, take place on rooftops, in parks and at bars. The premise is simple: Show up with a book,...
Bollywood Is Huge — AI Might Change Everything
According to a 2019 Deloitte report, India has the largest film industry in the world in terms of films produced each year. The industry...
Man Is Mistaken For A Famous Author, Given An Award, Asked To Speak…
I was in Rimini as a thoroughly marginal person—however fine a speaker, however deserving of my medal, I would surely never have been invited...
The Humanities Have Sown The Seeds Of Their Own Troubles
If the humanities have become more political over the past decade, it is largely in response to coercion from administrators and market forces that prompt disciplines...
Global Movie Box Office Down 5 Percent In 2023
“Given that we lost 50% of production time in 2023, the anticipated 5% year-on-year decrease in 2023 is not indicative of a declining interest...
ARTnews’ 25 Art Works That Defined 2023
Each year, countless new artworks are made and historical ones come into sharper focus as events in the art world and beyond give them...
Wikipedia’s Assault On History
"What we need, what I’m going to establish, is an ever-expanding phalanx of Wikipedia editors to create, reframe, and defend these pages, which are...
It’s Getting Even Harder To Sell Books
In 2022, less than half a percent of books even cleared 100,000. But this is the financial model on which the publishing industry operates:...
So Generative AI Can Write. But Surely Our Poetry Is Worth More Than That
Poets should not be threatened by the fact that every person with internet access can now create the poetic equivalent of hotel art. Although...
The Met Opera’s Siloing Problem
"This is not a program of audience integration (the management cannot be so unobservant as to suppose that will happen, except at the outermost...
Washington Post Theatre Critic Peter Marks Retires. And Theatre Suffers Another Blow
The discourse about critics in the theatre has been so mindlessly hostile for so long that most of the time, the sensible thing for...
Deepfakes Are Scary. But “Cheapfakes” Are All Around Us
Long before generative AI became widely available, people were making “cheapfakes” or “shallowfakes.” It can be as simple as mislabeling images, videos, or audio...
Alex Ross’ Review Of “Maestro”
“Maestro” is a complete enough achievement that there is no point in dwelling on what it might have done differently. What’s most significant is...
Cyberattack Wipes Out British Museum’s Digital Presence
On Halloween, 2023, the British Library suffered a massive cyberattack, which rendered its web presence nonexistent, its collections access disabled, and even its wifi fried. - Public Books
Odd? More Than 1,200 Scientists Are Now Publishing New Research Papers Once Every Five...
In 2022 alone, 1,266 non-physics authors published the equivalent of one paper every 5 days, including weekends, compared with 387 in 2016. The accelerated...
Huge Gender Pay Discrimination Suit Against Disney Moves Forward
Disney in 2019 was hit with a suit accusing it of “rampant pay discrimination.” The case cleared a major hurdle Dec. 8 when a...
Controversy Over White House “Nutcracker” Video
The clip drew heavy criticism on Fox News and in The New York Post. It was shocking to see something as innocuous as “The Nutcracker”...
As Disney Turns 100, Looking At Its “Problematic” Movies
Recent Disney films like the animated “Strange World,” with its gay teenage protagonist, have become cultural flash points. But “Pocahontas” prompted a full-blown fracas. - The...
Mozambiqan Uses Dance To Critique His Country
Born the year after Mozambique gained independence from Portugal in 1975, Panaíbra Canda, 47, has used his art to offer searing critiques of his...
We’re Distracted. So Now Watching A Movie Seems Like An Accomplishment Equal To Reading...
You know what watching a movie felt like to my easily-distracted hamster brain? It felt like an accomplishment. It felt smart. It felt like...
