Douglas McLennan
Doug is the editor of ArtsJournal
The Remarkable 2,700-Year-Old Rock Paintings Just Discovered In Sweden
The designs were made through a laborious process of smacking stones against the granite rock that exposed an underlayer of white. This color, in...
Why Writers Have Difficulty Talking About The Working Class
“There’s a class issue that we don’t always talk about in writing and publishing, where you need to be able to afford this life....
TV’s Tired Script Formulas Are Perfect For AI, Aren’t They?
Let’s get to the other side. After analyzing forty years’ worth of sitcom scripts and studio-audience laughter and applause levels, A.I. has unlocked the...
Is This True? Are We All Really Hardwired To Our Primitive Past?
“We have seemingly been hardwired with a number of cognitive biases that impede our ability to take appropriate action to address seemingly distant, gradual...
How Parking Explains American Cities (And What To Do About It)
You imagine the American city in the 1940s and ’50s and you think so many challenges being confronted—substandard housing, deindustrialization, racial strife, pollution—all this...
The First AI Magazine (It’s Soulless)
The ability to see something you hadn’t expected is what separates printed products from the internet. It’s why those who love magazines do so...
What We Should Learn From Loss
We fail all the time, in things large and small, yet our biggest failure may be that, as a rule, we don’t understand failure. And...
Canadians Want To Promote Canadian Content. Problem: What Is Canadian Content?
Nobody seems happy. The way the issue splits along political lines feels so incoherent, it’s almost arbitrary. - The Walrus
Public Libraries Have Become… Social Work Agencies?
Vicky Varga, a twenty-four-year veteran of Edmonton Public Library, described how the city had moved toward fully integrating social work into the activities of...
Satire Seems To Be Dead (For Now)
As the world became almost unfathomably strange, many people reacted by demanding seriousness; social and political critics understandably turned very sober. And this too...
In The Age Of AI, Form Seems To Be Making A Comeback
AI-driven image-making—far from heralding some future post-human development—appears to be reviving long-dormant visual strategies that dominated the arts, and art theories, of the past....
The Enduring Allure Of Concert Halls That Make An Architectural Splash
Sydney cemented the idea that grandiose political and architectural ambitions — some would say hubris — can merit the expenditure of much larger sums...
Taliban Sell Tickets To Bamiyan Buddha Site They Destroyed In 2001
With the group now back in power, Bamian holds new symbolic and economic importance to the cash-strapped region: Officials see the Buddha remnants as...
How The Oregon Shakespeare Festival Found Itself In A Crisis
“We've been basically in a recovery mode since the 2020-21 pandemic. And I think that's the real reason why things have been stressed more....
Liverpool Vies To Be New Home Of English National Opera. Process Is “Complicated,” Says...
In a letter to Culture Minister Lord Parkinson, Mr Rotheram and Liverpool City Council leader Liam Robinson said it would be "an honour" to...
Streaming Companies Spent 100s Of Millions Of Dollars On Content. Worth It?
In this country, nothing indicates cultural importance more than cash, and seeing this much of it handed out to creators of television said as...
David Remnick Remembers Robert Gottlieb
Gottlieb, who died on Wednesday, at the age of ninety-two, may have been the most important book editor of his time. Caro was just...
Our Metaphors For Language Shape How We Think
For example, if we talk about “wasting” or “saving” time, we treat time as if it were a commodity. Or, if we say that...
What Failure Can And Cannot Do For You
In a culture that demands overcoming against all odds, even failure has been commodified by the American self-help industrial complex: rebranded not as a...
What Libraries Are Becoming
Libraries were once places to access books. They are now places to access everything? The last place to access anything? As the social safety...
Asian Movie Theatre Box Office Is Down. So They’re Being Inventive
With movie ticket sales still lagging behind pre-pandemic highs, multiplex operators across Asia have begun deploying unconventional strategies to generate excitement and attract people back to...
California Mandated Ambitious Arts Education For Students. Why Isn’t It Working?
“It can't be an after-school program only because that builds inequitable access. Art needs to be consistent in terms of hands-on experience, as well...
How Hadid Architects Are Using AI To Design Better Buildings
Mr. Blum said ZHAI had a computer tool that, in 27 hours, could come up with 100,000 designs for a building’s interior; an architect...
17 Music Publishers Sue Twitter For $250 Million
According to the publishers, Musk's company allows users to share music on the platform without permission from the copyright holders. - Mashable
Legendary Editor Robert Gottlieb, 92
For three decades at the publishing houses Simon & Schuster and Knopf, he turned hundreds of manuscripts into well-received books, many of which sold...
