Douglas McLennan
Doug is the editor of ArtsJournal
Facts Don’t Win Arguments. But Propaganda?
Numerous studies have shown that, due to a myriad of cognitive biases such as belief perseverance and confirmation bias, facts unfortunately do not change people’s...
Mozart — The Eloquent Rebel
In an often-cited letter to his father, he wrote that his piano concertos offered a happy medium between the easy and the difficult. There...
The Dicing Up Of Movies — A New Way To Consume Media
Mysterious movie-clip accounts, by editing films such as 12 Feet Deep into multipart sagas that anyone can watch on their phone, have offered TikTok users the...
Study Of Video Games: Male Characters Speak Twice As Much As Female Characters
Our analysis, published in the Royal Society Open Science today studied over 13,000 video game characters and found that twice as much dialogue is given to...
How The 1990s Changed America
New scholarship indicates that the end of the Cold War did not so much settle history’s debates as it did undermine the structuring framework...
Researchers Are Burning Out. It’s The Culture
The recent studies, which have collectively surveyed tens of thousands of researchers worldwide, suggest that scientists’ mental-health struggles are a direct result of a...
The Arts: We’re Being Bored To Death
After a century or so, as Dave Hickey explains, in which it had evaded institutional control—a century of Parisian bohemians, modernist vagabonds, and visionary...
Adding Live Theatre To Movies Is A Hit In Western Australia
Evidently, this new blend of live theatre and film may be just what the cinema industry needs to help fight back against at-home streaming...
Why The US Needs Its Own Bookfair
The U.S. is the biggest English-language publishing market it the world, yet it’s one of the few large countries without an industrywide conference. - Publishers...
Susan Sontag’s Complicated View Of Women
The essays in “On Women” make clear that, for Sontag, the oppression of women presented an aesthetic and narrative problem as well as a...
Want To Be Wildly Successful? Fail. A Lot
Far from being an occasional exception, failure is an inherent part of human life. - Hedgehog Review
Louise Bourgeois Spider Sells At Auction for $33 Million
Only four of the French-American artist’s arachnid creations have ever appeared at auction. In May 2019, another sold for $32.1 million with fees at...
Meet The Chicago Symphony’s Music Librarians
The orchestra "owns more than 5,000 sets of scores and parts, some dating back a half century or more, with even older ones...
Hearing Aids Help Clarify Speech. Music? Not So Much
Much of the research indicates that it can take years for the brain to adjust to the new mode of input via hearing aids....
Hi! We’d Love To Publish Your Book. But Could You Take Out Any Reference...
In what Maggie Tokuda-Hall described as a “Faustian bargain,” Scholastic made the offer contingent on removing mentions of the Japanese American incarceration that tied...
Artificial Intelligence? Let’s Think For A Moment Beyond That
How would we deal with artificial beings with rich capacities for thought, experience, and feeling? What are our obligations to them? What of their...
Yup — Using Big Words Doesn’t Make You Sound Smarter
“Complexity neither disguised the shortcomings of poor essays, nor enhanced the appeal of high-quality essays.” In other words, George Orwell got it right: “Never...
US Surgeon General Says Social Media Is “Profound Risk” To Youth
The surgeon general called on policymakers, tech companies, researchers and parents to “urgently take action” to safeguard against the potential risks. - The New...
Philly Pops Updates Lawsuit Against Philadelphia Orchestra, Kimmel Center
In April, the Pops filed an antitrust lawsuit claiming the Philadelphia Orchestra and Kimmel Center used tactics intended to force the company out of business and create a...
In Several US State: Lend A Book, Go To Prison
Some of the laws impose severe penalties on librarians, who until now were exempted in almost every state from prosecution over obscene material —...
UCLA Picks A Local Star To Run Its Center For The Art Of Performance
An Angeleno who emigrated from Mexico at age 8, grew into a first-generation college student and climbed his way through the ranks of the...
Maureen Dowd: Classical Music Is Sexy!
“Let’s not forget that the word ‘climax’ is a common musical term,” the soprano Renée Fleming told me. “It has to do with musical...
Why Naked Standup Comedy Is Finding An Audience
The most surprising aspect of “The Naked Comedy Show” might be how asexual it is. The audience is meticulously polite, quick to laugh. The...
The Dizzying Downfall Of An A-List Art Advisor
In a dizzying fall from grace, Lisa Schiff was accused by a close friend and client of running a “Ponzi scheme” and misappropriating millions of...
Some Numbers: College Enrollment Slide To Tech, Away From Humanities
The number of students nationwide seeking four-year degrees in computer and information sciences and related fields shot up 34 percent from 2017 to 2022,...
