Douglas McLennan
Doug is the editor of ArtsJournal
The Hot Topic At This Year’s Avant-Garde Theatre Festival? The Classics
Half a dozen of the main works are deliberately in dialogue with literary classics and ephemera, from sources as diverse as Mark Twain’s satirical...
The Mind-Blowing Incomprehension Of Nothingness
Nothing. Absolutely nothing. Continued experiments and observations only served to confirm that at scales both large and small, we appeared to live in an...
Why Is The Eiffel Tower Wearing A Cowboy Hat?
Paris, Texas was founded in the 1840s, and quickly became a hub for business and culture in Northeast Texas. Unfortunately, in 1916, a massive...
How Juilliard’s Director Of The Dance Division Is Remaking The Program
In 2018, the school hired Alicia Graf Mack to head up its dance division, making her the youngest person, and the first woman of...
Robert Gottlieb On The Relationship Between Editor And Writer
The editor represents many things, and different things to every writer. It's a financial relationship. It's an approval relationship. It's a technical relationship. It...
The Extraordinary Literary Partnership Of Robert Caro And Robert Gottlieb
They bicker all the time, about every comma, period, and semicolon. Actually, don’t even get them started on semicolons. Gottlieb refers to a “civil...
Chaos In Streaming — An Inevitable Consolidation?
Not one of the people running streaming TV services think there are going to be a ton of TV services in the future. They...
Warner CFO: We Went Overboard On Streaming
“There was a lot of thinking of, you know, let’s do more more more, not necessarily ‘let’s do the exact right things, let’s do...
Our Loneliness Epidemic
The most salient social feature of the pandemic was how it forced people into isolation; for those fortunate enough not to lose a loved...
Dilemma: How To Preserve A Banksy Mural In The Rubble Of Ukraine
The conversation has grown urgent after thieves last month made off with one artwork from the town of Hostomel, about 15 miles (25km) outside...
The Stage: 100 Most Influential People In Theatre
The Stage 100 in 2023 is the first ‘traditional’ version of the list since early 2020, pre-Covid. It returns slightly altered. - The Stage
Broadway Notches Best Box Office Week Since 2019
The 33 shows grossed $51.9 million, the most since the final week of 2019. And “The Lion King” notched a remarkable milestone: It grossed...
This Is What Happens When Government Meddles In Arts Funding
It does not benefit either the arts or the government for politicians to be involved in arts funding. The current controversy is an excellent...
EU Hefty Ruling Against Meta/Facebook Could Change Social Media
E.U. regulators found that Meta’s decision to place the clause allowing it to collect personalized user data deep in its terms of service more...
Apple Introduces Audiobooks Voiced By AI
On the company’s Books app, searching for “AI narration” reveals the catalogue of works included in the scheme, which are described as being “narrated...
Bankruptcy Judge Tells Regal Theatres’ Parent Company To Close More Theatres
Cineworld has closed 23 theaters since filing and reached new lease agreements with 25% of landlords — a percentage that clearly failed to impress the...
The Science Of New Year’s Resolutions (Data Say They Work)
When the researchers predicted how many of them would stick to their resolutions after six months, their expectations ranged from 10% to 25%. The...
When Blogs Changed Our Relationships With Music
By the mid-aughts, starting a blog was easier than ever. Streaming hadn’t yet taken over our listening habits, but Web connections were speedy enough...
How Stan Lee Reinvented The Comics
The 1960s were Stan Lee’s most astonishing decade, during which he came up with ideas and scripts for the first appearances of such heroes as the...
Artists’ Studios Are Less Refuges As They Are Places Of Tumult
The Artist’s Studio describes how a noisome cockpit of lust, crime and virtuosity produced innovations in how art gets made, and by whom. - The...
Are We So Addicted To Narratives That We’re Corrupted By Them?
Peter Brooks’s fear is that we are so over-saturated with story that we have become undiscerning consumers, slipping too willingly into the familiar rhythms...
A Short History Of Art Hung Upside Down
Those museums don't always get it right. - The Art Newspaper
By Design: Why There Are No Seats In New York City’s New Train Station
One of the animating principles of modern civic life is to make public resources increasingly inaccessible in order to prevent public resources from being...
Study: A Third Of Theatre Directors Are Considering Quitting Over Working Conditions
When asked why, participants’ responses included how "theatre direction just doesn’t pay a living wage", with another claiming "the pay and hours are terrible"....
Redesigning Los Angeles To Make It Cooler
In a city where tree shade is unequally distributed and half the surfaces are dark asphalt or concrete, the solution to increasing temperatures could lie...
