Douglas McLennan
Doug is the editor of ArtsJournal
An Internet Game That Reveals How Musicians Discover Music
If you really dive into this thing, you’ll begin to learn how musicians hear, how they think, how they remember, how they forget, how...
Clapping As A Performative (And Meaningless?) Gesture
For the nation’s viewers, I think, this juvenile practice communicates something unserious: Which beaming retinue can clap harder for its standard-bearer? - Washington Post
American Historical Society Embroiled In History Wars
“We suffer from an overabundance of history not as a method of or analysis, but as anachronistic data points for the articulation of competing...
Golden Globe Organizers Say They’ve Reformed. Should We Believe Them?
The Globes have long had a reputation for booziness and irreverence. Will the revived ceremony still be seen as a less-staid alternative to the Academy Awards?...
Graphic Novel Imagines What Would Have Happened If Jan. 6th Insurrection Had Succeeded
Drawing on a rich tradition of comics that depict counterfactual and dystopian futures, this graphic novel breathes horrifying visual life into a world in which there...
The Case For Vandalizing Art In The Name Of Climate Change Awareness
We honor many protesters, past and present, who broke the law to advance a good cause. Suffragettes targeted great art in their struggle to...
The Age Of Incrementalism: Have We Got Stuck In A Rut?
Data from millions of manuscripts show that, compared with the mid-twentieth century, research done in the 2000s was much more likely to incrementally push...
Meet San Francisco Ballet’s New Leadership Team
Together, the company’s first-ever female leadership team will strive to innovate in ways that keep it at the vanguard of forward-thinking arts organizations while...
Yay! The Death Of TV Laugh Tracks
Was it only proven brain dead in late 2021, when no sweetened TV sitcoms debuted on U.S. networks during the all-important fall season? -...
Making Theatre On The Edge Of A War Zone
With a country in flames across Poland’s eastern border, I traveled to Krakow last month to erase some of that distance. I wanted to...
Saving 100-Year-Old Pianos From The Landfill
"Pianos do kind of take on the character of 100 years of playing, you know?” says Tim Vincent-Smith, co-founder of Pianodrome - a project...
Who Ya Gonna Call? Ghost-Writer!
Ghostwriters channel someone else’s voice and construct with it a book that has shape and texture, narrative arc and memorable characters, all without leaving...
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...
