Douglas McLennan
Doug is the editor of ArtsJournal
The Purposes Of Grief
Philosophically, the most important thing about grief is that it’s not always a form of self-pity. It’s not selfish. There are aspects of grief...
Holiday Season Used To Be Hollywood’s Biggest Box Office. Now It’s Vying To Be...
We’ll see if Saturday night business is so bad that that this weekend becomes the lowest of 2022, unseating that of Jan. 28-30 when...
Social Media Is In Disarray. Want A Better Model? Look To Coffeehouse Culture
Everything about discursive social media is suddenly open to question. What sort of news and discussion should it host and encourage? What should be...
Why AI Chatbots Can Easily Take Over Creative Work
“The Internet itself is just patterns—so much of what we do online is just knee-jerk, meme reactions to everything, which means that most of...
Ukraine Calls On World’s Dance Companies To Forego “Nutcracker” This Year. (They’re Not)
"We're not talking about canceling Tchaikovsky, but rather about pausing performances of his works until Russia ceases its bloody invasion. Ukrainian cultural venues have...
Hollywood’s Existential Crisis: Audiences Are Not Going To Their Most Critically-Acclaimed Movies
Hollywood sees this an affront to its identity. Film power players have long clung to the fantasy that the cultural world revolves around them....
Broadway’s KPOP Tried To Market Itself Online Like K-Pop. Didn’t Work
KPOP marketed its characters over social media, leveraging some of the same tools and tactics that brought K-pop’s biggest names to widespread fame. Unfortunately, KPOP’s fictional...
Worry Escalates Over Fate Of The English National Opera
For the past month, the fate of the E.N.O. has made headlines here. Musicians, critics and politicians have been arguing over whether the decision...
How Twitter Changes Our Sense Of Time
The concept of entrainment points to the ways in which our experience of time can be affected by so much more than the number...
Met Opera Scrambles To Replace Its Website, Ticket Portal
The attack has wreaked havoc as the Met prepares for a string of holiday productions. At this time of year, the company’s ticketing systems...
Study: How Reading Changed During The Pandemic
While many commentators at the beginning of the pandemic endorsed reading as a straightforward way to relax, our readers showed that the practice morphed and took...
Can We Transcend Today’s Humanness To Be Something More?
We can imagine “heights of flourishing” that tower above the life we know now, but human minds and bodies are capable of climbing only...
Our Five Senses (Wait, We Actually Have Seven?)
Beyond the traditional five senses, neuroscientific research also examines proprioception (sensing your muscles, their location, and their movements) and the vestibular system, which regulates the sense of orientation...
Do We Have Free Will? (And How Does It Shape Our Identity?)
Human beings may make choices that are not predictable or even completely determined. The hard question of free will is whether, at the time...
How Did The Things Around Us Get So Ugly?
It occurs to us, strolling past a pair of broken BuzzFeed Shopping–approved AirPods, that the new ugliness has beset us from both above and...
Being An Old Artist (It Can Be Liberating)
Many artists have found that old age, for all its physical and emotional burdens, can be a moment of creative liberation comparable to, even...
Czech Museum Returns Beethoven Manuscript To Heirs
The Moravian Museum in the Czech city of Brno has had the original manuscript for the fourth movement of Beethoven's String Quartet n B-flat...
ChatGPT Elevates Interactive Artificial Intelligence To A New Level
ChatGPT feels different. Smarter. Weirder. More flexible. It can write jokes (some of which are actually funny), working computer code and college-level essays. It can also guess at medical diagnoses, create...
Does This New Artificial Intelligence ChatGPT Spell The End Of The Student Essay?
The essay, in particular the undergraduate essay, has been the center of humanistic pedagogy for generations. It is the way we teach children how...
Denver Post’s Investigative Series Into A System That Enables Looted Art Trade
The series highlights the cozy nature between curators, scholars, museums and dealers — and how incentives align to allow the dirty world of the...
Penguin Random House CEO Steps Down After Failed Takeover
As the head of the largest publisher in the country, Markus Dohle oversaw the attempted acquisition of Simon & Schuster, a deal the Justice...
Now That It’s Safe, Gustavo Dudamel Visits Home Again
This was also his first trip to Venezuela in six years. Inciting the wrath of President Nicolás Maduro, Dudamel had become politically persona non...
Canada Doubles Down On Canadian Content Rules For Media
The CRTC's moves toward greater flexibility for radio include introducing new criteria to determine whether a song is Canadian, including refining content categories to...
The Gamification Of Everything Is A Fraud
The application of game design principles like leaderboards, progress bars, points, badges, levels, challenges, and activity streaks to nongame ends has seeped into just...
A Seattle Business Blasts Classical Music To Harass Homeless Encampment
Nearby business owners said the Comcast Service Center has been playing loud music from a surveillance system with a speaker for about a month...
