Douglas McLennan
Doug is the editor of ArtsJournal
Can Music Support Ukraine Without Being Propaganda?
Credible reports have been published about atrocities committed by Russian soldiers in Ukrainian cities. But is music the same as weapons? Can musicians stand for...
Is Elvis Finally Irrelevant?
"To be honest, no one I know under 30 cares or knows much about Elvis. The classic version of rock ’n’ roll just doesn't...
The Netrebko Problem
With a larger-than-life personality and a taste for extravagance, she built a loyal fan base and was sometimes called classical music’s answer to Beyoncé. Now...
London West End Theatre Ticket Prices Rise 20 Percent Over Pre-Pandemic
In 2022, the average cost of the most expensive tickets available for West End productions is £140.85, up 21.3% on 2019. The increase has...
Eight Men Convicted In Paris Of Stealing Banksy’s Bataclan ArtWork
British street artist Banksy painted his “sad girl” work on the door of the Bataclan in memory of the 90 people killed in worst...
How To Convince Pseudo-Science Believers Of Real Science
We shouldn’t be dismissive of people who believe in pseudoscience. In many cases they’re victims who have fallen for disinformation that’s been put forward...
How Method Acting Influenced Opera
Method acting has a history in opera, and it begins earlier than you might think. Even before his Moscow Art Theatre toured the United...
Canadian Parliament Advances Bill That Would Force Streamers To Promote Canadian Content
It would also apply to platforms including YouTube and Spotify and make them promote Canadian music artists by law. Critics of the bill say...
So Alexa Can Now Read In The Voice Of Your Loved One. What Could...
So your Alexa may soon be able to mimic your departed nan, long-lost friend or, presumably, someone off the TV. The goal is to...
Getting The Band Back Together: After COVID, Not So Easy For Students
Now that P.S. 11 band students have returned to the classroom, they are rediscovering their confidence as musicians. But it has been no small...
Cleaning Up Messy Ideas Results In Stale Monocultures
It seems to me that the one indisputable thing we can say about our current illiberalisms, of the left and the right: All illiberalisms are...
Streaming On Edge: Companies Crack Down On Password Sharing
It's "an industry falling out of sync with how people use its products. It’s no longer just a cheaper, ad-free alternative to cable, but...
Smithsonian Picks Four Potential Sites For New Women’s History and Latino Museums
The historical Arts and Industries Building, on Jefferson Drive SW next to the Smithsonian administration building known as the Castle, is the sole site...
What COVID School Closures Really Cost Students
Conventional accounts of the effect of school closures focus on the shift from in-person to online teaching and the academic losses that resulted. This familiar...
After 47 Books, John Grisham On Writing, Hollywood, And Storytelling
"I can’t get a fraction of that today. You can say, Well, we choked the golden goose, but all those films made money. Then...
Shall I Compare Thee To A Summer’s Algorithm?
We Googled the first line, expecting it to be an existing Philip Larkin poem, but we couldn’t find it on the Internet. It was...
What The Toppling Of Public Monuments Says About Our Time
While the recent destruction of statues in the contemporary West ostensibly relates to a racial reckoning, it nonetheless stands in a long lineage of...
Cornell West: America’s Essential Philosophy Is Pragmatism
Pragmatism emerged in the US in the late 1800s as a response to the Enlightenment push for absolute truth. Pragmatists — like William James...
The Purpose Of Comedy?
Comedy is a social corrective exposing the gap between what is (injustice, poverty, environmental disaster) and what some think it ought to be (fairness, equal opportunity, gentle breezes)....
The Meteoric Rise Of Art Star Anna Weyant
It has been a rocket-fueled rise to the top of the contemporary art world for Ms. Weyant—and far from her unassuming start in Calgary,...
Apocalypse Not: The American Mall Cannot Be Killed
Since the 1978 movie Dawn of the Dead, we have been using “the apocalyptic scale, the language and imagery of civilizational collapse” to describe malls....
The Cheech Is A Big Step Forward
The Chicano generation of artists and activists that emerged in the late 1960s knew that self-empowerment requires historical knowledge. The same goes for art,...
How BTS Became A Global Phenomenon To Rival Beatlemania
It was unusual for a K-pop group to start from a base of rap and hip-hop. It was even more unusual for a group...
The Strange Case Of Google’s “Sentient” Artificial Intelligence
Where we’ve arrived instead is somewhere more foreign than artificial consciousness. In a strange way, a program like PaLM would be easier to comprehend...
Where Does Responsibility Lie For Things We Do Wrong?
On the one hand, if we are solely responsible for the things we do wrong, some genuinely malevolent parties get off scot-free. On the...
