Douglas McLennan
Doug is the editor of ArtsJournal
Co-opting Woke
Charles Blow: "Perhaps no other word of the moment is so under attack as “woke,” a word born as a simple yet powerful way...
A New University To “Fix” Education? It Needs A Rethink About What’s Broken
UATX’s founders for years have used their various platforms to bemoan the state of higher education and propose how to fix it. They’re about to...
Why Are Some Classical Music Institutions Resisting Broadening Their View of Music?
Joshua Kosman: How long can an artistic culture survive and thrive on the work of the same circumscribed set of a dozen or so...
Quebec Court Upholds Fines On Theatres That Portray Smoking Onstage (Even With Prop Cigarettes)
The theatres challenged the fines, claiming it violated their freedom of expression. They argued Quebec’s ban on indoor smoking goes too far, because it...
NFT’s Explained
NFTs have fundamentally changed the market for digital assets. Historically there was no way to separate the “owner” of a digital artwork from someone...
Disney+ Loses Momentum
Disney+ growth slowed for the fiscal fourth quarter, adding 2.1 million subscribers to hit 118.1 million. That’s 10M less than it added in the...
How Beeple Is Changing The Relationship Between Artist And Collector
The dynamic nature of Beeple’s art speaks to an emerging paradigm in both art and crypto, where the artist and the buyer are in...
Local Journalism Is Disappearing. Might We Revitalize It With Existing Institutions?
One starting point is to re-imagine and use already-existing public infrastructures that produce and disseminate vital information, such as libraries, public broadcasting stations, and post...
Music Is What It Is – You Have To Meet It There
David Finckel: "People have a hard time sitting still. Attention spans are getting shorter. The only thing this doesn’t change is the length of...
Man And Daughter Killed Over Four Stradivarius Violins
“Our principal hypothesis is that the motive for the double crime was to find the international certification of authenticity of the violins so they...
Xi Jinping Is Rewriting China’s History – A New Cultural Revolution
Xi’s use of history projects the message that the struggles of the first century of Communist Party rule have been buried by the need...
David Graeber Was A Startlingly Smart Anthropologist. He Died Just After Completing His Magnum...
"Since one cannot know a radically better world is not possible, are we not betraying everyone by insisting on continuing to justify and reproduce...
How We Became Post-Modernist (And Why It’s A Problem)
Perhaps the ultimate postmodern irony is to be both – to sell out to the system while sending it up. It becomes impossible to...
As Broadway Reopens, Who Is Broadway For?
Representation absolutely matters. But ever since Broadway announced that so many Black plays would reopen its season, there has been a feeling of dread...
London’s Barbican Center Commits To “Radical Transformation” After Investigation
The external review, which interviewed 35 people, identified “a lack of diversity in the organisation, an absence of confidence in HR systems and in...
Cities Are Spreading Like Organisms
In a widely cited paper from 2007, on a number of common measures of innovation and wealth creation, cities deliver benefits that exceed what we would...
Ludovic Morlot Appointed To Lead Barcelona Orchestra
Morlot, born in Lyon in 1974, will replace Kazushi Ono. The contract with the OBC is for four years, with a minimum of eleven...
Niall Ferguson: Why I’m Starting A New University
Those of us who were fortunate to be undergraduates in the 1980s remember the exhilarating combination of intellectual freedom and ambition to which all...
Musicians: Suffocating In The Gig Economy
Many musicians have watched, cringing, as the term “gig economy” has become a defining term of the national economic Zeitgeist. Not just because the...
John Cleese Cancels Cambridge Union Appearance Over Speaker Blacklist
"I was looking forward to talking to students at the Cambridge Union this Friday, but I hear that someone there has been blacklisted for...
Portland’s Iconic Super Bookstore Faces Uncertainty
The latest plot twist has foreshadowed a potentially unhappy ending. Like the rest of Portland’s urban core — and like downtowns across the United...
Study: Listening To Familiar Music Boosts Brain Function
"We have new brain-based evidence that autobiographically salient music -; that is, music that holds special meaning for a person, like the song they...
Theatre Workers Aren’t Just Leaving Jobs, They’re Leaving Theatre
Theater salaries, even for full-time jobs, are so low so often that the weekly nationwide theater newsletter Nothing for the Group recently debuted a section called That’s...
Diagnosis: What Would It Take To Make Victoria BC A Music Center?
Research was completed by an organization that specializes in analyzing local music scenes — Sound Diplomacy — which has come up with strategies for...
Scottish Nightclub Tries To Harness Dancers’ Energy To Power Club
Glasgow nightclub SWG3 is set to trial technology that captures body heat from dancers to create renewable energy to heat up or to cool...
