Douglas McLennan
Doug is the editor of ArtsJournal
How The Amazing Sculptures In The Paris Catacombs Got There
An avid carver, Décure turned the Catacombs into his private workshop. Outside of working hours—during lunch breaks and before and after his shifts—he snuck...
What It Says About You When Your Accent Changes
Researchers studied Taylor Swift’s voice as a way of exploring a phenomenon called “second-dialect acquisition,” or the way people learn a new style of speaking....
Lufthansa Crew Refuses To Let Violinist Bring Instrument Case On Carrying 243-Year-Old Violin
A soloist was forced to carry her 1782 Giovanni Battista Guadagnini violin in her arms through the Helsinki airport security and onto a flight...
Lebrecht: 2025 Was A Year Of Meddling With Music
I cannot remember a time when there was so much political meddling in music and so little resistance. - The Critic
Schubert Club seeks Artistic and Executive Director
The next Artistic and Executive Director will shape Schubert Club at a moment of organizational strength and artistic vitality.
Minnesota Dance “Titan” Dies At 63
Toni Pierce-Sands, a featured soloist in some of the Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater’s most iconic suites and a co-founder of celebrated Twin Cities...
Dallas City Council Considers Leaving Its IM Pei-Designed City Hall
The Dallas city government has voted to explore relocating and selling the brutalist city hall designed by architect IM Pei, placing the building under increased threat of demolition. -...
The Art Developments That Defined 2025
All in all, an exhausting year. But—if you’ll permit me—a bit of hope? For every gallery that shut down or closed a location, another...
AI May Help To Preserve And Grow Endangered Arapaho Language
I first visited the Northern Arapaho people on the Wind River Reservation in Wyoming in 1999. At that time, there were hundreds of speakers of the...
Race To Buy Warner Bros. May Come Down To Relationship
Netflix showing strong interest in WBD's assets, including making a mostly cash offer to acquire them, coincided with reports that the White House had antitrust concerns, while...
By The Numbers: How Arts Organizations Have Fared In The Past Six Years
Performing arts organizations experienced sharper drops in revenue and staffing in 2024 than museums or community organizations. - SMU Cultural Data
When Our Machines Become Sentient, Will We Notice?
If an AI system were sentient, then the alignment paradigm, whereby AI activities are circumscribed entirely by human goals, becomes untenable. It would be...
How Civilizations Collapse
Today the conditions for apocalypticism—gaping inequality, pandemics, rapid technological development—are amply present. So perhaps it isn’t surprising that, over the past several years, a...
Broadway Veteran Makes Leading Lady Debut At 96
June Squibb made her Broadway debut in the Ethel Merman-led production of “Gypsy” as a replacement for one of the strippers. What would she...
Supreme Court Appeared To Be Leaning Toward Internet Companies In Music Piracy Case
During nearly two hours of argument, the court appeared to be leaning toward the internet companies – perhaps on narrow grounds. - CNN
Canadians Are Buying Canadian. How About Music Too?
Canada has been neglecting our (excellent and varied) music scene for the past decade. A post-pandemic evaluation of the government’s Canada Music Fund revealed...
Netflix: Viewership Of Southeast Asian Content Up 50 Percent In 2025
More than 100 Southeast Asian titles have appeared in Netflix’s Global Top 10. Over 40 of those titles charted in 2025 alone. Titles from...
Cliches Have Gotten A Bad Rap
While I agree that leaning on a cliché might be a prosaic get-out-of-jail-free card, I do think they get a bad rap. The general...
Why Close Reading Is Having A Moment
I learned about close reading when I asked them to take their own thinking seriously—to take themselves seriously. Doing so, I found, forced me...
How A “Broken” Reader Learned To Loving Reading Again
It took weeks for me to realize that I was a broken reader. I assumed I’d just had a streak of bad luck in...
A Race To Save Our Recorded Music History
A huge portion of the world’s recorded musical heritage is stored on magnetic tape, used regularly from the 1940s into the digital age to...
Hamnet — The Shakespeare For Our Times?
Most of all, I was struck by how the film chose to portray William Shakespeare, the greatest poet in the English language, as a...
Why We Need Systemic Support For Arts And Humanities
Arts and humanities scholarship is not an ornament, it is the record of what human minds have made, imagined and endured. To let those...
Supreme Court Will Decide Whether Internet Providers Can Be Liable For Music Piracy
The Supreme Court on Monday grappled with the practical implications of a closely watched copyright clash testing whether internet providers can be held liable...
Christopher Knight Reflects On His Career At The LA Times
Sprawl is usually cast as an L.A. negative, but it was good for art. The horizontal city is just too big to fully gentrify;...
