Douglas McLennan
Doug is the editor of ArtsJournal
Study: Number Of Theatre Productions In UK Has Declined By A Third In The...
In 2024, the 40 best-funded theatre companies that make their own productions - ranging from the National Theatre to the Colchester Mercury - opened...
Why “Close Reading” Can Miss The Plot
When you studied literature in school or university, I expect that you were taught, implicitly or explicitly, that this plot-focused way of reading was...
A Conservative Argument For Culture Funding Betrays The Problems With Such Arguments
Its curious incoherence is emblematic of a movement of cultural conservatives that’s lost the plot. - Artnet
SoulPepper Theatre Launches A Community “Public Domain” Project
With a full slate of free programming that ranges from workshops and classes to performance, the company is hoping to become a neighbourhood hub....
France Agrees To Collaborate With India On Major Controversial Museum Project
The controversy around France’s deal with India may appear more ambiguous to a Western audience. Is it France’s concern if the YYBNM decides to...
The Man Behind Philadelphia Pianos
For the past several decades, Greg Sikora has tuned and voiced pianos for the biggest musical artists to play this region, from Frank Sinatra...
Why The Human Brain Needs Ideologies
Our brains are these amazingly predictive organs trying to constantly explain the world, because that’s our way to survive. We have to have a...
Tech Titans Propose An End To Intellectual Property
One can only imagine what the value of music would look like if copyright protections were to disappear altogether. It would not be a...
How “Six” Challenges Conventional Broadway Musical Conventions
“Six,” which runs a sleek 85 minutes as an unruly concert where performers are explicitly competing for the audience’s sympathy, might ultimately be less...
The Classically Cool Frick Re-emerges
If the museum experience is now more stylistically bifurcated — the Beaux Arts past on one side of the complex, a sympathetic but unapologetic...
Trump Administration Wants Congress To Cancel Funding For PBS, NPR
The plan is to request that Congress rescind $1.1 billion in federal funding for the Corporation for Public Broadcasting. If Congress agrees, that will...
Why Trump’s Sculpture Garden Project Of American Heroes Is A Big Deal
Effectively killing the NEH in its current form and then reallocating its money to build the National Garden of American Heroes—the centerpiece of Trump’s plans to...
Stem Or Humanities? It’s a Disastrous Distinction
In fact, neither one of these labels names a particularly coherent group of fields. STEM covers endeavors as different in their workings and aims...
Do We Even Know What Classical Music Is These Days?
Like every other sector of cultural life, classical music has been roiled over the past decade by intense debates about the field’s ongoing lack...
National Geographic Says These Are The World’s Best Book Towns
By definition, a book town is “a small, preferably rural, town or village in which secondhand and antiquarian bookshops are concentrated… available to everyone…” Today, there...
Inside The Rise And Fall Of YA Fiction
The rise of more inclusive YA has felt as much like a seismic shift as “The Hunger Games” did back in the day. It’s...
How To Stop Students From Being Merely Cogs In Machines?
The trick is convincing administrators, parents, and students that the best way of getting an education in independent and creative thinking is through the...
Teachers Don’t Want Students To Use AI. But Increasingly Teachers Are Using AI
Is it fair to use A.I. to grade student essays, if you’ve prohibited students from using A.I. to write them? School leaders are grappling...
What We Need To Do To Save Universities
The future of the nation’s universities is very much at stake. This is not a challenge that can be met with purely defensive tactics....
How Spotify Is Ruining (Not Saving) Music
While music discovery used to be a social event, now most of us cower to simply accepting whatever the Spotify algorithm feeds us. While...
How Learning To Improvise Freed My Mind
As a classically trained flutist, I expected to feel unmoored without structure. But improvisation has made space for a freedom I didn’t know I...
How AO Scott Morphed From Writing About Movies To Pondering Poetry
For the past five months, he has been the nation’s most prominent poetry critic, writing a monthly column that uses the Times’ interactive technology...
LA Philharmonic Makes Its Coachella Debut
The Los Angeles Philharmonic led the charge into their first Coachella performance on Saturday with the "Ride of the Valkyries," helmed by Venezuelan conductor...
Will AI Save Or Kill Journalism?
The more closely you look at the profession of journalism, the stranger it seems. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, fewer than fifty thousand people...
The Strange Limbo Of TikTok In The New World Order
TikTok already existed in a kind of limbo before last week, but now its strange state of in-betweenness is intensified: it is both alive...
