Culture

On who gets caught in the crosshairs when it comes to “beef."

Digging down into the roots of white America’s infatuation with Black.

What are elevator passengers listening to?

The American Scene is Henry James’s indictment of what Americans had made of their land.

For "On the Road"’s author, it was a struggle to write, then a struggle to live with its fame. “My work is found, my life is lost,” he wrote.

A review of ”Man Ray: The Artist and His Shadows” by Arthur Lubow.

The captivity narrative as creation myth.

Taking seriously the midlife crisis.

From Phillis Wheatley to Lil Uzi Vert, Black names and their evolution tell the story of America.

She animated the horror and emotional intensity in American labor songs by projecting them like a European opera singer.

Over its 13-year run, Vee Jay built a roster that left a lasting impact on every genre of music.

Close your eyes and imagine you’re married to Ernest Hemingway. Now, imagine it twice as bad, and you’ll be approaching the life story of Mary Welsh Hemingway.

Black contestants — and winners — have not translated into changed beauty standards or structural transformation.

The transcendentalists thought all human inspiration was divine, all nature a miracle.

A spectre is haunting houses—the spectre of possession.

In the new nonfiction collection “You Don’t Know Us Negroes,” what emerges is a writer who mastered a Black idiom but seldom championed race pride.

After the 1927 Great Flood, Black musicians from the Delta produced an outpour of songs testifying to the destruction. The same is true today.

A brief history of their tangled saga of patriotism and dissent.

Whether exploring the dread of everyday life or the horrors of the occult, her ghost tales documented a nation haunted by isolation, class, and despair.

Green burials — the long-ago practice of laying loved ones to rest in biodegradable wooden caskets or shrouds, without embalming — are gaining in popularity.

Uncovering the life of Rose Dougan, a real Renaissance woman, and her pioneering role in preserving Native American art.

The king of ragtime published his hit tune 120 years ago. Pianist Lara Downes believes the piece helped shape the future of American music.

A new feminist history of women and exercise glosses over the darker side of fitness culture.

While Poe was likely using opium, the efforts to keep him quiet suggest that he was also drinking.

When Sidney Poitier slapped a white murder suspect on screen, it changed how the stories of Black Americans were portrayed on film.

Coming to love Puritan poetry is an odd aesthetic journey. It's the sort of thing you expect people partial to bowties and gin gimlets to get involved with.

Of mice and men.

The Czech composer came to New York with the conviction that African-American melodies would be the ‘seedbed’ for their nation’s 20th-century music.

Margaret Wise Brown constantly pushed boundaries—in her life and in her art.

Since their initial popularity during World War II, comic books have always been a medium for American counterculture and for nativism and empire.