Culture

Scarry’s guides to life both reflected and bolstered kids’ lived experience, and in some cases even provided the template for it.

To capture the spirit of the poet Audre Lorde, Alexis Pauline Gumbs decided to break all the rules.

The rhythms of our days may never be the same.

How deathly rituals affect our perception of personal dignity.

Screwball comedies are beloved films, but for decades historians and critics have disagreed over what the genre is and which movies belong to it.

“It’s not just preserving seeds, it’s preserving our culture, our history, our way of life.”

An elegiac retelling of rap's origins, "Hip-Hop Is History" also ends with a sense of hope.

In the forty-eight years that she’s lived in the West Village, the owner of the iconic cookbook shop has never ordered delivery.

The yuppies embodied the winning side of America’s deepening economic divide. Bruce Springsteen spoke for those left behind.

For God, politics, love, integrity, or a sense of ennui, film stars at the height of their fame have left the industry behind.

In the 1950s, the covers of most jazz records featured abstract designs. By the late 1960s, album aesthetics better reflected the times and the musicians.

Capturing the 1968 DNC.

The 2008 election sparked an outburst of brightness and positivity across pop culture. Now hindsight — and cringe — is setting in.

Sixty-five years later, a critic argues that “Kind of Blue” is the least challenging of Davis' works.

We take for granted the Titians and Botticellis that hang in galleries across the U.S., little aware how and why they were acquired.

By framing the U.S. as a victim, 'Red Dawn' obscured U.S. aggression in Latin America and elsewhere.

The history of Camp Wo-Chi-Ca tells a largely overlooked story about left-wing politics and Black culture.

A new study claims that songs have become less complex. But the magic of these short, sharp tunes can’t be so easily distilled.

Baldwin wrote with the knowledge that change would be hard and slow to achieve.

The famous author, who would have been 100 years old today, was best known for his novels and essays. But correspondence was where his light shone brightest.

Skateboarding was considered a silly and childish phenomenon for much of its existence.

Two books that remind us that tone and timbre, musical style and sound, matter to history.

Can we appreciate Herman Melville’s work without attributing to it schemes for the uplift of modern man?

Revisiting his first book, "The Enormous Room," a reader can get a sense of everything appealing and appalling in his work.

She left exactly when we need her most.

Dr. Ruth left a legacy of sexual candor and the need to defend pleasure as a universal right—a conversation that is more relevant today than ever.

On defying gender norms and expectations in extreme sports.

Jews in the industry called for the Academy Museum to highlight the men who created the movie business. A voice in my head went, Uh-oh.

How a tragedy in New York City convinced Americans to learn how to swim.

On self-pleasure and sex education in children's literature.