Culture

In the experimental world of modernist poetry, literary journals were vulnerable to fake submissions.

The history of the Crazy Woman Driver trope.

How the master of suspense got his sadistic streak.

The Jewish Tin Pan Alley composer who wrote ‘Take Me Out to the Ball Game’ had never been to a ballgame.

Disney gets inventive when they need to circumvent white people’s historical responsibility for genocidal atrocities — and queerness is a useful scapegoat.

Oy Bay! Become seasoned on the history of America's beloved spice blend.

A review of "To Live and Defy in LA: How Gangsta Rap Changed America."

Everything that was once considered lowbrow is now triumphant.

A librarian with a love for eBay built this trove of culinary history.

The history of pimento cheese as a working class fixture and a symbol of Southern culture as seen through mystery novels.

Reconciliation is good — but not at any cost.

Recent works inspired by his fiction struggle to reckon with his racist fantasies.

A stereotype? Definitely. Problematic? You bet. But many Mexican Americans still love the cartoon character.

The challenge of documenting a virtual world.

For poet Honorée Fanonne Jeffers, as for the Black Romantics, history is the repetition of anti-Black violence that has yet to be abolished.

Charlotte Perkins Gilman authored the beloved short story "The Yellow Wallpaper," but also supported eugenics and nativism.

Why the Potato Heads are the latest toys becoming more inclusive.

What an old poem says about the search for justice following the Capitol riot.

Two new movies emphasize the singer’s spirit of defiance and political courage.

A recent documentary reminds us of her family’s strength and our own weakness.

As technologies of quantification and video capture grow more sophisticated, is baseball changing? Do those changes have moral implications?

Greek statues, the Napoleonic wars, and the advent of photography all played a role.

Will the industry remain a bastion of conservatism, or take advantage of the opportunity to broaden its base?

It's about the satirical tradition of 'going there.'

James Taylor, Roberta Flack, Tori Amos, Joan Armatrading, Rufus Wainwright and more on the 70s masterpiece.

In a career of many flops, he laid claim to the outsized success of Marvel Comics.

Gerd Stern, the Beats, and the psychiatric institution.

Joshua Cohen imagines how Philip Roth would review his own biographer.

Jacob Lawrence was one of twentieth-century America’s most celebrated black artists.

What if chairs could shift our state of consciousness, transporting the imagination into distant landscapes and ecstatic experiences, both religious and erotic?