Culture

A sweeping new history explores facial hair as a proving ground for notions about gender, race, and rebellion.

Despite seeming like strange dance partners, disco and classical make the best music—together.

Art, politics, and revolution intertwined as transatlantic Patriots used wax, paint, and wit to shape the fight for American independence.

Thomas Kinkade’s paintings show conservatives a world they have already won.

Long before the new detention facility in Florida, the reptile has featured in the fantasies of Southern racists.

Chinese immigrants, the queue, and the boundaries of political citizenship.

A new book recognizes Claire McCardell as a pioneer of American womenswear as we know it.

Like the atomic bomb testing site, the new bathing suit was named “le bikini,” and its impact was almost as explosive.

The poem that became a hymn to the nation came about in troubled, polarizing times.

A new book examines the aggressive masculinity that the editors of the Partisan Review brought to their art and literary criticism.

How the novelist turned the violence and randomness of war into a cosmic joke.

How Claire McCardell changed women’s fashion.

The turbulent late sixties saw the technique’s popularity explode—and it’s been helping moviemakers engage with the unsettling tempos of modern life ever since.

Myths are fed back as stereotypes and strawmen to divine some boundary for acceptability.

In 1861, Edward Payson Weston walked the 500 miles from Boston to D.C., and launched a legendary career as a pedestrian in the process.

A group of early 20th-century Catholics sought to impose their standards of morality onto the growing and scandal-ridden Hollywood film industry.

Shahn was an American phenomenon, but a new retrospective suggests that we’ve come to prize his politics over his accomplishments.

More than three decades since "Paris Is Burning" put the underground scene on a world stage, ball culture remains a haven for the queer community.

From Revolutionary War-era recluses to 1920s roadside attractions, meet the solitary figures who turned isolation into a destination.

Trump mixes restoration with revolution—his reactionary modernism wooed Silicon Valley, but for everyone else, it signals looming repression.

How Irving Thalberg helped turn M-G-M into the world’s most famous movie studio—and gave the film business a new sense of artistry and scale.

The charged meaning of hair in 19th-century America.

“Girl on Girl,” by the critic Sophie Gilbert, is the latest in a series of consciousness-raising-style reappraisals of the decade’s formative texts.

J. Hoberman’s teeming history of New York’s avant-garde scene is a fascinating trove of research and a thrilling clamor of voices.

"Full Metal Jacket" and the crisis of masculinity.

In the relationship between humans and raccoons, the black-masked mammals have played many roles.

The increasing secularism of the nineteenth century helped make board games a commercial and ideological success in the United States.

Ella Fitzgerald performed above the emotional fray.

Why are avocados everywhere?

R. Crumb’s cartoons plumb the grotesque corners of the American unconscious.