Culture

Watchmen is a sophisticated inquiry into the ethical implications of its own form—the flash and bang, the prurience and violence of comic books.

In the twentieth century, advertisements for a new type of garment for preteen girls sought to define the femininity they sold.

The counterculture dictum to “turn on, tune in, drop out” did not quite capture Janis’s philosophy to “get it while you can.”

The qualities for which live theater is celebrated—audiences responding with laughter, tears, gasps, and coughs—accelerate its danger.

In the period immediately following World War II, the femme fatale embodied a host of male anxieties about gender roles.

The Gold Rush introduced a new figure into the American imagination – the effete Eastern urbanite who travels to the Wild West in quest of his fortune.

As coronavirus becomes an ever-increasing threat to our lives, there seems to be one thing that people around the world cannot go without the most.

It’s hardly a secret, but, for a land that bills itself as a land of freedom and opportunity, America can be inhospitable to just about anyone.

Ben Katchor's Brief History of the Dairy Restaurant.

On the fixture of white yuppiedom and icon of post-ironic millennial hipsterdom.

How high-fructose corn syrup became an American staple.

Superman et al were invented amid feverish eugenic speculation: what does the superhero craze say about our own times?

How "Choose Your Own Adventure" books indoctrinated ‘80s children with the idea that success is simply the result of individual “good choices.”

In segregated units set up under the Federal Theatre Project, African American artists took on work usually reserved for whites and wrote radical dramas.

Screwball comics wage a gleeful war on civilization and its discontents—armed mostly with water-pistols, stink bombs, and laughing gas.

A new biography and TV show present Emily Dickinson as a self-aware artist who created a life that defied the limits placed on women.

The artist’s Saturday Evening Post covers championed a retrograde view of America. In the 1960s, he had a change of heart.

While segregation was a shameful period in baseball history, the Negro Leagues were a resounding success and an immense source of pride for black America.

A look back on the album that kick-started a worldwide movement, half a century since Ozzy Osbourne first bellowed, “What is this that stands before me?”

When poetry met power in January, 1961.

Victoria Dailey looks back at Oscar Wilde’s wild ride through the United States in the early 1880s.

Zadie Smith on Kara Walker, blackness and public art.

Ashley Boone Jr., the first black president of a major Hollywood studio, helped make Star Wars a hit, yet chances are you've never heard of him.

Jonathan Goldman explores the beginnings of the Algonquin Round Table and how Parker's determination to speak her mind gave her pride of place within it.

The value of shame in objects.

Oscar night has become a platform for stars to pitch political causes.

The most popular songs today are sadder than they were 50 years ago: can cultural evolution explain this negative turn?

J.B. Jackson’s 1976 essay on the evolution of the American garage displays his rare ability to combine deep erudition with eloquent and plainspoken analysis.

The mysterious appeal of my first detective.

William Dorsey Swann fought for queer freedom a century before Stonewall.