Michael Waters

1934 world champion runner Zdenek Koubek, boxer Imane Khelif, and how far we haven’t come on gender in sports.

Naked runners used to disrupt events seemingly all the time. Why’d they stop?

“The Other Olympians: Fascism, Queerness, and the Making of Modern Sports” upends long-held assumptions about trans people’s participation in sports.

In 1936, the Czech track star Zdeněk Koubek became world-famous after undergoing surgery so that he could live openly as a man.

A quiet movement that began in the 1920s didn’t disappear—it just went underground.

Barbara Ann Richards designed—and then demanded—the life she deserved.

We tend to think of "they," "Mx.," and "hir" as recent inventions. But English speakers have been looking for better ways to talk about gender for a long time.

In the 1970s, social workers in several states placed queer teenagers with queer foster parents, in discrete acts of quiet radicalism.

In the 1940s, journalists fled traditional news outlets to write directly for subscribers. What happened next may be a warning.

From atomizer crazes to stranded actor troupes to school by phone, daily life during the flu pandemic was a trip.

In the 1930s, a forgotten federal bureau experimented with ways to make soy and other products more popular in the U.S.