Culture

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.

"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.

At the Met, "Superfine: Tailoring Black Style" shows how clothing became a way for Black men to assert presence and push back against control.

In his short story “The Benefit of the Doubt,” Jack London turned truth into fiction, and then some.

On grifters, the Chicago World Fair, and Oz as symbol of a modern USA.

On sanitized depictions of the 19th century, comfort shows, and income inequality.

Lessons from the anti-fascist novel in Trump’s second term.

The revolutionary history behind one of America’s main musical exports.

From Jim Crow-era performance to contemporary gospel musicals, entertainers have shaped the Black public sphere.

A new Criterion series of McCarthy-era noir films is a timely collection for an era of rising government repression.

On the early history of Black participation in America's pastime.

The enigma of Samuel Clemens.

On Ray Bradbury’s underappreciated classic.

Populist and patrician, hustler and moralist, salesman and satirist, he embodied the tensions within his America, and ours.

Marching bands at historically Black colleges and universities can be seen as both celebratory emblems and complicated arbiters of Black American culture.

In 1902, a woman named Mary MacLane from Butte, Montana, became an international sensation after publishing a scandalous journal at the age of 19.

If you've noticed a certain look common to the manosphere, you're not mistaken. A visual identity has taken hold, with roots that trace back decades.

Dan Nadel on the formative awkward adolescence of an iconic American cartoonist.

A documentary dissects Henry Fonda's character and his role in American cinema.

One hundred years ago, "The Great Gatsby" was first published. It remains one of the books that almost every literate American has read.

In 1966, the conductor arrived in Vienna with a mission: to restore Gustav Mahler’s place in 20th-century music.

Why did Hollywood lose interest in making paranoid thrillers? Was it a change in the culture? Or a change in the marketplace?

It's not about the bike or the bloomers.

Why his turn-of-the-century travelogue still resonates.