Culture

Is he merely a reactionary, or do his films paint a more complicated picture?

Lionel Trilling defends humanism amid crisis culture, warning that obsessing over evil can erode the self and our capacity for moral and creative agency.

While she always insisted that she wasn’t a ‘real’ critic, Dorothy Parker is more astute than most on matters of style.

At one time, wearing white after Labor Day was not just considered a fashionable “faux pas,” but a mark of bad manners and bad taste.

As Bruce Springsteen’s "Born to Run" turns 50, its most underrated track deserves some love.

On a new biography of James Baldwin.

How the Boss provided a 50-year-long soundtrack for the last of the Baby Boomers.

Elbridge Ayer Burbank’s haunting paintings capture a likeness that was only ever real from the vantage point of a White man with a gun, canvas, or camera.

Exploring ropemaking, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, and Jeremiah N. Reynolds’s wild tale.

Once dismissed as passé, since recast as a secular saint, Baldwin’s true message remains more unsettling than readers in either camp recognize.

Revisit the transformative moment in American culture through the lens of a new book about the 1960s New York avant-garde.

A woman killed by Congress.

Painter William Merritt Chase opened an art school for a new generation of women, teaching them how to draw as well as how to advocate for themselves.

By posting paintings like “American Progress,” the DHS signals its white supremacist beliefs.

How a decision sparked by the death of one of the world’s biggest pop stars knocked the Billboard 200 out of alignment.

The 1893 World’s Fair and the origins of Aunt Jemima.

Correspondence about writing, travel, and friendship, from 1926 through 1929.

A closer look at the character’s history shows that the latest movie is true to his past.

Jaws is a landmark hit, but also a sharp 1970s film shaped by political ire, social critique, and realist cinema’s lasting influence.

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.