Culture

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.

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.

On his films and the way they provocatively confronted the evils of the times in which they were made.

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.