Culture

No rap album has quite the mythology attached to it—as a game changer, a king maker, a genre expander. But legends aren’t exactly fact.

It was only in the 20th century that toolboxes became staples in the homes of middle-class men.

Coronavirus songwriting has gone as global as the pandemic itself, creating a new genre called pandemic pop. It’s a tradition with a long history.

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

From kitsch to cool, ride the waves of undulating popularity of a tropical fashion statement.

The pandemic is stress-testing two concepts Americans have historically gotten wrong.

Sasha Geffen’s debut book reveals that the history of pop music is a history of gender rebellion.

The literature that arose from the influenza pandemic speaks to our current moment in profound ways, offering connections in the exact realms where art excels.

Even knowing every awful thing Richard Nixon would go on to do, you had to respect, as the phrase goes, his hustle.

West understood more clearly than anyone the allure of Communism for educated Westerners.

Although largely forgotten today, exercise by club swinging was all the rage in the 19th century.

“Either they’ve got no conscience, or they’re not awake to the gravity of the situation.”

Though the "electricity biscuit" thesis is plausible, killjoy historians need more evidence.

The influenza pandemic did long-lasting damage to relationships in some American communities. Could the mistrust have been prevented?

Until a century or so ago, almost no one lived alone; now many endure shutdowns and lockdowns on their own. How did modern life get so lonely?

Myspace changed the way we discovered music and fell apart after conquering the world.

The 1936 movie Little Lord Fauntleroy broke box office records, only to be toned down and masculinized amid cultural fears of the “sissified” male.

We are demigods of discards – but our copious garbage became a toxic burden only with the modern cult of ‘disposability.’

Katherine Anne Porter’s ‘Pale Horse, Pale Rider’ tells the tale of a pandemic she barely survived.

At a time when questions about women's rights in marriage roiled society, women readers took to the pages of cheap books about husband-murdering wives.

In the literature of pestilence, the greatest threat isn’t the loss of human life but the loss of what makes us human.

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.