Culture

Superman et al were invented amid feverish eugenic speculation: what does the superhero craze say about our own times?

How "Choose Your Own Adventure" books indoctrinated ‘80s children with the idea that success is simply the result of individual “good choices.”

In segregated units set up under the Federal Theatre Project, African American artists took on work usually reserved for whites and wrote radical dramas.

Screwball comics wage a gleeful war on civilization and its discontents—armed mostly with water-pistols, stink bombs, and laughing gas.

A new biography and TV show present Emily Dickinson as a self-aware artist who created a life that defied the limits placed on women.

The artist’s Saturday Evening Post covers championed a retrograde view of America. In the 1960s, he had a change of heart.

While segregation was a shameful period in baseball history, the Negro Leagues were a resounding success and an immense source of pride for black America.

A look back on the album that kick-started a worldwide movement, half a century since Ozzy Osbourne first bellowed, “What is this that stands before me?”

When poetry met power in January, 1961.

Victoria Dailey looks back at Oscar Wilde’s wild ride through the United States in the early 1880s.

Zadie Smith on Kara Walker, blackness and public art.

Ashley Boone Jr., the first black president of a major Hollywood studio, helped make Star Wars a hit, yet chances are you've never heard of him.

Jonathan Goldman explores the beginnings of the Algonquin Round Table and how Parker's determination to speak her mind gave her pride of place within it.

The value of shame in objects.

Oscar night has become a platform for stars to pitch political causes.

The most popular songs today are sadder than they were 50 years ago: can cultural evolution explain this negative turn?

J.B. Jackson’s 1976 essay on the evolution of the American garage displays his rare ability to combine deep erudition with eloquent and plainspoken analysis.

The mysterious appeal of my first detective.

William Dorsey Swann fought for queer freedom a century before Stonewall.

As José Ferrer was being handed his Oscar—making him the first Latino actor to win—he was being investigated by the House Un-American Activities Committee.

Thomas crunches history and Hollywood tropes in his first solo show in L.A.

"Every film about war ends up being pro-war," Francois Truffaut once said.

From the moment DeFord Bailey stepped onto a stage in Nashville, country music would never be the same. Decades after his death he finally got his due.

A pianist performs a piece of music forgotten for 150 years.

Donald Judd, Richard Wollheim, and the origins of what we now describe as minimalist.

This footnote in New York Public Library history hints at a rich story of power, taste, and the crumbling of traditional gatekeepers.

William James, Charles Peirce, and the questions that roiled them.

Both Southerners. Both all but forgotten. Both, in their own ways, questioned the social constructions of race and white supremacy in their writings.

Proudly embracing their role as outsiders, a group of writer-activists set out to create a cultural identity—and a literature—of their own.

The artists of our time, with their ruin-porn coffee-table books, offer the world a glossy, anesthetized image of abandoned infrastructure from Chernobyl to Detroit.