Culture

The Sackler dynasty’s ruthless marketing of painkillers has generated billions of dollars—and millions of addicts.

Why the makers of today's popular culture are still so obsessed with the Reagan era.

In 1976, Joyce Weisbecker programmed games for an RCA PC and console based on technology created at home by her dad.

Before Tinder, there was “Singles News.”

The groundbreaking musician who inspired Elvis and The Beatles.

Nineteenth-century urbanization unleashed the nation's anarchic spirits.

How 1940s films reinvented the ways stories are told onscreen.

To shave or not to shave? At the start of the twentieth century, a trend away from facial hair reflected dramatic social and economic shifts.

After almost 80 years, America is finally rethinking how it screens its favorite movie.

The great short story writer and poet wrote many a book review.

Jim Marshall photographed the spread of the peace sign between 1961 and 1968, with his images now published for the first time by Reel Art Press.

Harvey Weinstein and the history of the male cinematic gaze.

We could have had a very different World Series.

The many lives of ferocious cartoonist and illustrator Arthur Szyk at a jewel of a show at the New-York Historical Society.

One of the greatest living artists in popular music still isn’t properly recognized.

A visual trip back in time to 1977.

Twitter, valuing expansion over principles, achieved its goal of changing the world. But not in the way that it planned.

Hollywood in its early days was not the kind of place where powerful men abused their power over women.

The upper classes once imposed the fashion staple on their servants—then they stole it back from them.

Dorothy Thompson's 1941 paranoid 'parlor game' just as (un) useful today.

Jane Addams, a leading Victorian-era reformer, believed dance halls were “one of the great pitfalls of the city.”

A bizarre episode in circus history became an unlikely forum for discussing 19th-century theories of race.

A new study suggests that online dating is influencing levels of interracial marriage, and even the stability of marriage itself.

In 1995, the "Deep Space Nine" installment “Past Tense” stood out for its realistic, near-future vision of racism and economic injustice.

"Blade Runner: 2049" portrays a world that is both more terrifying and duller than the world of the franchise's original.

Patterson Hood argues that Tom Petty achieved perfection in his songwriting... time and time again.

Country music is assumed to be the soundtrack of the Republican Party. But it wasn't always that way.

How a folk hero inspired one of the most covered songs in American history.

Four books contend with the lifting of the 108-year old curse.

Your favorite light sweater was worn to war, before getting picked up by academics, Mr. Rogers, and Kurt Cobain.