Culture

In the 1950s, the covers of most jazz records featured abstract designs. By the late 1960s, album aesthetics better reflected the times and the musicians.

Capturing the 1968 DNC.

The 2008 election sparked an outburst of brightness and positivity across pop culture. Now hindsight — and cringe — is setting in.

We take for granted the Titians and Botticellis that hang in galleries across the U.S., little aware how and why they were acquired.

By framing the U.S. as a victim, 'Red Dawn' obscured U.S. aggression in Latin America and elsewhere.

The history of Camp Wo-Chi-Ca tells a largely overlooked story about left-wing politics and Black culture.

A new study claims that songs have become less complex. But the magic of these short, sharp tunes can’t be so easily distilled.

Baldwin wrote with the knowledge that change would be hard and slow to achieve.

The famous author, who would have been 100 years old today, was best known for his novels and essays. But correspondence was where his light shone brightest.

Skateboarding was considered a silly and childish phenomenon for much of its existence.

Two books that remind us that tone and timbre, musical style and sound, matter to history.

Can we appreciate Herman Melville’s work without attributing to it schemes for the uplift of modern man?

Revisiting his first book, "The Enormous Room," a reader can get a sense of everything appealing and appalling in his work.

She left exactly when we need her most.

Dr. Ruth left a legacy of sexual candor and the need to defend pleasure as a universal right—a conversation that is more relevant today than ever.

On defying gender norms and expectations in extreme sports.

Jews in the industry called for the Academy Museum to highlight the men who created the movie business. A voice in my head went, Uh-oh.

How a tragedy in New York City convinced Americans to learn how to swim.

On self-pleasure and sex education in children's literature.

Nine Inch Nails, the Manson Family, and the contradictions of Los Angeles.

Beverly Hills Cop: Axel F spends its final moments on a thrilling cinematic trope of the ’80s, one that I would argue is due for a comeback.

What happens when the automation of music makes it too easy to create and too easy to consume?

The anthology drama provided a venue for discourses on American national identity during the massive cultural, economic, and political changes occurring at midcentury.

Explore science fiction worlds from the last few decades – and what these fictional settings tell us about ourselves.

A statistical analysis of how music composition evolved over time.

On the 50th anniversary of “Chinatown” and the beginning of the end of petromodernity.

Norman Mailer’s generation learned to “write like men.” But their female contemporaries from Mary McCarthy to Diana Trilling pioneered a more enduring style.

How three movies set on the Fourth of July reproduce popular myth, but reveal even more through what they leave unsaid.

A mythical creature that lurks in the pinelands of New Jersey has served as a reminder of the horrors that result when reproductive freedoms are destroyed.

A look at this iconic salad’s origin story and its evolution into a cornerstone of accessible American cooking.