Excerpts

Curated stories from around the web.
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Still frame from a slow motion sequence in the 1967 film Bonnie and Clyde shows actress grimacing inside a vehicle.

How Slow Motion Became Cinema’s Dominant Special Effect

The turbulent late sixties saw the technique’s popularity explode—and it’s been helping moviemakers engage with the unsettling tempos of modern life ever since.

Why America Got a Warfare State, Not a Welfare State

How FDR invented national security, and why Democrats need to move on from it.
US National Guard troops block off Beale Street as Civil Rights marchers wearing placards reading, "I AM A MAN"

The Classical Liberal Foundation of Civil Rights

The progress we have seen toward civil rights for all Americans is inseparable from the history of classical liberalism.
Illustration by Ben Kothe / The Atlantic

The Perils of ‘Design Thinking’

How did the concept become the solution to society’s most deeply entrenched problems?
A mouse hovers over a screen filled with buttons for purchase choices that all look the same.

Americans Are Tired of Choice

How did freedom become synonymous with having lots of options?
Conservative protesters hold signs and flags at a Tea Party protest.

Lone Star Futures

Texas might have been a place to start a conversation about widening the scope of civil liberties, but it has also been a place where those liberties end.
William Buckley stands behind a podium, surrounded by a throng of people, and waves.

The Real Bill Buckley

Even some liberals toasted William F. Buckley Jr. as a patrician gentleman. A long-awaited new biography corrects that record.
The letters Q and A having a conversation.

The History of Advice Columns Is a History of Eavesdropping and Judging

How an Ovid-quoting London broadsheet from the late seventeenth century spawned “Dear Abby,” Dan Savage, and Reddit’s Am I the Asshole.
An illustration of blurry Korean people in the ruins of a city after a nuclear bombing.

The Atomic Bombs’ Forgotten Korean Victims

Survivors of the nuclear blasts in Hiroshima and Nagasaki are still fighting for recognition.
Karl Marx's face in the American flag

The Marxists Are Coming

Calls to defund the Marxist left and similar mobilizations against rumors of a new red dawn are nothing new.
Irving Thalberg and his wife, with Louis Mayer.

The Wizard Behind Hollywood’s Golden Age

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.
View of a cast member sitting nude on scaffolding during a performance.

The Sixties Come Back to Life in “Everything Is Now”

J. Hoberman’s teeming history of New York’s avant-garde scene is a fascinating trove of research and a thrilling clamor of voices.
Abstract painting depicts faces staring at each other from either end of the canvas.

Bridging the Gap

A new book portrays five American historians who published popular books that sacrificed neither intellectual depth nor political bite.

My Freedom, My Choice

A new book illuminates how freedom became associated with choice and questions whether that has been a good thing—for women in particular.
Walter Lippmann.

Walter Lippmann, Beyond Stereotypes

On the political theorist and the new media landscape.
William F. Buckley reclines behind a desk, glasses in hand, a bulletin board of National Review magazine material behind him.

The Conservative Intellectual Who Laid the Groundwork for Trump

The political vision that William F. Buckley helped forge was—and remains today—focused less on adhering to principles and more on ferreting out enemies.
Drawings of women authors

How Margaret Fuller Set Minds on Fire

High-minded and scandal-prone, a foe of marriage who dreamed of domesticity, Fuller radiated a charisma that helped ignite the fight for women’s rights.
Cover of book. Red text on a blue background with stickers of Karl Marx's face arranged like the 50 stars.

Marx: The Fourth Boom

Were you to vanish Marx from every library, you’d destroy the central interlocutor around which most of capitalism is built.
Attica after state police stormed the prison, 1971.

How Should We Remember Attica?

Orisanmi Burton’s "Tip of the Spear" uncovers the obscured and radical demands of the inmates who staged the 1971 prison uprising—a world without prisons.
Mother's hand holding baby's hand on the cover of "Blue: A History of Postpartum Depression in America".

On Rachel Louise Moran’s "Blue: A History of Postpartum Depression in America"

A new book challenges the discursive ignorance about the condition.
Ella Fitzgerald performing in Paris, 1961

Rare Gift, Rare Grit

Ella Fitzgerald performed above the emotional fray.
Zbigniew Brzezinski

The Coldest Cold Warrior

How a sharp-elbowed Polish academic with an unpronounceable name helped defeat the Soviet Union.
Illustration of lady liberty balancing housework and child care, holding cash instead of a torch.

The World That ‘Wages for Housework’ Wanted

The 1970s campaign fought to get women paid for their work in the home—and envisioned a society built to better support motherhood.
The all seeing eye reveals that the American flag is melting.

America’s Broken Commonwealth

The nation’s founding myth was based on faith and solidarity – but it also contained the roots of today’s democratic crisis.
Walt Whitman

Brag and Humblebrag: Walt Whitman’s Encounters

Walt Whitman was a champion self-advertiser, maven of the brag and the humblebrag.
Still from "Monuments Men" of warehouse of items confiscated by Nazis.

Secrets in the Stacks

A new book demonstrates that the skills taught and honed in the humanities are of vital importance to the defense of democracy.
Friedrich Hayek

Hokey Cowboy: Is Hayek to Blame?

Hayek suspected that nothing about the vindication of neoliberalism was likely to be straightforward.
A newspaper drawing of St. Louis from above.
partner

German Radicals vs. the Slave Power

In "Memoirs of a Nobody," Henry Boernstein chronicles the militant immigrant organizing that helped keep St. Louis out of the hands of the Confederacy.
Robert Crumb

He’s Lewd, Problematic, and Profoundly Influential

R. Crumb’s cartoons plumb the grotesque corners of the American unconscious.
An iMac computer displays the starry night screensaver.

Recurring Screens

Reflections on memory, dreams, and computer screensavers.
Woodrow Wilson and a panel of red stars.

Surviving Bad Presidents

What the Constitution asks of us.
An illustration depicts Dorothy holding her dog Toto while interacting with an Ozian.

L. Frank Baum’s Literary Vision of an American Century: "The Wizard of Oz" at 125 Years

On grifters, the Chicago World Fair, and Oz as symbol of a modern USA.
Sanitation truck.

W.A.S.T.E. Not

John Scanlan’s “The Idea of Waste” argues that all civilization is an attempt to make waste disappear.
Mark Twain

Mark Twain and the Limits of Biography

The great American writer witnessed the forging of his nation – but Ron Chernow’s portrait cannot see beyond its subject.
Aimee Semple McPherson addresses a crowd.

An Eerily Familiar 20th-Century Hoax

Aimee Semple McPherson created a wildly popular personal brand as a preacher—then suddenly disappeared.
A Freedmen’s Bureau office, Richmond, Virginia, 1866.

One Brief Shining Moment

Manisha Sinha’s history of Reconstruction sheds fresh light on the period that fleetingly opened a door to a different America.
Murray Kempton

The Late, Great American Newspaper Columnist

The life and career of Murray Kempton attest to the disappearing ideals of a dying industry. But his example suggests those ideals are not beyond resurrection.
Lyndon Johnson and Richard Helms, framed by a camera shutter.

Is Spying Un-American?

Espionage has always been with us, but its rapid growth over the past century may have undermined trust in government.
Line drawings of related is school desegregation activism.

How Brown Came North and Failed

Half a century ago the civil rights movement’s effort to carry the campaign for school desegregation from the South to the urban North ended in failure.
Woman in prayer looks up to an angel holding a pen for advice.

What Kind of Questions Did 17th-Century Daters Have?

A 17th-century column shows that dating has always been an anxiety-riddled endeavor.
Scene of prehistoric game hunters.

Prehistory’s Original Sin

We need more than genealogies to know who we are, and who we ought to become.
John C. Calhoun

The Prelude to the Civil War

“Only two states wanted a civil war—Massachusetts and South Carolina.”
A magnifying glass on C. Wright Mills's book "The Power Elite."

Whatever Happened to the Power Elite?

The trio of interests atop business, military, and government depicted in C. Wright Mills’s postwar critique is no longer united in setting the national agenda.
Rachel Cockerell’s “Melting Point" tells the story of an exiled people and their effort to find a place to call home.

When Jews Sought the Promised Land in Texas

While some Jewish exiles dreamed of a homeland in Palestine, the Jewish Territorial Organization fixed its hopes on Galveston.
Science fiction landscape.

75 Years Ago, "The Martian Chronicles" Legitimized Science Fiction

On Ray Bradbury’s underappreciated classic.
Mark Twain

The Impossible Contradictions of Mark Twain

Populist and patrician, hustler and moralist, salesman and satirist, he embodied the tensions within his America, and ours.
Belle da Costa Greene at her desk in the Morgan library.

Ambition, Discipline, Nerve

The qualities that enabled Belle da Costa Greene to cross the color line also made her a formidable negotiator and collector for J.P. Morgan’s library.
Painting of the Battle of San Pasquale in the U.S.-Mexico War.

Borders May Change, But People Remain

The legacies of conflict—and their increasingly accessible images in a global age—frame the shared bonds of trauma in keeping their memories alive.
An eagle grabbing the earth, focused on Latin America, in its talons.

What America Means to Latin Americans

In a new book, the Pulitzer Prize winner Greg Grandin tells the history of the hemisphere from south of the border.
Catholic activists burn draft files to protest the Vietnam War in Catonsville, Maryland, 1968.

Resistance Reexamined

The complex, sometimes romanticized, but ultimately prophetic Catholic peace movement has critical lessons for today's America amid a genocidal war in Gaza.
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