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A walkway with walls covered in graffiti.

Graffiti Has Undergone a Massive Shift in a Few Quick Decades as Street Art Gains Social Acceptance

In the last decade, some graffiti writers have moved from outlaw taggers to sought-after artists.
Prominent writers Billy Wilder and Gore Vidal (right and second from right) join a writers’ picket line at 20th Century Fox in Los Angeles, June 25, 1981. (Bettmann / Getty Images)

Hollywood Screenwriters Have Always Known That Moviemaking Is a Form of Labor

Stretching back to Hollywood’s Golden Age, writers and many others in the industry have fought for their rights as workers.
The sixty-four hexagrams from the King Wen sequence of the I Ching.

The I Ching in America

Europeans translated the "Chinese Book of Changes" in the nineteenth century, but the philosophy really took off in the West after 1924.
Connie Converse playing a guitar

The Lost Music of Connie Converse

A writer of haunting, uncategorizable songs, she once seemed poised for runaway fame. But only decades after she disappeared has her music found an audience.
Illustration by Cristina Spano, picturing rulers and colorful shapes and designs coming out of the neck of a collared shirt

The Origins of Creativity

The concept was devised in postwar America, in response to the cultural and commercial demands of the era. Now we’re stuck with it.
Drawing of performers and different audio technologies.

The End of the Music Business

A century of recorded music has culminated in the infinite archive of streaming platforms. But is it really better for listeners?
64 East 7th Street, New York City, 2022.

The Parsonage

An unprepossessing townhouse in the East Village has been central to a series of distinctive events in New York City history.
Production of Oklahoma! where actors in brightly colored clothing dance a square dance in front of a set of rural architecture and farmland.

Behind 'Oklahoma!' Lies the Remarkable Story of a Gay Cherokee Playwright

Lynn Riggs wrote the play that served as the basis of the hit 1943 musical.
Screenwriter Dalton Trumbo with his wife Cleo at the House Un-American Activities Committee hearings in 1947. Bertoldt Brecht can be seen in the background.

Monopolywood: Why the Paramount Accords Should Not Be Repealed

If studios can again harness the income from exhibition, we may see a return of traditional vertical integration.
Young girl triplets wearing identical clothes sitting on a bed.

Posed Riddles

Seeing through empathy with Diane Arbus.
Comic strip: Bungleton Green and the Mystic Commandos: "Jon Smythe has escaped being lynched by Green Men but is captured by the "Dark Mystery!".

Jay Jackson’s Audacious Comics

Written during World War II, Bungleton Green and the Mystic Commandos imagined a future liberated from racism and inequality.
Horatio Greenough's statue of George Washington in a toga.

The First Statue Removed From the Capitol

Long before monuments to enslavers were removed, lawmakers decided to relocate a scandalous, half-naked depiction of George Washington in a toga.
Black writers Askia Toure, Lorenzo Thomas, and Ismael Reed seated at an Umbra meeting.

A New Flame for Black Fire

What will be the legacy of the Black Arts Movement? Ishmael Reed reflects on the transformation and growth of Black arts since the 1960s.
Bruce Springsteen and the E Street Band perform in 2016 in D.C.
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Springsteen’s Early Struggles Reveal How the Music Industry Has Changed

The album was once king. Now it’s the live show.
1859 painting "Negro Life in the South," with enslaved people in a courtyard.

How An Abolitionist Painting Set In D.C. Became Proslavery Propaganda

An 1859 painting by Eastman Johnson depicted enslaved people in a D.C. courtyard. Intended to humanize them, it was coopted by slavery defenders.
Production reference photos of "Wizard of Oz" cast members in their wigs and make-up.

What Hollywood’s Ultimate Oral History Reveals

For all the clouds of publicity, the dream machine is actually a craft business. Have we asked too much of it?
Painting, James Daugherty, "Thanksgiving Greetings."

You Cannot Give Thanks for What Is Stolen

American artists were instrumental in propagating the false narrative of Thanksgiving, a deliberate erasure of violence against Indigenous peoples.
A.I. image of Benjamin Franklin, Audrey Hepburn and Al Capone if they were alive today.

Photographer Uses AI to Imagine What Historical Icons Would Look Like Today

Some of the stars depicted in Yesiltas’ portraits are instantly recognizable as modern-day sirens, while others are less obvious at first glance.
Black and white photograph of Loretta Lynn holding a microphone

Personifying a Country Ideal, Loretta Lynn Tackled Sexism Through a Complicated Lens

The singer wasn't a feminist torchbearer, but her music amplified women's issues.
Headstones in Mount Auburn cemetery. Photograph by Daderot at en.wikipedia, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=18003519.
original

A Tour of Mount Auburn Cemetery

Two centuries of New England intellectual history through the lives and ideas of people who are memorialized there.
Drawing of onomatopoetic words, exclamation points, and objects used to make noises.

The Weird, Analog Delights of Foley Sound Effects

E.T. was jello in a T-shirt. The Mummy was scratchy potpourri. For Foley artists, deception is an essential part of the enterprise.
Arlen Parsa's Painting, Declaration of Independence Revisited (2019), the famous painting of the signing but with red dots over the faces of slaveholders.

How to Decolonize the Capitol

Art historians, legislators, and activists have long decried themes of white supremacy in the art collection of the U.S. Capitol. Can this place be decolonized?
Sign that reads "Instructions to all persons of Japanese ancestry living in the following area"

Memory Work: Reading and Writing Japanese American Incarceration

What new possibilities might arise if we were to consider history as ongoing memory work, rather than a set narrative of progress or as singular “truth”?
Collage of photos of musicians.

How a Saxophonist Tricked the KGB by Encrypting Secrets in Music

Using a custom encryption scheme based on musical notation, US musicians smuggled information into and out of the USSR.
The icons for mobile phone apps Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp.
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‘Keeping it Real’ Has Lost its True Meaning

How a phrase tied to authenticity and resistance sometimes just dishes out entertainment.
Biggie Smalls posing for the camera, with three friends looking on from behind.

Behind the Scenes of Ready to Die

An intimate look at the creation of an iconic album.
A pair of color stereogram photographs featuring people sitting in front of a desert stone structure.

New Look, Same Great Look

The history of humans being confounded by color photography.
Street Painter among paintings in Rome, Italy

W.E.B. Du Bois and the Aesthetics of Emancipation

“I am one who tells the truth and exposes evil and seeks with Beauty and for Beauty to set the world right,” W.E.B. Du Bois said in his June 1926 lecture.
Photo of Danyel Smith.

Danyel Smith Tells the History of Black Women in Pop Music

The author discusses Whitney Houston, Gladys Knight, racism in magazines, and why she’s so hopeful for the future of music and writing.
Nas performing at the 2022 Grammys.
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Grammys Have Little Credibility in the Hip-Hop Community

While the awards have recognized achievements in rap, Black artists continue to face musical segregation.

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