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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.
by Richard Brody via The New Yorker on June 6, 2025
Shulamith Firestone, 1997.

When the Battle's Lost and Won

Shulamith Firestone and the burdens of prophecy.
by Audrey Wollen via Harper’s on March 28, 2025
David Bowie singing into a microphone wearing a feather boa and tights.

How Pop Came Out of the Closet

Jon Savage’s “The Secret Public” traces the influence of queer artists on a hostile culture.
by Samuel Clowes Huneke via The New Republic on February 14, 2025
Meme of white Gen X voters in their ironic cynicism.

We Care a Lot: White Gen Xers and Political Nihilism

Since the 2024 election, liberals, progressives, and the left has been wringing our collective hands over why Trump won yet again.
by Mindy Clegg via 3 Quarks Daily on December 20, 2024

The World of Tomorrow

When the future arrived, it felt…ordinary. What happened to the glamour of tomorrow?
by Virginia Postrel via Works In Progress on December 5, 2024
Nan Lurie's "Women's House of Detention drawing in Greenwich Village.

How Greenwich Village Became America’s Bohemia

Greenwich Village’s bohemian and queer culture roots lie in its history of incarcerating women, notably via the Women’s Court and House of Detention.
by Hugh Ryan via The Gotham Center on November 20, 2024
"REM" musicians pose in front of a mirror.

How R.E.M. Created Alternative Music

In the cultural wasteland of the Reagan era, they showed that a band could have mass appeal without being cheesy, or nostalgic, or playing hair metal.
by Mark Krotov via The New Yorker on November 13, 2024
Scene from "Smokey and the Bandit" of Burt Reynolds talking on a CB radio.

"A Long Way to Go and a Short Time to Get There"

In the 1970s, trucker films like "Smokey and the Bandit" celebrated rebellious, working-class solidarity and freedom, with complex politics at play.
by Adrian Daub via Dreams in the Which House on November 3, 2024
Photograph of Drag stars: Lady Bunny, Misstress Formika, Sweetie, Anna Conda, Tabboo!

A Nearly Complete Oral History of the Pyramid Club

The Pyramid Club is the stuff of downtown New York legend. In the 1980s, a tiny little dive bar became ground zero for the exploding New York drag scene.
by Michael Musto, Mickey Boardman, Sister Dimension, Linda Simpson, John Kelly, Scott Lifshutz, Steve Buscemi, Lypsinka, Fenton Bailey, Randy Barbato, Billy Beyond via Paper on October 24, 2024
A newspaper clipping with the headline "Norway Makes Skateboarding Against Law"

Skateboarding: From Criminal Offense to Olympic Sport

Skateboarding was considered a silly and childish phenomenon for much of its existence.
by Louis Anslow via Pessimists Archive on July 30, 2024
Trent Reznor

Knots, Ties, and Lines: “The Downward Spiral” at Thirty

Nine Inch Nails, the Manson Family, and the contradictions of Los Angeles.
by Gianni de Falco via Cleveland Review of Books on July 16, 2024
Henry Martyn Robert at West Point

Who Invited Robert?

Robert’s Rules shaped 19th-century civic life but were later rejected by 1960s movements, showing shifting ideas of democracy and community.
by Taylor Hines via Damage on June 17, 2024
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Alt Text

A brief history of the textfile, and the production of conspiracy theories on the internet.
by Walter J. Scheirer via HNN on May 8, 2024
Attendees at Woodstock festival.

Nine Variations On Pete Townshend and Abbie Hoffman

As legend has it, an onstage altercation took place between the two icons in the middle of The Who's set at Woodstock. Or did it?
by David Susman via North Dakota Quarterly on May 2, 2024
A newspaper article from the Inner City Voice in Detroit with the headline, "Black Workers Uprising."

Acid Rhythms

A look at the psychedlic-inspired music scene of Detroit.
by William Harris via n+1 on April 10, 2024
A collage of suggestive images of women, a woman holding a camera, and a red letter X.

How Candida Royalle Set Out to Reinvent Porn

As a feminist in the adult-film industry, she believed the answer wasn’t banning porn; it was better porn.
by Margaret Talbot via The New Yorker on March 18, 2024
Cover of "The Freaks Came Out to Write"

The City in Its Grip: On Tricia Romano’s “The Freaks Came Out to Write”

Romano’s book is a vital, comprehensive piece of media scholarship about one of the most influential outlets of the last century. It’s also fun as hell to read.
by T. M. Brown via Los Angeles Review of Books on March 15, 2024
"Alien Embrace" repeated artwork

The Institute for Illegal Images

Meditating on blotter not just as art, or as a historical artifact, but as a kind of media, even a “meta medium.”
by Erik Davis via The Paris Review on March 4, 2024
Harry Smith pointing finger upward

Outsider’s Outsider

At once famous and obscure, marginal and central, Harry Smith anticipated and even invented several important elements of Sixties counterculture.
by J. Hoberman via New York Review of Books on February 28, 2024
Woman creating a "zine", using a presumably Xerox photocopy machine.

American Counterculture, Glimpsed Through Zines

Zine-making is a tradition shared by the young and alienated, people enamored with the fringes of culture. Can a museum exhibit capture its essence?
by Hua Hsu via The New Yorker on February 14, 2024
Black and white photo of the outside of a bar, with "CB GB: OMFUG" written on an overhang, and graffiti and posters on the walls and windows

Real Estate Developers Killed NYC’s Vibrant ’70s Music Scene

In the 1970s and early ’80s, NYC’s racially and ethnically diverse working-class neighborhoods nurtured groundbreaking rap, salsa, and punk music.
by Kurt Hollander via Jacobin on February 11, 2024
Living history interpreter demonstrating a mortar and pestle in a historic kitchen.
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The Countercultural History of Living Museums

In the 1960s and ’70s, guides began wearing period costumes and farming with historical techniques, a change that coincided with the back-to-the-land movement.
by Marley Brown III, M. J. Rymsza-Pawlowska, Marla Miller, Livia Gershon, Marko Demantowsky, Jon Hunter, Joce Jesson via JSTOR Daily on January 10, 2024
Tom Wolfe in profile against the New York City skyline.

The Electric Kool-Aid Conservative

Tom Wolfe was no radical.
by Osita Nwanevu via The New Republic on January 5, 2024
Katherine Rye Jewell standing in front of a tree and brick building on Vanderbilt University's campus.

‘Live From the Underground’ Details the Influential World of College Radio

What made those left-of-the-dial broadcasts so special during the 1980s, ‘90s and 2000s?
by Michael Patrick Brady via WBUR on December 5, 2023
Sly Stone with daughter Nove, ca. 1980.

On the Sly

A memoir of the Family Stone.
by Carl Wilson via Bookforum on December 4, 2023
A photograph of two women and a man, arms and legs linked, lying on grass.
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Polyamory Isn't Just for Liberals

In the history of sexual dissent, the relationship between politics and sexual freedom defies simplistic categorization.
by Christopher M. Gleason via Made By History on November 13, 2023
Part of a Xerox poster with the words "punk with copymachine" in front of a face
partner

Xerox and Roll: The Corporate Machine and the Making of Punk

On the 85th anniversary of the first xerographic print, a collection of punk flyers from Cornell University provides an object lesson on anti-art.
by Alex Houston via JSTOR Daily on October 22, 2023
Lou Reed in front of a photography setup.

The Canonization of Lou Reed

In a new biography, the Velvet Underground front man embodies a New York that exists only in memory.
by Jeremy Lybarger via The New Republic on October 17, 2023
Lenore Kandel’

The Forgotten Poet at the Center of San Francisco’s Longest Obscenity Trial

Amid Reagan’s late-sixties crackdown on the California counterculture, a jury was tasked with deciding whether Lenore Kandel’s psychedelic sex poems had “redeeming social importance.”
by Joy Lanzendorfer via The New Yorker on October 13, 2023
Colorful collage of Rocky Horror characters

Rocky Horror Has Surprising Roots in Victorian Seances

‘Time Warp’ all the way back to the 1800s.
by Victoria Linchong via Atlas Obscura on October 11, 2023
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