culture

The anthropologist helped popularize both techno-optimism and the concept of existential risk.

A pop star’s road map to decadence.

It is impossible to talk about the blues and country without talking about race, authenticity, and contemporary America’s relationship to its past.

His “Clash of Civilizations” essay in Foreign Affairs turned 30 this year. It was provocative, influential, manna for the modern right—and completely and utterly not true.

From European streets to Manhattan’s Lower East Side, Jews have been deeply involved in the history of coffee and the café scene.

Sara Marcus’s recent book argues that from the Reconstruction to the AIDS era, a distinct aesthetic formed around defeat in the realm of politics.

Penmanship was once considered a window to the soul. The digital age has closed it.

How Istanbul changed his career—and his life.

Diners have always been considered a model of culinary democratization in the American public consciousness, but can they really be for everyone?

Anthem for a forgotten cohort.

Top Chef contestant Nini Nguyen shares the history of the Viet diaspora and how two cultures combined to create a whole new delicious Southern flavor.

Johnny Cash wasn't the only superstar to play in prisons. Music, initially allowed as worship, came to be seen as a rockin' tool of rehabilitation.

Why the history of science is of use to not only the sciences, but all branches of scholarship.

From the Statehouse to Lucas Oil Stadium, Arab American immigrants have made contributions across Indianapolis, according to IUPUI's Edward Curtis.

What honor required of men.

The language sustained a Jewish diasporan secular culture. Today, that heritage survives in a gritty corner of Queens to be claimed by a new generation.

It's a tale thousands of years in the making.

There is a long list of ways America was transformed by the terrorist attacks. But the question of how TV itself was changed is more complicated.

A conversation with Richard Jean So about combining data and literary analysis to understand how the publishing industry came to be dominated by white writers. 

In ‘The Free World: Art and Thought in the Cold War,’ Louis Menand explores the poetry, music, painting, dance and film that emerged during the Cold War.

From Kentucky to Wales and all across the Atlantic, the enslaved and downtrodden got married – by leaping over a broom. Why?

For the warriors and wanderers who became the Aztec people, truth was not singular and history was braided from many voices.

Three new books consider the life, and impact, of Franz Boas, the "father of American cultural anthropology."

The counterculture dictum to “turn on, tune in, drop out” did not quite capture Janis’s philosophy to “get it while you can.”

The culture of calamity from the Jamestown Colony to the Johnstown Flood.

What is Texas? Should we even think about so large and diverse a place as having an essence that can be distilled?

A review of George Hutchinson's "Facing the Abyss: American Literature and Culture in the 1940s."

For some Lebanese immigrants, religion was a comfort, providing a sense of home in an new world. For others, it was a constant reminder of what was left behind.

The Spotify and Ancestry partnership proposes to entertain users based on the narrowest possible conception of who they are.

Coaches have long sacralized the gridiron, extolling it alongside faith, family and the military as a setting stone of the social order.