culture

"Hillbilly Elegy" has been used to explain the 2016 election, but its logic is rooted in a dangerous myth about race in Appalachia.

It’s more helpful to think about exploitation and disrespect than to define cultural “ownership.”

Popularized images of female hula dancers have deviated far from their origins and perpetuated stereotypes.

Why do we dance? African-American social dances started as a way for enslaved Africans to keep cultural traditions alive and retain a sense of inner freedom.

19th century Hawai‘i attracted traders, entrepreneurs, and capitalists, who displaced, a flourishing and elaborate culture.

“Only two states wanted a civil war—Massachusetts and South Carolina.”

Its ingenious design inspired generations of language-processing technology, but only one prototype was made and had long been assumed lost.

On the constitutional settlement that governed America from the end of the Volcker Shock in 1982 to the re-election of Donald Trump in 2024.

Today no one on either side of the political spectrum would present themselves as an enemy of choice. Sophia Rosenfeld exposes the complex legacy of this idea.

The United States fares badly on the World Happiness Report. Who cares?

After its purchase by a tech entrepreneur, the publication is now a shadow of itself.

The National Garden of American Heroes represents a dangerous shift in values—from inquiry to reverence.

How endless options became our only option.

Reflections on the literary legacy of a timeless American novel.

Normally staid historians sound alarm at authoritarian grasping for control of the premier US museum complex.

NYT pundits and NBA writers alike can't stop recommending this four-decade-old book.

All Americans with some education are aware that Manifest Destiny was one of the Bad Things in our past and very few know any more about it than that.

We are told that we are a Calvinist culture, which means very little, and none of that good.

Plutocrats, anarchists, and what Henry James grasped about the romance of revolution.

On the tension between celebratory rhetoric and restrictive policy surrounding immigration.

City of the living dead.

Tales of the city and beyond.

For a century, Americans have embraced a punitive approach to addiction—one that has undermined treatment efforts.

Hard thinking on difficult and uncomfortable questions about how to keep everything from falling apart.

Since the 2024 election, liberals, progressives, and the left has been wringing our collective hands over why Trump won yet again.

What it conveys is quite specific: grandeur, beauty, dynamism, and power.

On the medallic art of the Gilded Age.

The notion of political realignment in the Lone Star State is older than you think. It goes back to Giant, an acidic novel by Edna Ferber.

At universities, American Marxism has led to good scholarship, but it’s also encouraged hyper-specialization and the use of impenetrable jargon.

When the future arrived, it felt…ordinary. What happened to the glamour of tomorrow?