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Cursor arrows caught in a spider web.

How the Web Was Lost

The Internet was not meant to suck.
by James Gleick via New York Review of Books on November 11, 2025
Bruce Springsteen playing the guitar.

The Long Road to Nebraska

Springsteen’s 1982 classic has become an American scripture, its ghosts of fathers and highways still haunting today’s America.
by Brian Francis Slattery via Arc: Religion, Politics, Et Cetera on November 4, 2025
William Faulkner, Malcolm Cowley, and a manuscript letter.

The Man Who Rescued Faulkner

How the critic Malcolm Cowley made American literature into its own great tradition.
by Michael Gorra via The Atlantic on November 4, 2025
The Canadian and American flags.

Canada’s Heroic Delusion

The country’s 40-year-ago embrace of free trade with the U.S. has come back to haunt it.
by Dónal Gill via The Dial on October 28, 2025
Kitchen workers moving a paper-mache Statue of Liberty in 2009 Kabul, Afghanistan.

Pervasive Impunity

How four presidential administrations managed to evade moral responsibility for the “war on terror” by hiding behind legality and process.
by Cora Currier via New York Review of Books on October 16, 2025
1952 artwork of six different people standing in separate boxes.

Nothing Left Inside

How America learned not to fear the inner self but lost its places of belonging.
by Anton Cebalo via Novum Newsletter on October 5, 2025
George Washington saying farewell to his officers in 1783.

Where George Washington Would Disagree with Pete Hegseth About Fitness for Command and a Warrior

Washington’s ‘warrior ethos’ was grounded in decency, temperance and the capacity to act with courage without surrendering to rage.
by Maurizio Valsania via The Conversation on October 2, 2025
Efka Pyramiden cigarette papers in a green packaging sleeve made in Nazi Germany.
partner

Papering Over History

Efka—the German rolling paper company—was a Nazi regime favorite. After World War II, it was refashioned as a darling of the pot-infused counterculture.
by Alexandra M. Lord, Robert M. Ehrenreich via JSTOR Daily on September 24, 2025
Frank Matsura photograph: a staged scene of a Native American man using a rifle to hold up men playing cards.

How Photographer Frank S. Matsura Challenged White America’s Hegemonic View of the West

On the groundbreaking work of the Japanese photographer who made Washington state his home.
by Glen Mimura via Literary Hub on September 11, 2025
Two matcha drinks.

Green Gruel? Pea Soup? What Westerners Thought of Matcha When They Tried It for the First Time

‘Matcha mania’ shows no signs of slowing, pushing supply chains to the brink. It’s marked quite the rise for a drink long met with skepticism in the West.
by Rebecca Corbett via The Conversation on September 3, 2025
Collage of photos of Lionel Trilling.

Lionel Trilling and the Limits of Crisis-Thought

Lionel Trilling defends humanism amid crisis culture, warning that obsessing over evil can erode the self and our capacity for moral and creative agency.
by Sam Gee via The Hedgehog Review on September 3, 2025
Black and white teenagers dance in a train car while a band plays.

Twist and Shout: Music, Race, and Medical Moralization

On the role that medical and health professionals played in raising suspicions of The Twist.
by Beth Linker, Hannah Yusuf via Nursing Clio on September 3, 2025
John McCain stands in a crowd shaking hands in a Ukrainian city.

How Decades of Folly Led to War in Ukraine

For decades, US hostility towards Russia and continued NATO encroachment ever further into Eastern Europe have laid the groundwork for the current crisis.
by Michael A. Reynolds via Compact on August 15, 2025
Donald Trump, flanked by Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and others, shows executive order restarting the Presidential Fitness Test

What’s Behind Trump’s New (Old) Physical-Fitness Test?

He misrepresented the history of the gym-class test. I know because I served on the council that helped modernize it.
by Mark Hertling via The Bulwark on August 4, 2025
A policeman stoops down next to a roulette wheel and writes on a clipboard.

The Engines and Empires of New York City Gambling

As plans are laid for a new casino, one can trace, through four figures, a history of rivalry and excess, rife with collisions of character and crime.
by Adam Gopnik via The New Yorker on August 4, 2025
Octopus like arms, holding a stack of newspapers.

The Birth of the Attention Economy

The rise of the cheap, daily newspaper in the 19th century remade how Americans engaged with the world.
by Jake Lundberg via The Atlantic on July 31, 2025
Black and white photograph of Claude McKay

Letters from Claude McKay

Correspondence about writing, travel, and friendship, from 1926 through 1929.
by Claude McKay via The Paris Review on July 25, 2025
Thomas Kinkade

The Painter of the Right

Thomas Kinkade’s paintings show conservatives a world they have already won.
by Sarah Jones via Dissent on July 16, 2025
Images of historical figures including Bejamin Franklin and Albert Einstein are overlaid on a green and white background.

Who’ll Be in Trump’s Hero Garden? There Are a Few Surprises.

The list of nearly 250 includes the famous, the obscure and, in some cases, the intentionally controversial.
by Bonnie Berkowitz, Hannah Dormido, Kati Perry via Washington Post on July 15, 2025
Painting of the Bay of San Francisco, by Eduard Hildebrandt.

Mark Twain, the Californian

In 1864 San Francisco, Twain found hardship, Bohemia, and his voice—transforming from local reporter to rising literary force.
by Ben Tarnoff via Lapham’s Quarterly on July 4, 2025
Abandoned church in Coaldale, Pennsylvania, with an American flag hanging upside down over its door.

The Decline and Fall of Christianity in America

If we imagine religion as a technology, argues Notre Dame sociologist Christian Smith, we can better see the cause of its decline: obsolescence.
by Daniel N. Gullotta via The Bulwark on July 1, 2025
A group of workers in hard hats walk through the shallow water of one of the Panama Canal's locks.

‘The Canal Is Ours’

Trump’s threats to take control of the Panama Canal have precipitated a struggle over the country’s sovereignty.
by Miriam Pensack via New York Review of Books on June 28, 2025
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.
by Adam Gopnik via The New Yorker on June 9, 2025
Jewish activists hold Passover Seder outside ICE headquarters in New York City to demand an end to Israel's war on Gaza.

The Past, Present, and Future of Left Jewish Identity

Jewish-led Palestine solidarity demonstrations are part of a long history of Jewish identity being bound up in leftist politics.
by Benjamin Balthaser, Shane Burley via Jacobin on June 8, 2025
Youppi! mascot sitting in a baseball stadium

Master of Puppets

Bonnie Erickson got her start making puppets in Jim Henson's studio, then she became one of America's most beloved mascot designers. Here's how it happened.
by Colby Crowe via Victory Journal on June 4, 2025
A student protest at Gallaudet University.

A Striking Moment in American Activism

A new documentary revisits a pivotal week at Gallaudet University in 1988.
by John Hendrickson via The Atlantic on May 23, 2025
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.
by Rowan Williams via New Statesman on May 22, 2025
Avocados

Why Are We So Obsessed With Avocados?

Why are avocados everywhere?
by Sarah Allaback, Monique F. Parsons via Literary Hub on May 21, 2025
Old man and young boy.

The Perils of Generational Thinking

By assigning personal attributes to birth cohort, generationism tends to undermine personal responsibility.
by Richard Gunderman via Law & Liberty on May 16, 2025
John C. Calhoun

The Prelude to the Civil War

“Only two states wanted a civil war—Massachusetts and South Carolina.”
by Hunter DeRensis via The American Conservative on May 5, 2025
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