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QAnon proponent and Trump supporters

Bad Information

Conspiracy theories like QAnon are ultimately a social problem rather than a cognitive one. We should blame politics, not the faulty reasoning of individuals.
Abstract drawing of Edgar Allan Poe

Edgar Allan Poe, Crank Scientist

The great discoveries of the age captivated Poe’s imagination. He almost always misunderstood them.
Richard Jean So and the cover of his book "Redlining Culture"

The History of Publishing Is a History of Racial Inequality

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. 
Photographs and a cover of Spectra, a literary magazine.

Spectra: The Poetry Movement That Was All a Hoax

In the experimental world of modernist poetry, literary journals were vulnerable to fake submissions.
Frances Ellen Watkins Harper

The Poetics of Abolition

For poet Honorée Fanonne Jeffers, as for the Black Romantics, history is the repetition of anti-Black violence that has yet to be abolished.
Gerd Stern.

Ping Pong of the Abyss

Gerd Stern, the Beats, and the psychiatric institution.
A collage of book covers.

The Radical Origins of Self-Help Literature

How did the genre of self-help go from one focused on collective empowerment to one serving the class hierarchy as it stands?
A movie still featuring a close-up of two actors from The Age of Innocence

The Age of Innocence: How a US Classic Defined Its Era

Cameron Laux looks at how The Age of Innocence – published 100 years ago – marked a pivotal moment in US history.
Portrait of John Brown beside the American flag, c.1846.

America, Lost and Found at Wounded Knee

Stephen Vincent Benét’s lost epic “John Brown’s Body” envisions a nation sutured together after the Civil War, but fails to reckon with the war’s causes.

Bad Romance

The afterlife of Vivian Gornick's "The Romance of American Communism" shows that we bear the weight of dead generations—and sometimes living ones, too.

The Tangled History of Illness and Idiocy

The pandemic is stress-testing two concepts Americans have historically gotten wrong.
A crowd with communist and unemployment relief signs listens to a woman making a speech.

What Endures of the Romance of American Communism

Many of the Communists who felt destined for a life of radicalism experienced their lives as irradiated by a kind of expressiveness that made them feel centered.
Sign noting that spitting spreads the Spanish flu.

Trapped on a Ship During a Pandemic

“Either they’ve got no conscience, or they’re not awake to the gravity of the situation.”

The Seminal Novel About the 1918 Flu Pandemic Was Written by a Texan

Katherine Anne Porter’s ‘Pale Horse, Pale Rider’ tells the tale of a pandemic she barely survived.
Photo of Carson McCullers

The Closeting of Carson McCullers

Through her relationships with other women, one can trace the evidence of McCullers’s becoming, as a woman, as a lesbian, and as a writer.
The Nancy Drew logo, a silhouette of a woman looking through a detective glass

Oh Nancy, Nancy!

The mysterious appeal of my first detective.

‘A Doubtful Freedom’

Andrew Delbanco's new book positions the debate over fugitive slaves as a central factor in the nation's slide toward disunion.

What Does Gender Have to Do with the Desert?

"Everything, of course."
Soldiers burning books.

How We Roasted Donald Duck, Disney's Agent of Imperialism

Why a 47-year old anti-colonialist critique by Chilean dissidents may be newly relevant in the Trump era.

Rereading Childhood Books Teaches Adults About Themselves

Whether they delight or disappoint, old books provide touchstones for tracking personal growth.

The Right Way to Remember Rachel Carson

She did not write her most famous work until late in life. Until then, she thought of herself as a poet of the sea.

Bohemian Tragedy

The rise, fall, and afterlife of George Sterling’s California arts colony.

The Short, Sad Story of Stanwix Melville

Piecing back together the forgotten history of Herman Melville's second son.

William Bradford Huie’s “The Klansman” @50

With Donald Trump bringing the Ku Klux Klan back into the spotlight, we must return to William Bradford Huie's 1967 novel.
Illustrated children reaching for books by statue of Anne Carroll Moore

The Librarian Who Changed Children’s Literature Forever

They called her ACM, but never, ever, to her face.
Edgar Allan Poe

On Edgar Allan Poe

Crypts, entombments, physical morbidity: these nightmares are prominent in Poe’s tales, a fictional world in which the word that recurs most crucially is horror.
Pearl Curran

Ghostwriter and Ghost: The Strange Case of Pearl Curran & Patience Worth

In early 20th-century St. Louis, Pearl Curran claimed to have conjured a long-dead New England Puritan named Patience Worth through a Ouija board.
Portrait of Ambrose Bierce with skull

One of America's Best

Ambrose Bierce deviated from the refined eeriness of English-style ghost stories for his haunting descriptions of fateful coincidence and horrific revelation.
Drawings of George Washington

His Highness

George Washington scales new heights.

A Look Inside James Baldwin’s 1,884 Page FBI File

Memos on "aliases," sexuality, and The Blood Counters.

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