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Billboards advertising the new Superman film in Times Square.

Superman Was Always a Social Justice Warrior

A closer look at the character’s history shows that the latest movie is true to his past.
by Ryan Biller via New Lines on July 25, 2025
The shark approaches the boat in a scene from the film Jaws.

The Undeniable Greatness of Jaws

Jaws is a landmark hit, but also a sharp 1970s film shaped by political ire, social critique, and realist cinema’s lasting influence.
by Eileen Jones via Jacobin on July 24, 2025
The four Harper Brothers, founders of the namesake publishing giant.
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The 200 Year History of American Virtue Capitalism

Despite the recent backlash against DEI, there is a longstanding tradition of virtue capitalism in the United States.
by Joseph P. Slaughter via Made By History on July 23, 2025
Leslie Groves and J. Robert Oppenheimer at Los Alamos in 1942.

General Groves Invented the Atomic Bomb, Not Oppenheimer

Gen. Leslie Groves promoted Oppenheimer as the atomic bomb's inventor to craft a propaganda narrative, obscuring the true creators and moral implications.
by Peder Anker via Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists on July 21, 2025
Still frame from the film Inherit the Wind depicts a legal team sitting in a packed courtroom.
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How Theater Helps Us Remember the Scopes Trial 100 Years Later

'Inherit the Wind' changed how people understand, and remember, the legendary Scopes trial.
by Charlotte M. Canning via Made By History on July 10, 2025
Women clad in 1950s era bikinis.

Common Threads: The Origins of the Scandalous Bikini

Like the atomic bomb testing site, the new bathing suit was named “le bikini,” and its impact was almost as explosive.
by Einav Rabinovitch-Fox via The Saturday Evening Post on July 5, 2025
Movie poster for Warfare, 2025.
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War Stories Without the History

Films about the Iraq War prize “truth-telling,” but don’t offer many insights about the war itself.
by Jake Pitre via HNN on July 1, 2025
Collage of gay film covers

Good Queers and Bad Queers

Myths are fed back as stereotypes and strawmen to divine some boundary for acceptability.
by KJ Shepherd via Contingent on June 27, 2025
Silhouette of a man with smokestack smoke entering his brain.

Did Lead Poisoning Create a Generation of Serial Killers?

Ted Bundy, Charles Manson, and many other notorious figures lived in and around Tacoma in the sixties. A new book argues that there was something in the water.
by Gideon Lewis-Kraus via The New Yorker on June 25, 2025
Beyonce concert.

Why Beyoncé Is Carving a Route Along the ‘Chitlin' Circuit’

From Jim Crow-era performance to contemporary gospel musicals, entertainers have shaped the Black public sphere.
by Rashida Z. Shaw McMahon via Zócalo Public Square on May 5, 2025
Helicopter, soldiers, and civilians at the fall of Saigon.
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How We Oversimplified the History of the Vietnam War

Popular memory of the war in both the U.S. and Vietnam tends to cast the fall of Saigon as inevitable.
by Andrew Bellisari via Made By History on April 30, 2025
Mark Twain sits in thought on stone steps surrounded by nature while holding papers

Twain Dreams

The enigma of Samuel Clemens.
by John Jeremiah Sullivan via Harper’s on April 29, 2025
Political cartoon of smokers.

Puff, Puff? Pass!: The Anti-Tobacco Writings of Margaret Woods Lawrence

Reformers linked tobacco use to a deterioration of social and familial values, a habit that disrupted the sanctity of the home.
by Brian Fehler via Commonplace on April 8, 2025
A woman at a toy counter.
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“The End Is Coming! The End Is Coming!”

In the 1990s, an entire industry was born of trying to convince Americans that Beanie Babies were a great investment opportunity.
by Ross Benes via HNN on April 1, 2025
Shots from various conspiracy films of the 20th century.

The Life and Death of Conspiracy Cinema

Why did Hollywood lose interest in making paranoid thrillers? Was it a change in the culture? Or a change in the marketplace?
by T. M. Brown via The Nation on March 31, 2025
A portrait of Edgar Allen Poe.

The Most Overrated Writer in America

Do people really like Edgar Allen Poe?
by Naomi Kanakia via Woman of Letters on March 18, 2025
Painting by Earle Richardson titled "Employment of Negroes in Agriculture," 1934.

Uncle Tom's Cabin is the Great American Novel

Most countries take their popular novelists more seriously than America has. The term “Great American Novel” was literally invented to describe this book
by Naomi Kanakia via Woman of Letters on March 11, 2025
Cartoon of well-dressed arm holding a lit match

The Gilded Age Never Ended

Plutocrats, anarchists, and what Henry James grasped about the romance of revolution.
by Adam Gopnik via The New Yorker on February 24, 2025
Elaine May and Walter Matthau sitting on a bench in May’s film A New Leaf.

May Days

A new biography of an elusive comic talent.
by Lizzy Harding via Bookforum on February 11, 2025
A group of people riding horses on a dude ranch.

The Rise and Resilience of Dude Ranches

Dude ranches have been a popular American vacation spot for more than one hundred years.
by Teresa Bitler via The Saturday Evening Post on February 3, 2025
The Griffith Observatory, constructed by the Works Progress Administration, on a hill overlooking Los Angeles.

A New Deal for Architecture

What it conveys is quite specific: grandeur, beauty, dynamism, and power.
by David Schaengold via Compact on December 20, 2024

Can the Rodeo Save a Historic Black Town?

One woman’s quest to rescue Boley, Oklahoma.
by Caleb Gayle via The Atlantic on December 17, 2024
William F. Buckley, Donald Trump.

The Modern Conservative Tradition and the Origins of Trumpism

Today’s Trumpist radicals are not (small-c) conservatives – but they stand in the continuity of Modern Conservatism’s defining political project.
by Thomas Zimmer via Democracy Americana on December 16, 2024
A painting of a large camera on a film set, surrounded by green screens.

Casual Viewing

Why Netflix looks like that.
by Will Tavlin via n+1 on December 16, 2024
Johnny Carson hosting the Tonight Show.

The Amazing, Disappearing Johnny Carson

Carson pioneered a new style of late-night hosting—relaxed, improvisatory, risk-averse, and inscrutable.
by Isaac Butler via The New Yorker on November 6, 2024
A drawing of Kamala Harris in a police uniform.

Lipstick on the Pigs

Kamala Harris and the lineage of the female cop.
by Sophie Lewis via The Drift on October 28, 2024
An old, crumbling Victorian house with figures from horror, including Toni Collette in Hereditary, a zombie, Edgar Allen Poe, and Stephen King.

American Horror Stories

It just might be the great American art form. You can thank the residents of Salem for that.
by Laura J. Miller via Slate on October 19, 2024
Sketch of Joan of Arc on horseback, flanked by knights.
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The Bowl Truth

On Joan of Arc’s much-maligned and forgotten haircut.
by Emma Maggie Solberg via HNN on October 1, 2024
An illustration of the book "Silent Spring" on top of the earth.

This Book Helped Save the Planet—but Created a Very Harmful Myth

It radically shifted the way the world looked at the environment, but created a wave of misinformation we’re still dealing with today.
by Katie MacBride via Slate on September 29, 2024
John Mack speaking on the Oprah Winfrey Show, with a tagline that reads "John Mack, M.D., Harvard Psychiatrist Who Believes Patients Were Abducted By Aliens."

John E. Mack and the Unbelievable UFO Truth

The controversial career of John E. Mack, the Pulitzer Prize–winning Harvard psychiatrist who wrote best-selling books on UFO abduction.
by Michael J. Socolow via Los Angeles Review of Books on September 21, 2024
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