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Paper in a typewriter, with the words "the end" just typed.

Words Left Behind: The Quandary of Posthumous Publishing

Joan Didion’s journal entries posthumously has sparked a wider ethical debate: Is it acceptable to publish a writer’s unfinished work after their death?

by Selina Alipour Tabrizi via The Saturday Evening Post on August 4, 2025

A newspaper article about Warren G. Harding's death.

Commanders-in-Heat VII: Flatline & Spin

The first modern presidential death was also the first medical mystery America refused to let go.

by Alexis Coe via Study Marry Kill on August 2, 2025

Mel Bradford on the cover of Southern Partisan magazine in 1992.

A Paleoconservative War Story

The conservative movement "assumed it had intellectual ownership over the presidency," but an NEH appointment fight reveals the Reagan administration disagreed.

by Joshua Tait via To Live Is To Maneuver on July 29, 2025

Black man's face, and maps of Chicago, in an outline of a detective.

The Talented Mr. Bruseaux

He made his name in Chicago investigating race riots, solving crimes, and exposing corruption. But America’s first Black private eye was hiding his own secrets.

by Matthew Wolfe via The Atavist on July 23, 2025

A Democratic donkey with its head cut off is surrounded by hands pointing at charts and graphs.

How Strategist Brain Took Over the Democratic Party

During the Reagan revolution, Democrats settled on a new way to win—and it’s destroying them now.

by Ben Mathis-Lilley via Slate on July 10, 2025

Jimmy Swaggart holds up a bible. The word "legacy" is superimposed over him.

‘The LORD Told Me It’s Flat None of Your Business’: Jimmy Swaggart’s Scandalous Legacy

Jimmy Swaggart utilized his charisma to overcome not one, but two sex scandals.

by Suzanna Krivulskaya via Religion Dispatches on July 2, 2025

Photo illustration by Slate. Photo by Acey Harper/Getty Images.

The Angry Death of Kimberly Bergalis

A dark mystery shocked America in the early 1990s, from prime-time shows to Congress. It’s largely been forgotten. It shouldn’t be.

by Josh Levin via Slate on June 25, 2025

A naked woman bathes.

How the Hays Code Took the Sex Out of Hollywood

A group of early 20th-century Catholics sought to impose their standards of morality onto the growing and scandal-ridden Hollywood film industry.

by Michael Koresky via Literary Hub on June 24, 2025

Phineas Gage.

How the ‘Myth of Phineas Gage’ Affects Brain Injury Survivors

Why does the diagnosis of Gage social ‘disinhibition’ lean so heavily on flimsy documentation about Gage, while overlooking the case of Eadweard Muybridge?

by Ben Platts-Mills via Aeon on June 23, 2025

William Buckley stands behind a podium, surrounded by a throng of people, and waves.

The Real Bill Buckley

Even some liberals toasted William F. Buckley Jr. as a patrician gentleman. A long-awaited new biography corrects that record.

by Nicole Hemmer via Democracy Journal on June 17, 2025

Eco-Terrorists Aren't What They Used to Be

Fifty years on, "The Monkey Wrench Gang" remains a problematic text for environmental activists, who are inclined to endorse its violent tendencies.

by John Bicknell via Law & Liberty on June 13, 2025

Industrial plant releasing thick smoke into the sky.

Poisoned City: How Tacoma Became a Hotbed of Crime and Kidnapping in the 1920s

On the intersection of environmental contamination and violence in the Pacific Northwest.

by Caroline Fraser via Literary Hub on June 10, 2025

Political cartoon of General Jackson Slaying the Many Headed Monster (the Second National Bank).

The Ghost of Nicholas Biddle

Trump’s war against elite academia has created an uncanny parallel to the most dramatic fight in Jackson’s day—the attack on the 2nd Bank of the United States.

by Adam Rowe via Compact on June 2, 2025

Amelia Earhart and her husband.

Amelia Earhart’s Reckless Final Flights

The aviator’s publicity-mad husband, George Palmer Putnam, kept pushing her to risk her life for the sake of fame.

by Laurie Gwen Shapiro via The New Yorker on June 2, 2025

The insolvent brothers giving queer bail

Insolvent Brothers: The Generals Ethan and Ira Allen

How could two renowned, high-ranking men of the American Revolution have fallen into such dire straits that they feared the loss of all they worked for?

by Gary Shattuck via Journal of the American Revolution on May 22, 2025

John Trumbull’s painting of the signing of the Declaration of Independence, 1819.

Who Invented the “Founding Fathers?”

The making of a myth.

by George Dillard via Looking Through The Past on May 21, 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

Aimee Semple McPherson in front of her Gospel Car, painted with the words "Jesus is coming soon - get ready."

The “Lady Preacher” Who Became World-Famous—and Then Vanished

Aimee Semple McPherson took to the radio to spread the Gospel, but her mysterious disappearance cast a shadow on her reputation.

by Casey N. Cep via The New Yorker on April 14, 2025

Edgar Watson Howe

The Sins and Sayings of E.W. Howe

A deeply skeptical, deeply American mind and its trail of sharp, clean sentences.

by Steve Szilagyi via 3 Quarks Daily on April 11, 2025

Green light in a dark sky.

On My Grandfather’s Novel: F. Scott Fitzgerald’s "The Great Gatsby" at 100

Reflections on the literary legacy of a timeless American novel.

by Eleanor Lanahan via Literary Hub on April 7, 2025

Richard Nixon scowling.

The Alarming Effort To Rewrite the History of Watergate

For decades, politicians distanced themselves from Nixon's Watergate legacy. Now, some are advancing a new history.

by Michael Koncewicz via Made By History on March 24, 2025

A UC Berkeley student picket supports a strike protesting demonstrators’ arrests, 1964.

Whose Side Are College Administrators On?

There’s a long history of politicians targeting student protesters — and of campus leaders abetting those efforts.

by Lauren Lassabe Shepherd via HNN on March 19, 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

Shield with the words "For European Recovery Supplied by the United States of America."

Soft Power

What it means, why it matters, and where it started.

by Lindsay M. Chervinsky via Imperfect Union on March 15, 2025

Zora Neale Hurston’s Rediscovered Novel

A new publication obscures the canonical writer.

by Tiana Reid via The Yale Review on March 11, 2025

Malcolm X on the newspaper with Jimmy Breslin and Langston Hughes in the background.

How Two of America’s Biggest Columnists Reacted to the Assassination of Malcolm X

What Jimmy Breslin and Langston Hughes failed to imagine.

by Ted Hamm via Literary Hub on February 21, 2025

NAACP Legal Defense Fund button against lynching.

“Lynch Law in America”: Annotated

Ida B. Wells-Barnett, whose January 1900 essay exposed the racist reasons given by mobs for their crimes, argued that lynch law was an American shame.

by Ida B. Wells, Liz Tracey via JSTOR Daily on February 21, 2025

Sam Peckinpah looks into a film camera.

The Noble Savagery of Sam Peckinpah

“Bloody Sam” was born one hundred years ago this month.

by Christopher Sandford via Modern Age on February 19, 2025

President John F. Kennedy writing at desk in the Oval Office.

Kennedy Family Values

Why is America’s near-mythic dynasty so nasty up close?

by Alan Pell Crawford via The American Conservative on January 25, 2025

John Tower; Pete Hegseth.

In 1989, Senators Faced a Pete Hegseth Situation Very Differently

I covered the 1989 fight over George H.W. Bush's secretary of defense nominee. It feels awfully familiar.

by Fred Kaplan via Slate on January 23, 2025

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