Culture

Left-wing intellectuals' early responses to the 9/11 terror attacks.

From Saint-Simon to Silicon Valley, the urge to forecast the future has always masked a struggle over who gets to define it.

The controversial chaos of the Angola Prison Rodeo.

Doctor, writer, musician, and orator: Rudolph Fisher was a scientist and an artist whose métier was Harlem.

A century ago, artists who survived the trenches captured humanity’s capacity for destruction. What can they teach us in a new age of genocide?

How German immigrants brought Christmas celebrations to the United States.

In the early twentieth century, America's literature seemed provincial until Malcolm Cowley championed writers like Kerouac and Faulkner as distinctly American.

When movie fandom became a medical condition.

A decade before the mainstream Black Arts Movement, Detroit underwent a transformation of its own.

Pecans are a truly American nut: They grew on George Washington’s estate, and they flew to space on an Apollo mission.

On Albert Barnes’ massive acquisition of Chaim Soutine's artworks in the early 1900s.

What it would mean to take taste seriously again.

Friends, enemies and lovers animate more than 60 years of the John Updike’s remarkable correspondence.

Rambunctious and often offensive, R. Crumb draws freely on pre-existing racial and gender stereotypes.

Passing your eyes over those first, electric sentences, it occurs to you that his readers are still catching up.

What we lose when casual nudity disappears.

On the enduring influence of one of the genre's most iconic drum riffs.

Marty Reisman, a brilliant, hustling ping-pong showman, rose from NYC clubs to global fame, clashed with officials, defied the sponge era, and left a legend.

The fantastical roots of “scientific racism.”

What makes a house feel haunted and why do people keep telling these stories?

Springsteen’s 1982 classic has become an American scripture, its ghosts of fathers and highways still haunting today’s America.

Charles Oldrieve used custom-made wooden shoes to float on the water’s surface and propel himself forward.

'Freaks' asked audiences to think about the exploitative display of human difference while also demonstrating that the sideshow was a locus of community.

Lists of great artists say more about the list-maker than the artist.

The new Boss biopic robs his music of its mythic American qualities.

Starbucks didn’t invent them. But it’s possible that Tori Amos or a Midwest grandma did.

When the single was released in 1955, it was a big hit – but only after the original lyrics were changed.

Washington Irving’s story isn’t just about a very long nap. It’s about the making of America.

Audre Lorde’s legacy shows how feminism can honor difference, as Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor argues in this review.

Sarah Curtis: “Maybe we’ve just learned what my teenage daughter does not yet fully know: that to be held to a law is often to be loved.”