Good grief, adolescence is difficult. Luckily Hilary Fitzgerald Campbell found solidarity and guidance from The Peanuts Gang.

There’s no such thing as a 140-character exegesis: the (non)-discourse around “Joker” is the latest to prove that social media is designed for emotion, not dialogue.
 

Sometimes a flower is just a flower, and sometimes it’s a powerful vehicle for giving free rein to our worst colonialist and misogynist impulses.

In “Coventry,” Rachel Cusk draws a connection between politeness and narrative death, rudeness and tragedy, storytelling and war.

For one brown, queer Filipino-American, Karen Carpenters’ music anchored her to her musical family’s past while helping chart her path in their adopted Southern California.

Being an adult at the end of the world means listening to children tell the truths grown-ups refuse to actually hear.

Historian Amir Alexander on Euclidean geometry’s far-reaching effects.

Nell Zink, Joy Williams, and a different kind of climate skepticism.

What happens when you’re not different just for the sake of being different.

Elizabeth Wurtzel’s bestseller is deeply rooted in a specific, Gen-X cultural moment. Can it still speak to us in 2019?

Why do we care about famous people?

The movie theater was once a kind of lay church, with festivals like TIFF serving as annual religious holidays — until new houses of worship opened online.

There are numerous ways to tell stories. In her turn MFA program, one writer encountered a literary culture that espoused gendered aesthetics and fostered toxic masculinity.

Congressional fan fiction is real, it’s glorious, and it might be reshaping our political world.

This outsider musician made music sound new again to everyone who listened.

The West Coast may have invented skateboarding, but imaginative New Yorker Tyshawn Jones keeps pushing the limits of what this slab of wood can do.

If the most financially and critically successful artists don’t feel successful, maybe there’s something wrong with how we think about success.

General readers won’t have heard of their publications, but Washington D.C.’s trade press cater to specialist readers who pay top dollar for the beats they cover.

An economic downturn in 2008 shuttered numerous publications and further marginalized people of color in an already minimally integrated industry. But in the 90’s and early-aughts, multicultural publications flourished, providing an alternative model for journalism that bears remembering.

Before they released “Wichita Lineman,” the greatest unfinished song of all time, Glen Campbell and Jimmy Webb lived surprisingly parallel lives.

The classic rock star wanted to stick it to The Man, and did so bender by selfish bender. The new rock star knows you can’t do it alone.

This is the sound of not really trying.

Should white critics cover black culture? Only if they’re able to own their whiteness.

How will artificial intelligence change literature?

For a brief period in the 1960s, the Afro-Brazilian author of the memoir “Child of the Dark” was one of the most well-known writers in the world.

Hot Girl Summer has women subverting a feminine archetype, but only if they can embody it first.

Either Martin Mull or Frank Zappa or Elvis Costello once said writing about music is as pointless as dancing about architecture. Which doesn’t account for how I’ve danced to all these books.

Some of the most iconic images get captured when you’re just out for a stroll. What you do with these images is a political act.

My best friend and the New Kids on the Block, 30 years later.

Sady Doyle discusses the connection she draws between society’s monstrous treatment of women and woman’s archetypal monstrosity.