Asking difficult questions often comes at a cost.

“’I’m good,’ I told him. I didn’t tell him I was running eleven miles, playing two hours of ball, and eating eight hundred calories a day.”

Her father’s gender transition was the impetus behind Jill Soloway’s show.

Williams’ paintings explored love, desire, and loss, too.

What’s so great about having things spelled out clearly?

“I think when I found film,” he said, “I found a way — I still hide a bit — but a way to not hide as much. I felt like I could put these things into the work because it’s the movie. It’s not me.”

An album that took five months to record sat in the vault for 20 years before finally getting pressed to vinyl.

Rachel Syme profiles Lady Gaga and dives deep into the mystique and mythology of “A Star is Born.”

Roxane Gay writes about the necessary and inevitable influence of politics on literature at this fraught time in history.

While the Sally Horner case gave ‘Lolita’ its main character, the Edward Grammer case gave the book an almost perfect murder.

Emerick engineered more than The Beatles’ Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band. He helped re-engineer the way music got made.

Sarah Miller recalls her days in the ’90s as a fickle movie critic.

OutKast’s masterful 1998 album “Aquemini” defined a bold and Black South and predicted today’s pop music landscape.

From its first issue in 1993, Vibe magazine reflected the “multicultural mainstream.”

Bradley Cooper’s new film is ultimately about the way commerce can ruin art, which is why he won’t answer the personal questions Taffy Brodesser-Akner asked him.

How ’90s webzines heralded the best — and worst — of today’s online media landscape.

Before Portland was a known entity, a group of volunteers and one charismatic editor published an indie arts magazine called Snipehunt. This is its story.

On one summer day in 1998, XXL magazine gathered 177 hip-hop artists for one of the greatest musical photographs of all time: A Great Day in Hip-Hop.

Cultural critic Simon Reynolds looks at 20 years of Auto-Tune.

Is “mindfulness” not the cure for anxiety we thought it was? Dang, neoliberalism wrecks everything.

Author Tim Mohr talks about East Germany’s dissident punk rock scene, and its role in bringing down the Berlin Wall in 1989 — the story behind his remarkable new book, ‘Burning Down The Haus.’

The story of the Velvet Underground’s fourth album that almost never was.

One of the few things that could raise anger — real, intense anger — in Mister Rogers was the willful misleading of children. Superheroes, he thought, were the worst culprits.

“There’s an idea that laborers end up in their role because it’s all they’re suited for. What put us there, though, was birth, family history — not lack of talent for something else.”

I believed that there was no music existing in the world with an unbroken connection to its original context. I was wrong.

In the wake of an Australian cartoon about the U.S. Open historian Brooke Newman traces a history of racial caricature.

Ahistorical narratives of racial uplift and singular heroes deny complexity and are devoid of real politics.

“Imagine realizing one day that you’re a Beatle. Think about how you might decide to handle that for the next 50, 60, 70 years.”

“One-eighth of all natural pregnancies begin as twins,” Leah Dieterich writes in her memoir, “but early in pregnancy, one twin becomes less viable and is compressed against the wall of the uterus or absorbed by the other twin.” This concept of a vanishing twin, a term coined in the year of Dieterich’s birth, frames the […]

When a young white musician gets invited to a house-party, the musicians he plays with show him a slice of blues culture many people assumed had died.