How a college student’s scholarly investigation into whether Tolstoy was murdered led to her first book, about the people obsessed with Russian literature.

“We had nothing to lose,” Cary Ann said. “Fuck it. Band. Family. Let’s give it a shot. . . . Handshake, spit on it. If it gets too nasty we’ll cut and run.”

Cancel culture suggests we can change the world from the outside in, but the misogyny and racism are coming from inside the house.

Hells to the yes, says I.

By protecting ourselves and no one else, we destroy ourselves along with everyone else.

“Every fiction about the future is like an ice-cream cone,” Gibson says, “melting as it moves into the future.”

How a young bilingual Latina became one of punk’s enduring icons and helped create a new musical universe.

“But there’s nothing wrong with a nudge toward examining the difference between what makes us happy and what is merely habitual.”

‘“A bagel,” the newspaper of record explained in 1960, “is an unsweetened doughnut with rigor mortis.”’

Pivoting to video is only one of many ways media workers lose their jobs, but it’s still a horrible way.

The muted response to Todd Haynes’s “Dark Waters” is depressingly similar to our culture’s muted response to climate change

We asked writers and editors to choose some of their favorite stories of the year in various categories. Here is the best in music writing.

Combining island sounds with stylish clothes and an unforgettable stage presence, one of New York City’s most original bands helped influence 1980s pop culture, and they never sacrificed their unclassifiable artistic vision.

It’s time writers free themselves from concepts like “break out books” and “making it.”

We asked writers and editors to choose some of their favorite stories of the year in various categories. Here is the best in arts and culture.

In a country with violent history and violent politics, Brazil’s first all-female, Afro-Brazilian percussion group drums and dances and changes lives.

From Martin Luther to The Nutcracker, Germany’s original national nightmare was a tangled knot of writhing rats.

Some albums make it hard to separate the music from the experience of listening to it.

Women with power have the capacity to silence women with less — and they wield it. Why can’t they see that?

“This mom runs on caffeine, wine, and Amazon Prime” is a funny t-shirt slogan, but there is a serious social phenomenon behind it.

When Columbia Records breached one of their big star’s contracts back in the 1950s, he sued and won.

Almost everything you think you know about Aladdin is wrong.

“A guitar sounds better as it gets older, just like a Stradivarius does.”

We watch the (women) influencers watching the (heavily female) influencing industry, but the men aren’t entirely in the dark.

‘“I think that how we were first loved — or not — has a great deal to do with what we create and how,” Fred once told me.’

The electric bass chose her, but it took 44 years to heed the call.

Alex DiFrancesco reflects on Peter Jackson’s nuanced approach to representation in the critically acclaimed film.

Influencers who break type, like Mina Gerges or Jakiya Brown, have more than just an image. They have a story — and a plan.

Sometimes art can challenge viewers enough to change them. Sometimes art just makes the narrow-minded angry.

Raised in a school bus by itinerant hippie parents, with one foot in Mexico and one in the US, the singer blossomed into her true multicultural self in bilingual Montreal.