Captain Scott took jars to the Antarctic with him, and Edmund Hillary took one up Everest. Marmalade is part of the British national myth. Livvy Potts wants to know why.
Arts & Culture
A Genre of Myths: A Jazz Reading List
Created in New Orleans and played around the world, the music we call jazz is filled with genius, legend, and tragedy.
The Ugly History of Beautiful Things: Lockets
Lockets simultaneously display and hide. But does squirreling our love and grief away in a piece of jewelry keep the memories and emotions present for us, or minimize them?
Removing Beethoven’s Wig: A Classical Music Reading List
Classical music is more than dead Europeans in wigs, starched collars, and stuffy concert halls.
What classical music is, where it’s going, and what it still can be.
Killer Mike Takes His Allies Where He Finds Them
“You may start off with Professor X but Magneto got a fucking point.”
Sleeping with Amazon
Sometimes it’s not who you work with, but who you work for.
Sold! On Going (Once!) to Auctioneer School
“Five dollar now five gidibid five dollar now ten gidibid ten, ten now fifteen digibigit now fifteen now fifteen gidibid, now twenty?”
Tangled Up in Bob Stories: A Dylan Reading List
Few musicians have generated as much music and as much study as this Nobel Prize winning singer-songwriter. Dylanology will last hundreds of years.
If You Love the Music of the Carter Family, Thank Leslie Riddle
“First, you exclude black people from the festivals. Then write them out by not recording them. And pretty soon, ‘you have this manufactured image of country music being white and being poor.'”
The Power and Business of Hip-Hop: A Reading List on an American Art Form
Stories of hip-hop’s genius, influence, struggle, and endurance.
