Category: culture

Audiences wanted Disney to give Elsa a girlfriend. But the Frozen franchise is at the center of the corporation’s latest princess project, whose nationalist concerns are decidedly here for the gay agenda.

Too Japanese for Americans and too American for the Japanese, one New Jersey native traces the influence of racism on her parents’ careers and her own life.

Jeanna Kadlec considers the impact of Little Women’s matriarchy — and its heroine — on the formation of her own queer identity.

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

Almost everything you think you know about Aladdin is wrong.

Five months into her first pregnancy, one writer pursues a research project about the history of home economics, as she struggles with her own concerns about motherhood.

To understand what the Golden State is compared to what it was, one solitary hiker follows the trail of the first overland Spanish expedition into California 250 years later.

Sara Fredman talks to author Lindy West on women and likability, the evolution of pop culture, and navigating conversations in a complex, messy world. 

Instand Pot: great. Dover eggbeater? Not so much.

Edited by Toni Morrison, the 1983 novel ‘Fish Tales’ by Nettie Jones was supposed to set the literary world on fire. It didn’t.

Cinelle Barnes considers how the chaos and discipline of dance kept the disparate parts of her being stitched together.

In Iceland, overtourism has transformed the island in a few short years — and locals and visitors alike try to grapple with the change.

You can’t have work-life balance when work dictates the balance.

The New Yorker writer describes his career’s circuitous route, from his start as a struggling fiction writer to becoming a China correspondent, and now the author of a new book about the Arab Spring.

Elisabet Velasquez reckons with a lifetime of disharmony with her religious, mentally ill mother.

Vanessa Mártir introduces Writing the Mother Wound, a series of essays on mothering presented in collaboration with Writing our Lives and Longreads.

Healing crystals move from poor villages to first world consumers along a trail of death, ecological destruction, and capitalistic concentration of wealth.

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

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

The way schools choose to redesign themselves to protect students from shootings will determine how schools look, and how well students can learn in them, for decades to come.

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.

When a promising student left a neighborhood full of heroin for the University of Pennsylvania, it should have been a moving story. But what does an at-risk student actually need to thrive — or even just to survive?

The working homeless exist in a modern purgatory.

Is tech disrupting spirituality, or is spirituality finally disrupting tech?

Do you want reliable California breaks with reliable California crowds, or are you ready to take your chances in frigid Irish water where you’ll share waves with no one else?

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.

An elegy and reading list for Toni Morrison, the Nobel Laureate and Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist who died Monday, August 5, 2019.

How Southern California’s rich and famous tried to cheat to get their kids into college.

Our inherited biases about who should write what live deeper than most of us realize or want to acknowledge.

Forest mismanagement, political corruption, and PG&E’s corporate culture created a highly combustible situation.