Category: History

‘“Notre Dame will come out of this experience enriched,” she says. “And so will we.”’

Lawrence Wright did it again; Jordan Peterson in a coma?; Myriam Gurba forced out of her job; Woody Allen canceled by his publisher’s employees; THE VIRUS; and more.

We can all quarantine alone, together, in one big villa in the cloud.

In an excerpt from ‘The Third Rainbow Girl,’ Emma Copley Eisenberg interrogates various social conditions that might have contributed to a mysterious double murder in West Virginia in 1980.

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

Highly public pressure campaigns against telephone companies were the crux of early LGBTQ activism.

In the ancient hot mess known as Judea, a young queen had to navigate a self-destructive royal dynasty and one of history’s worst husbands.

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

Reexamining the motives of Felipe and Vivián Espinosa, two of the American West’s most brutal killers.

“U.S. officials constantly said they were making progress. They were not, and they knew it.”

Honeymooning in Cambodia, Lindsey Danis and her wife seek refuge in queer spaces, but struggle to find the acceptance granted to male travelers.

“Each arm, with its own brain inside, moves completely independent of the others. So much so that arms have been known to steal food from each other.”

Irving Nachumsohn invented the crock pot so that his family didn’t have to use the stove to prepare dinner on hot summer evenings. You’re welcome.

Almost everything you think you know about Aladdin is wrong.

Nina MacLaughlin discusses her retelling of Ovid’s Metamorphoses. “[In] my very vague high school memories…there was no discussion of the fact that this book is just rape after rape after rape.”

We invest a great deal of collective energy in commemorating our war dead. But do we remember them?

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

“I could see the ghosts,” recalled Lafcadio Hearn about his early childhood. Late in life, he became a celebrated chronicler of Japan’s folk tales: stories of strange demons and lingering visitations.

Steph Cha discusses her new novel “Your House Will Pay,” the LA Riots, the Korean American Angeleno community, her 3,600 Yelp reviews, and pushing back against gatekeepers in publishing.

“If you have the depth, the surface can be as light as it’s possible to make it…I don’t mind that ‘Swimming Home’ is sometimes described as a ‘beach read’ — actually that’s a triumph.”

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.

The Portuguese colonizers of West Central Africa learned it the hard way: you mess with the Queen of Ndongo and Matamba at your own peril.

“When I look at that dress and how much intention went into the making of it…it’s like we want to have something that can’t be destroyed, because so much of the past has been destroyed…”

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

Government jobs helped thousands of Black families move into the middle class. Now, increasing calls for government privatization are pushing them back out.

Three psycho-spiritual “events” of the 1970s — involving Philip K. Dick, Robert Anton Wilson, and Terence and Dennis McKenna — had a strange synchronicity.

‘The history of the West is a deeply turbulent one… that kept the living population in a constant state of unrest. I thought this constant state of unrest must be true for the dead as well.’

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.

“Ever since I was five years old,” wrote opera singer–turned–Buddhist lama Alexandra David-Néel, “I craved to go beyond the garden gate, to follow the road that passed it by, and to set out for the Unknown.”