Summer’s almost over. Alison Fields curated a list of beach-based books to make you feel like you’re still breathing in that sweet sea air.
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Bowie Knives, Concealed Rifles, and Caning Charles Sumner
As the Civil War loomed, weapons — like the recently invented bowie knife and rifles that were shipped to Kansas hidden in crates labeled as bibles — became complex political symbols.
Theatre of Wokeness
Are we having a surface-level reckoning?
Queens of Infamy: Josephine Bonaparte, from Malmaison to More-Than-Monarch
In fraught games of power politics, sometimes the best revenge is not being exiled to die alone on an island in the South Atlantic.
Carvell Wallace on ‘Moonlight’ Writer Tarell Alvin McCarney’s Next Acts
Tarell Alvin McCarney’s Broadway debbut,, “Choir Boy,” is a tender coming of age story about a queer Black boy at a prestigious boarding school.
This Month In Books: ‘This Is Really Not What I Want To Be Reading’
This month’s books newsletter is jam-packed with scammers, censors, and … other books.
The Story of Salvador’s Banda Didá
In a country with violent history and violent politics, Brazil’s first all-female, Afro-Brazilian percussion group drums and dances and changes lives.
The Unexpected Reemergence of an Elusive Strain of Rice
Hill rice was supposed to be extinct, until a South Carolina chef stumbled on it — in Trinidad.
When Zora and Langston Took a Road Trip
In 1927, Zora Neale Hurston gave Langston Hughes a lift to Tuskegee in her Nash coupe, nicknamed “Sassy Susie.” It was one of most fortuitous hangouts in literary history.
Finding a Lost Strain of Rice, and Clues to Slave Cooking
Historians of African-diaspora cooking have considered hill rice a mythical, long-extinct staple. Then, one of them stumbled on it while walking in the Trinidadian countryside.
