OK, changing the subject a little: Tattooing has been around for thousands of years, we’re even finding early humans with tattoos. Do you think there is something inherent to human nature that makes us want to tattoo ourselves? Sure. The cadaver that was found frozen and preserved in the Alps, which I think is about […]
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How Art Critic Jerry Saltz Fell in Love with Museums
I’ve spent much of my life in and in love with museums. When I was 10 years old, there was no mention of art in my home. But then my mother began driving me from the suburbs to the Art Institute of Chicago. There, she looked at art on her own for hours, leaving me […]
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The Debate Over Alternative Medicine
The Laidlers’ story is a microcosm of the changing debate over so-called alternative medicine and its cousin, integrative medicine. In 2007, Americans spent $2.9 billion on homeopathic medicine, a treatment based on the belief that minuscule amounts of what causes symptoms in a healthy person will alleviate symptoms in someone who is ill. From nutritional supplements […]
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‘A Century of Public Policy Designed to Segregate and Impoverish its Black Population’
As I described in the Making of Ferguson, the federal government maintained a policy of segregation in public housing nationwide for decades. This was as true in northeastern cities like New York as it was in border cities like Baltimore and St. Louis. In 1994, civil rights groups sued the Department of Housing and Urban […]
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How To Get Appointed to the Senate
In late 2008, Democratic Colorado Governor Bill Ritter received a political stick of dynamite when President-elect Obama announced his intention to appoint U.S. Senator Ken Salazar as his Secretary of the Interior. Ritter would have to replace Salazar, a respected Latino legislator and a popular figure throughout the state. Ritter was inundated with resumés from prominent […]
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Stereotyping in 170 Milliseconds
During a Skype conversation, Quadflieg explained that MRI-based brain studies show stereotypes are activated in about 170 milliseconds. No matter how open-minded we fancy ourselves, these biases kick in without our realizing it, she says. In a 2011 study in the journal Neuroimage, Quadflieg reported that the areas of the brain associated with body recognition had […]
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Stevie Nicks, Feminist
Stevie Nicks: The legend from Fleetwood Mac is a rock star, because she’s always been ruthlessly honest and fearless. The first time she picked up a guitar and wrote a song, it was about heartbreak, and when she wrote for Fleetwood Mac, many of those songs were about her doomed relationship with guitarist Lindsey Buckingham. But through all […]
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The Roots of the Insanity Defense
For centuries, courts have struggled to protect the mentally ill while also trying to distinguish between sanity and insanity. In the 1700s, the British courts relied on the “wild beast” test as their barometer for the latter: if the defendant’s understanding of his crime was no better than that of a infant or beast, he couldn’t […]
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Peggy Lee’s ‘Is That All There Is’ Was Inspired by a Thomas Mann Story
Peggy Lee’s haunting 1969 hit “Is That All There Is”—if you watch Mad Men, you’d recognize it from both the opening and closing of the midseason premiere—was written by Jerry Leiber and Mike Stoller during the 1960s, but its roots date back to an 1896 Thomas Mann novella. In a 2011 Los Angeles Times story on Jerry Leiber, Randall Roberts expanded on […]
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How Halston’s Death Galvanized the Fashion Industry to Take Action Against AIDS
But not all AIDS deaths were hushed up; indeed, there was a backlash against the conspiracy of silence. Before Way Bandy—one of the industry’s top makeup artists—died on August 13, 1986, he directed his executors to announce his death as AIDS-related. And Halston acknowledged the cause of his own death on March 26, 1990, in […]