• History

    Cundill History Prize

    Evolutionary Links: What Great Apes Tell Us About Being Human

    From Alison Bashford's Cundill Prize-Shortlisted The Huxleys: An Intimate History of Evolution

     
    By Alison Bashford  September 28, 2023
    Shakespeare

    On Shakespeare’s Two Heroic Friends that Saved the Bard’s Plays From Being Burned

    By Gregory Doran  September 27, 2023
    Activism

    How Bayard Rustin Inspired Martin Luther King Jr.’s Nonviolent Activism

    By Jonathan Eig  September 25, 2023
    Shipwrecks

    All Stories Float Ashore: Fae Myenne Ng on the Chinese Titanic Poet-Sailor Deportee

    By Fae Myenne Ng  September 21, 2023
    Nature

    How America’s Natural Beauty Called Generations of Women to Action

    By Tiya Miles  September 21, 2023
    Feminist History

    We Are Not Alone: 50 Years of Ms. Magazine

    By Gloria Steinem  September 20, 2023
    Book Marks: What the Critics Are Saying
    Jewish History

    On the Rothschilds’ Myth in Literature and Film

    By Mike Rothschild  September 20, 2023
    Astronauts

    First Lady of Space: How Sally Ride Became A Household Name Overnight

    By Loren Grush  September 14, 2023
    Fashion History

    How the Humble Pocket Came to Signify Feminist Liberation

    By Hannah Carlson  September 12, 2023
    Sci-Fi

    From Serialization to Novelization: On the First Iteration of Frank Herbert’s Dune

    "Books have the ability to travel into the future in a way that no other written medium does."

    By Ryan Britt  September 27, 2023
    Vacations

    “Out of Time’s Monotone”: The Literary Life of the French Riviera

    By Jonathan Miles  September 6, 2023
    American West

    Notions of “Wilderness:” Nine Essential Books About the American Frontier

    By Peter Stark  September 5, 2023
    Fathers and Sons

    How The Odyssey Helped My Father and Me to Grow

    By Daniel Mendelsohn  September 1, 2023
    Inventions

    How Complex Math and Human Innovation Created the Calculator

    Keith Houston on the People, Technology, and Equations Behind a Modern Mathematical Convenience

    By Keith Houston  August 31, 2023
    What to Watch

    Beyond Tortured Genius: Science and Conscience in Two Rediscovered Oppenheimer Films

    By Lauren Carroll Harris  August 31, 2023
    Cosmology

    On the “Inverted Cosmos”—From Aristotle to the Middle Ages

    By William Egginton  August 30, 2023
    Copyright

    Did J.D. Salinger Wield Copyright as Self-Protection?

    By Olivia Rutigliano  August 30, 2023
    Literary History

    How Obscenity Laws Nearly Stopped Nabokov’s Lolita from Being Published

    Thomas Harding on the Legendary Editor George Weidenfeld, Literary Smuggling, and Morality in Fiction

    By Thomas Harding  August 29, 2023
    Etymologies

    Month-Disease, Flewsa, Lunations: On the Etymology of Periods

    By Jenni Nuttall  August 29, 2023
    What to Watch

    The Greatest Velmas of History and Fiction

    By Shaenon K. Garrity  August 25, 2023
    Baillie Gifford Prize

    Rape As a Weapon: A Tragedy Both Ancient and Modern

    By Christina Lamb  August 25, 2023
    Activism

    How the Vietnam War Accelerated Generational Divides in America

    Drew Gilpin Faust on the Gradual Radicalization of Anti-War Student Activism

    By Drew Gilpin Faust  August 24, 2023
    Folk Music

    How the Folkloric Sounds of Rural America Reached the Mainstream

    By John Szwed  August 23, 2023
    Science Writing

    The Female Journalist Who Helped Create the Field of Science Reporting

    By Marcel Chotkowski LaFollette  August 22, 2023
    Afghanistan

    The Remarkable Story of the Horsewomen Warriors of Afghanistan

    By Pardis Mahdavi  September 11, 2023
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