The Vexed Meaning of Equality in Gilded Age America The Vexed Meaning of Equality in Gilded Age America
The agrarian, feminist, and labor movements of the 19th century elevated equality to a cardinal principle, but all three fell short when it came to transcending the divide of...
Sep 24, 2019 / Books & the Arts / Eric Foner
What Misogyny Does What Misogyny Does
In her new book, philosopher Kate Manne insists that what’s important is not what men intended but how women experience misogyny.
Sep 23, 2019 / Books & the Arts / Clio Chang
Martin Hägglund’s Case for Socialism Martin Hägglund’s Case for Socialism
If we knew there were no afterlife, would we make this life better?
Sep 23, 2019 / Books & the Arts / Peter E. Gordon
The Business of Being Taylor Swift The Business of Being Taylor Swift
Her latest album, Lover, has been heralded as a return to form. It also presents an opportunity to understand the pop star’s many contradictions.
Sep 18, 2019 / Books & the Arts / Olivia Horn
The Philadelphia Female Anti-Slavery Society Starts Its Third Annual Petition Drive for the Abolition of the Interstate Slave Trade and Slavery in Washington, DC, and the Territories (1836) The Philadelphia Female Anti-Slavery Society Starts Its Third Annual Petition Drive for the Abolition of the Interstate Slave Trade and Slavery in Washington, DC, and the Territories (1836)
Letters and pamphlets are good. Petitions, better: Ye who have pens, prepare to use them now. We’re going to need all of you to go house to house to collect signatures. We’ve been…
Sep 17, 2019 / Books & the Arts / Melissa Range
The Grimké Sisters at Work on Theodore Dwight Weld’s ‘American Slavery as It Is’ (1838) The Grimké Sisters at Work on Theodore Dwight Weld’s ‘American Slavery as It Is’ (1838)
Somebody had to be the first to amass the proof from slaveholders’ mouths: twenty thousand newspapers from the South, the unthinking testimony parsed, scissored carefully into stri…
Sep 17, 2019 / Books & the Arts / Melissa Range
Sally Rooney and the Millennial Novel of Manners Sally Rooney and the Millennial Novel of Manners
Her second book, Normal People, mines the travails of Irish youth to tell a decidedly contemporary love story.
Sep 17, 2019 / Books & the Arts / Hannah Gold
The Making of Moroccan Funk The Making of Moroccan Funk
Led by the Casablanca polymath Abdelakabir Faradjallah, the band Attarazat Addahabia defined the sound of the city.
Sep 17, 2019 / Books & the Arts / Marcus J. Moore
Have Americans Become More Conspiratorial? Have Americans Become More Conspiratorial?
In their new book, Russell Muirhead and Nancy L. Rosenblum argue that a new form of conspiracy thinking is consuming our culture in dangerous and alarming ways. But is it?
Sep 16, 2019 / Books & the Arts / Sophia Rosenfeld
Everyone Is Acting as if We’re Not Temporary, and I Am Falling Apart in the Privacy of My Own Home Everyone Is Acting as if We’re Not Temporary, and I Am Falling Apart in the Privacy of My Own Home
When he said, Sometimes we learn the most from losing, I think how often I’ve been bamboozled by life, how I’ve dropped a quarter in a slot machine and instead of cherries got coff…
Sep 10, 2019 / Books & the Arts / Kelli Russell Agodon