Meme of woman laughing with the tagline, "Laughs with Sorrow in Spanish," just below her face

How to Meme What You Say

The linguistic theories behind what we're trying to say when we adapt and share internet memes.
Pee Dee Rosenwald School, Marion County, South Carolina, c. 1935.

How Black Communities Built Their Own Schools

Rosenwald schools, named for a philanthropist, were funded mostly by Black people of the segregated South.
A 1960 advertisement for Woodbury Soap

Clean Skin, Ancient Microbes, and Mom Shame

Well-researched stories from The New Yorker, Wired, and more great publications that bridge the gap between news and scholarship.
A woman hiking in the Southwest

How Harassment Keeps Women off Hiking Trails

For many women, the pleasures of solitude in the outdoors must be weighed against the possibility of harassment.
Interior of a London Coffee-house, 17th century

The News Junkies of the Eighteenth Century

Hooked on viral news (or is it gossip?), today's Twitter hordes owe a lot to history's coffeehouses.
Kimberlé Crenshaw

Kimberlé Crenshaw’s Intersectional Feminism

Legal scholar Kimberlé Crenshaw broke new ground by showing how women of color were left out of feminist and anti-racist discourse.
Alexander Hamilton by John Trumbull

The Erotic Appeal of Alexander Hamilton

The handsome Founding Father has always had a robust fandom—even before the ten-dollar bill, or a certain musical.
The Castle Bravo hydrogen bomb blast at Bikini Atoll on March 1, 1954

How the H-Bomb Led to a Reckoning in Japan

For years, the trauma of the atomic bomb was hardly talked about in Japan. The H-bomb test at Bikini Atoll changed that.
Religious candles placed by religious devotees at a Catholic shrine in San Antonio, Texas.

In Defense of Kitsch

The denigration of kitsch betrays a latent anti-Catholicism, one born from centuries of class and ethnic divisions.
from Anna Maria Luisa de' Medici by Antonio Franchi

Plant of the Month: Peony

Peony's effectiveness as an ancient cure translated into a tool of statecraft in the eighteenth century.