Well-researched stories from Smithsonian, FiveThirtyEight, and more great publications that bridge the gap between news and scholarship.

A historian argues that it's time to look at the consequences of locking up millions of people over several decades.

The Illuminati was a real secret society. But in the hands of British conservatives during the French Revolution, it became a massive conspiracy.

As far back as the ninth century, doctors and poets wrote about women who loved women without calling them deviants.

Elke Mackenzie’s moments of self-citation illuminate the hopes of someone who, against ease and tradition, did not wish to separate her identity from her research.

If we find aliens, chances are they'll be nothing like we ever imagined.

The earliest wildfires raged long before humans, and they only needed three ingredients to get started.

The complicated notion of glamour in classic Hollywood, suggesting that stars were aloof and unknowable, was also a means to sell products.

In 1952, a government administrator named Mary Dublin Keyserling was accused of being a communist. The attack on her was also an attack on feminism.

The iconography of Mexico's Día de los Muertos has become wildly popular outside Latino communities. But where did the skulls and skeletons come from?