According to our columnist, the internet has destabilized many of the informal institutions that underpin our democracy.

Quick: Picture a haunted house. It's probably a Victorian mansion, right? Here's how these structures became signifiers of horror, haunting, and death.

Well-researched stories from the New Yorker, Pacific Standard Magazine, and other great publications that bridge the gap between news and scholarship.

The popular paint pigment called “mummy brown” used to be made from—yep—ground-up Egyptian mummies.

When Boake Carter opened his mouth, he whipped up tempers and tempests. But who was he?

Plagues capture the public imagination in ways that other less terrifying--but more deadly--diseases don't.

Conodonts are actually older than the oldest previously known vertebrates, making them the earliest known “skeletonized” vertebrates in existence.

Behind the slapstick antics in this beloved comic strip simmered ambivalence about color and race.

In the 1960s, two groups of feminists had very different views about motherhood. Unsurprisingly, race and family played a role.

Either environmental or sexual selective pressure began acting on hair after humans began dispersing out of Africa.