A selection of stories that chronicle our complicated notions of time.

Employed as a symbol of the American South or used as shorthand for unchecked growth, kudzu has demonstrated a tenacity beyond all imagination.

In the early 1800s, Americans formed all sorts of anti-vice societies, triggering jokes and serious resistance to reform through a wave of anti-societies.

The source of quinine, cinchona tells a story about the value placed on parts of plants and how that value can be extracted and distorted in support of empire.

The Big Bang theory is not threatened, but astrophysicists have some explaining to do.

Questions over their value for research conflict with the ethics of possessing the dead, especially when presenting human remains in the setting of a museum.

A Percival Everett fan weighs in on the novelist’s approach to racial satire and considers the translation of Erasure to the big screen in American Fiction.

One of the arguments of Irish nationalism was that English rule was morally corrupting. There was no better example of this than same-sex desire.

In the Catholic tradition, Epiphany is the day the Three Kings first met Baby Jesus. But in Italy, it’s also the day La Befana shows up with a basket of gifts.

Well-researched stories about diving horses, invasive iguanas, and more from publications that bridge the gap between news and scholarship.