A painting of Homer by William Blake

“Tell Me about a Complicated Man”: A Homer Reading List

The amount of scholarship on Homer and his works can be daunting. We've created this introductory reading list to help guide your explorations.
English actress Jane Birkin and French singer-songwriter Serge Gainsbourg, at home in Paris.

Jane Birkin’s Famous Love (Sex) Song

How the songs of the 1960s and ’70s captured the sexual liberation of women.
Ali Wallace, 1905

Ali: Alfred Russel Wallace’s Right-Hand Gun

Wallace wouldn't have become a famous naturalist without help from colonial networks and hundreds of locals, including his indefatigable Sarawak servant, Ali.
A cartoon of Guru Maharaj Ji on the cover of the November 1973 issue of The Rag

The Concert That Promised a Thousand Years of Peace

Guru Maharaj Ji, the teenage leader of the Divine Light Mission, was poised to usher in a new era. His huge Houston gathering proved to do anything but.
Guarana Fruit

Guaraná: Stimulation from the Amazon to the World

Long cherished by Indigenous peoples for its medicinal and stimulating properties, guaraná remains a key element of Brazilian identity.
Laura Kieler

Laura Kieler: A Life Exploited

Norwegian playwright Henrik Ibsen mined Kieler's life for the plot of his most famous play, The Doll's House.
A group of women sit in the waiting room of the American Birth Control League Clinic, New York, 1921

Pro-Sex Feminists of the 1920s

In the early decades of the twentieth century, political and social activists saw separating sex from marriage and reproduction as an issue of freedom.
Aerial view of Barringer crater in Arizona

The Eight Best Hidden Impact Craters on Earth

Many impact craters on Earth have been erased thanks to wind, water, and plate tectonics. But scientists have clever ways to find them.
Athanasius Kircher

Athanasius Kircher’s “Musical Ark”

The first algorithmically generated music came to us in the seventeenth century, courtesy of Kircher and his Arca musarithmica.
Boy genius Robert Strom is interviewed by host Hal March from the television series 'The $64,000 Question', 1955.

The Invention of the Gifted Child

The National Defense Education Act of 1958 meshed with white anxiety about the desegregation of schools.