But Why a Penguin?
Penguin Books built on an already strong tradition of branding through cute mascot “media stars” when they introduced their cartoon bird in 1935.
Shakespeare and Fanfiction
Despite an enduring slice of audience that treats his work as precious and mythic, most Shakespeare fans have rarely met an adaptive concept they didn’t like.
Sheet Music: the Original Problematic Pop?
A Johns Hopkins University curator of sheet music and pop culture discusses a “Middle East-inspired” sheet-music collection that’s anything but.
Performing Memory in Refugee Rap
Hip-hop and other performative arts offer Southeast Asian American immigrants a way to construct richer narratives about the refugee experience.
I Hear America Singing
Japanese American poet Garrett Hongo is a guiding spirit to a glorious cacophony, an exuberant collective thrum made of different tongues and peoples.
Vulture Cultures
By turns worshipped and reviled, the bird frequently associated with death has appeared in art works for thousands of years. Here’s a short history.
The Art of Impressionism: A Reading List
The first exhibition of paintings that would come to be described as Impressionism opened in Paris on April 15, 1874.
The Taj Mahal Today
In parallel with the recent shift in political attitudes toward Islamic heritage, India’s most famous monument may need to find a new place in history.
Fencer, Violinist, Composer: The Life of Joseph Bologne
As a musician of color during the Ancien Régime and French Revolution, Joseph Bologne, Chevalier de Saint-Georges, lived a life unlike those of his peers.
Going “Black to the Future”
How has Afrofuturism supported the imagining of other worlds in the face of the anthropogenic climate crisis?