Source: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:%22A_Thrilling_Hallowe%27en.%22_(Three_black_cats_flying_through_the_air_with_Jack-o-lanterns).jpg

Halloween Stories

Why are Victorians the default haunted house, what do ghosts have to do with the imagination, and why do we like to be scared?
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.
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.
Kahlil Gibran

Kahlil Gibran: Godfather of the “New Age”

Published in 1923, The Prophet became a perpetual best-seller, birthed a genre, and marked the poet as retrograde, sentimental, and florid.
Loie Fuller

The Serpentine Career of Loïe Fuller

Rising from the ranks of touring comedies and Wild West shows, the American dancer dreamed of a future of light, movement, and metamorphosis.
Mathilde “Missy” de Morny

The Cross-Dressing Superstar of the Belle Époque

Mathilde de Morny's commitment to a masculine aesthetic and a non-traditional lifestyle in nineteenth-century France challenged the boundaries of gender identity.
Fernando Pessoa, 1914

“The Poet Is a Man Who Feigns”

Portuguese modernist Fernando Pessoa channeled a grand, glorious chorus of writers—heteronyms, he called them—robust inventions of his unique imagination.
Adrienne Rich with Susan Sherman. Photo by Colleen McKay. c. 1983

The Incredible Versatility of Adrienne Rich

Rich challenged the language of the past in poetry and prose while not quite embracing a fully inclusive future.