What’s Queer About The Legend of Zelda?
Link may look like a classic video game hero, but his adventures complicate the heteronormative conventions of the genre.
Why Is Raja Ravi Varma’s Art So Valuable Today?
A record-breaking auction spotlights the artist who transformed Hindu imagery and helped shape modern Indian visual culture.
The Culture Wars of The Phantom of the Opera
The hit musical became a battleground for competing ideas about capitalism, artistic value, and commercial theater.
Dear Reader: 10 Epistolary Poems by Contemporary Writers
Letters to lovers, siblings, artists, gods, and enemies by Diane Wakoski, Yusef Komunyakaa, Kazim Ali, June Jordan, and more.
How the Big Dig Changed Boston’s Landscape
Created after the Big Dig, the Rose Kennedy Greenway shows how cities attempt to heal the scars of highway construction.
James Baldwin’s Complicated Relationship with Psychoanalysis
Baldwin criticized Freudian thinking yet drew on ideas like repression in his fiction and essays.
The Greek Tragedy Behind Suddenly Last Summer
A reinterpretation shows how Euripides's The Bacchae illuminates Tennessee Williams's play and its haunting final act.
The Cassette Tapes of the Great Migration
An archive of recorded interviews captures how ordinary people experienced one of the defining chapters of American history.
Reading the Maya with William S. Burroughs
Burroughs drew on the leading Maya scholarship of his day, much of which has since been overturned.
How Sir Lawrence Alma-Tadema Imagined Ancient Rome
The Victorian painter drew on archaeology and ancient texts to create richly detailed scenes of love and excess.