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.
Six Stories with First-Person Narrators
Distinctive voices and unforgettable perspectives, by Danielle Evans, Jamil Jan Kochai, Catherine Niu, Thomas Bernhard, Christine Schutt, and Michael Deagler.
The Hidden Grief of American Musicals
Musicology professor Jake Johnson argues that beneath the bright songs and happy endings of midcentury musicals lay the grief and anxieties of postwar America.