American actors and singers Liza Minnelli and Joel Grey perform on stage as nightclub performers in Germany during the Weimar Republic in the film version of the Broadway musical 'Cabaret' directed by Bob Fosse, 1972.

Cabaret Condemns and Shows Fascism’s Sinister Allure

Cabaret’s depiction of a Weimar-era nightclub reveals how easy it is to slip between satire of, indifference to, and complicity with Nazi aesthetics.
A parent and child near windmills at sunset

Black Midwestern Studies: A Reading List

This primer on Black Midwestern Studies examines the factors shaping communities of color in America’s “flyover country,” long mistaken as a place of normative whiteness.
Cross Reference image

Get Out of Dodge with Cross Reference

This month’s puzzle features a nod to the Second City.
Unclassics: Obscure Electronic Funk and Disco, 1975–1985

Quebec Disco: Influenced by Italo Disco?

Ostensibly developing on continents apart, the sounds Quebec Disco and Italo Disco exhibited an identifiable sonic kinship.
Left to right: Lady Ottoline Morrell, Mrs. Aldous Huxley, Lytton Strachey, Duncan Grant, and Vanessa Bell, July 1915

The Bloomsbury Group: A Reading List

In 1905, a group of writers and painters gathered in a London home and began a conversation on politics, love, sex, and art that lasted decades.
A general view of a 1970s disco showing people dancing, circa 1978.

What’s the Legacy of Disco Music?

If you listen to Blondie, The Police, or the Pretenders, it’s in the beat.
Frame from the movie La Coquille et le Clergyman (1928)

Surrealism in Cinema, 100 Years On

A century after the publication of the first Surrealist manifesto, the role played by film in the movement is still unfolding.
Bay Area Renaissance Festival in Tampa Florida, 2011

Reasons for Re-Enacting at the Renaissance Faire

Why do we love donning period costumes and re-enacting our history through mock battles, pioneer villages, and Renaissance Faires?
Fredric Jameson, 2008

Verbatim: Fredric Jameson

Marxist cultural critic Fredric Jameson offered a philosophy of late capitalism that gave us a language for talking about globalization and the end of modernism.
The covers of Partition by Saadat Hasan Manto, Palo Alto by Malcolm Harris, The Flew by Carlos Eire, Running While Black by Alison Mariella Désir, Living the Beatles Legend by Kenneth Womack, and The Gospel of Loki by Joanne M. Harris

What We’re Reading 2023

Enjoy a fresh batch of year-end book reports from all of the readers, writers, and editors at JSTOR Daily!