History’s Most Notorious True Crime Story
How New York City's tabloids sensationalized the murder case that inspired the classic film noir Double Indemnity.
The New Sameness of Leslie Jamison’s Addiction Memoir
Leslie Jamison's The Recovering is self-aware about being the same old story, recalling the redemption narratives of Rousseau and St. Augustine.
Queer Time: The Alternative to “Adulting”
What constitutes adulthood has never been self-evident or value-neutral. Queer lives follow their own temporal logic.
Our Obsession with Orphans: A Short History from Jane Eyre to Annie
Little Orphan Annie is the latest in a sequence of pop culture foundlings, but America’s orphans of the Great Depression weren’t endearing at all.