Workers of the World, Take PTO!
Vacations in the Soviet Union were hardly idylls spent with one’s dearest. Everything about them—from whom you traveled with to what you ate—was state determined.
Uncle Sam Wants You to Donate Books!
During World War I, the American Library Association built libraries on military training camps in a project that championed patriotism, literacy, and self-improvement.
Pieces and Bits
What does it take to stage Cresphontes, a lost Euripides tragedy, when all that remains of it are a few fragments of papyrus?
Chess, Unlike War, is a Game of Perfect Information
The late poet Charles Simic was a chess prodigy who used the queen and her court to conjure a hellscape that invoked a childhood in war-time Belgrade.
Fire and Brimstone
If our conception of hell was absent from Christianity at the time the religion was born, whence exactly does it hail?
What it Sounds Like When Doves Cry
A century ago, an ornithologist proposed a system for transcribing bird sound as human speech. It did not catch on.
Girls Gone Greek
The most influential character on Showtime’s Yellowjackets is the one who goes unnamed: Dionysus.
Was She Really Rosie?
The unlikely, true story of the Westinghouse “We Can Do It” work-incentive poster that became an international emblem of women’s empowerment.
How Upper Lips Got Stiff
The truism that “boys don’t cry” is a Western social convention. Colonialism and imperialism made sure it spread East.
Her Bounty Is Boundless
From the first actor—a man—to play Juliet to the “girl boss” version on Broadway, Shakespeare’s young lover offers something new in every iteration.