It’s Tough Work Being a Temporary Santa
Playing the role of a shopping mall Santa comes with challenges familiar to any gig worker, but the performers also see the job as carrying special meaning.
Annotations: A Christmas Carol by Charles Dickens
Scrooge became as good a friend, as good a master, and as good a man, as the good old city knew, or any other good old city, town, or borough, in the good old world.
Merry Christmas from The World
Festive poems from Anne Waldman, Bernadette Mayer, Eileen Myles, Clark Coolidge, Alice Notley, Yuki Hartman, Wang Ping, and more.
Tapping Cultural Values Against Domestic Violence
Southeast Asian Americans navigated evolving cultural norms while building grassroots organizations to combat violence against women.
A Blind Beetle Named Hitler?
The case for changing offensive names of animals and plants, and how it can be done
Mining for European Art
Advances in painting in early modern Europe were the product not just of artistic innovation but of changes in mining and manufacturing technology.
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.
Wilhelm Reich: Twice Burned
A psychoanalyst and physician, Reich fled the Nazis only to be detained by the US as an “enemy alien” during World War II. And then came the sexual revolution.
Recovering the Malay Manuscripts of South Africa
Descendants of those trafficked from Southeast Asia to South Africa by the Dutch, Cape Malay Muslims use surviving kietaabs to connect to their heritage.
Cleopatra’s Nose
Edmonia Lewis, a sculptor of African and Native American descent, gave Cleopatra “white” European features in her 1876 representation of the Egyptian ruler.