From the cover of Issue 9 of The World, December 1967

Merry Christmas from The World

Festive poems from Anne Waldman, Bernadette Mayer, Eileen Myles, Clark Coolidge, Alice Notley, Yuki Hartman, Wang Ping, and more.
Cambodian New Year's celebration, Trairatanaram Temple, Lowell, Massachusetts, 1988

Tapping Cultural Values Against Domestic Violence

Southeast Asian Americans navigated evolving cultural norms while building grassroots organizations to combat violence against women.
Adolf Hitler at his Berghof mansion in Obersalzberg.

A Blind Beetle Named Hitler?

The case for changing offensive names of animals and plants, and how it can be done
The Feast of the Gods, 1514/1529 by Giovanni Bellini

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.
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.
Wilhelm Reich portrait

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.
Nizamiye Mosque in Midrand, Greater Johannesburg, South Africa

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.
The Death of Cleopatra by Edmonia Lewis

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.
A gun partially hidden by a pillow

Firearms and Family Violence

The intersection of intimate partner violence and firearms is extremely dangerous for American women.
The first meeting between Montezuma II and Hernando Cortez in Mexico City, 1519

Was the Story of Cortés Plagiarized from Arabic?

The mythic stories of the Spanish conquest of Mexico seem to have been largely taken from earlier tales of the Muslim conquest of southern Spain.