How do the artistic inspirations that portrait artist Amy Sherald cites for Michelle Obama’s dress impact our visual and cultural understanding of the portrait for the Smithsonian's National Portrait Gallery?

The cost of generating solar power has dropped so dramatically, it is now economically advantageous for tobacco farmers to replace tobacco with solar farms in many places.

Well-researched stories from around the web that bridge the gap between news and scholarship. Brought to you each Tuesday from the editors of JSTOR Daily.

In 1588, Pope Sixtus V issued a papal bull officially classifying abortion, regardless of the stage of fetal development, as homicide.

Water is simultaneously one of the few things we absolutely cannot live without, and one of the things we value least. There's an economic rationale behind that.

The story of dingoes in Australia is the first recorded case where an introduced predator has taken on such a functional role in its adopted ecosystem.

Murphy Brown represented a threat to “family values”—a position that inherently placed her on the side of the families of color whose single family structures supposedly threatened the white, middle-class status quo of the 1990s.

The story of J. Edgar Hoover dressing in women's clothing is part of American myth. But does this story tell us more about Hoover or about the nature of gossip?

How the Memphis Sanitation Strike, with its iconic “I AM A MAN” signs, helped deepen Martin Luther King, Jr.'s radicalism in the last months of his life.

The good news is that most parents living in sanitary environments really don’t need to worry about toxocariasis. The bad news is that toxocara may be yet another obstacle placed in front of disadvantaged children.