Gay Mass Consumption Before Stonewall
In the 1960s, the Mattachine Society had only a few thousand members. But tens of thousands of men subscribed to physique magazines published by gay entrepreneurs.
The Mystery of Crime-Scene Dust
In the late nineteenth century, forensic investigators began using new technologies to study minute details—such as the arrangement and makeup of dust.
Parthenogenesis, Medieval Whales, and Debating Science
Well-researched stories from Slate, Knowable Magazine, and other great publications that bridge the gap between news and scholarship.
Kwame Brathwaite Showed the World that Black is Beautiful
Photographing everyone from musicians to athletes to the person on the street, Brathwaite found the beauty in Blackness and shared it with the world.
Monique Truong’s The Book of Salt
Centered on the Stein-Toklas household and written from the point of view of their gay Vietnamese cook, Binh, this novel tells a story of converging queer diasporas.
Declaration of Conscience: Annotated
In June 1950, Senator Margaret Chase Smith criticized Joseph McCarthy's anticommunist campaigns. She was the first of his colleagues to challenge his Red Scare rhetoric.
Deimos: A Chip Off the Old Martian Block?
A new space probe suggests that the moonlet Deimos isn’t a captured asteroid after all.
Plant of the Month: Indigo
The cultivation of this plant for its cherished blue dye tells the story of exploitative agricultural practices—and, hopefully, its reversal.
Windrush Day
There were British African Caribbean immigrants to the UK well before June 22, 1948, but it was the arrival of Empire Windrush that got the media's attention.
Coming Out Against The Vietnam War
The war radicalized many draft-age men, gay as well as straight. They helped normalize certain expressions of homosexuality while trying to avoid the draft.