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War is hell. The culture war is no exception—and the funny bone is usually the first casualty. The recent talk about abortion and contraception got me thinking, what would the […]

American politics are getting more Onion-ish. People are mistaking stories from the brilliant parodic newspaper The Onion for “real” news with what seems like growing frequency. Recently, Louisiana Rep. John […]

In 2009, the Roman Catholic church convened an “apostolic visitation” – a sort of modern-day auto-da-fe – a rare step taken when the Vatican feels that a church-affiliated institution has […]

This week, there’s been a flurry of stories about Muslim groups trying to suppress criticism of Islam, both by law and by force. It’s worth summarizing them briefly to show […]

While walking in Fairmount Park in 1872 with his minister father, 12-year-old Henry Ossawa Tanner saw a man painting and became curious about art. His family fed that curiosity, which […]

Friends sometimes ask me about the signs of marriages on the brink. Can mere mortals, without credentials even!, predict which marriages are likely to divorce? It makes for a fascinating […]

            To most journalists, a good story is defined in large measure by how much attention it will get. A story that makes page one, or leads the newscast, is […]

As a former Penn State faculty member, I am overwhelmed and outraged by the stories we are hearing out of Happy Valley.  My colleagues across the country continue to ask me why so many students have rallied in support of Coach Paterno, despite revelations that clearly suggest merely following the letter of a reporting policy is insufficient in a case alleged to be this egregious.  Are Millennials – at least the thousands chanting, “We want Joe” – missing a sensitivity chip?  

The Center for Media and Democracy and The Nation magazine have won this month’s Sidney Award for excellence in socially conscious journalism, the Sidney Hillman Foundation announced Tuesday. The winning […]

Peer into any young American boy’s imagination, and you’ll likely find knights, soldiers, and pirates roaming about. That fact is a true today as it was a century ago. One […]

In our time of confined specialization, it’s hard to comprehend the multimedia talents of Dante Gabriel Rossetti, whose poetry and painting helped shape the Victorian Age into the paradox-laden, hot […]

Martha Stewart. Bernie Madoff. Scooter Libby. Barry Bonds. They were public figures, leaders, and role models. They were also all liars, in fact, and part of a national epidemic of lying, says the author James Stewart. 

“Blessed be the man that spares these stones, / And cursed be he who moves my bones,” Shakespeare’s gravestone famously proclaims. Anthropologist Francis Thackeray, the man currently petitioning the Anglican […]

A few years ago I was at a conference of economic historians in Toronto where I happened to meet Dr. Mary Yeager, a professor in UCLA’s history department who also […]

Public opinion about climate change, observes the New York Times’ Andrew Revkin, can be compared to “waves in a shallow pan,” easily tipped with “a lot of sloshing but not […]

A scheme to lose weight effortlessly begins by injecting pregnancy hormones into the body which, in theory, allay the hunger pains of a starvation diet that follows.

When arrested in 1936 during a protest over the dismissal of 500 artists from the WPAFederal Art Project, Lee Krasner told the unsuspecting police officer processing her that her name […]

IT is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune must be in want of a wife. So wrote Jane Austen in the opening […]

This is probably the single most disturbing thing you will read on this Valentine’s Day: an “innovative” Parisian fashion designer has decided that the waist-cinching corset should become the Next […]

GUEST POST BY JASON SILVA The spectacular think tank and apparel company The Imaginary Foundation states that “To Understand Is To Perceive Patterns”.  This seemingly simple sentence is actually utterly profound:  what it […]

Today’s copy of the New York Times sits beside me, unopened. Most of my normal internet haunts have been ignored this morning. Why? Because I have been totally absorbed by […]

The aftershocks of the controversy surrounding the Smithsonian’s National Portrait Gallery’s decision to drop David Wojnarowicz’s 1987 video “A Fire in My Belly” from their exhibition Hide/Seek: Difference and Desire […]

Today marks the opening in Washington, DC of the annual meetings of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, the world’s largest event dedicated to science, policy, and culture.  […]

And not just a map: also a timeline, a literary checklist and a historiography

This semester at American University, the School of Communication has launched the inaugural Science in Society Film and Lecture series, an initiative designed to engage students, faculty, and the Washington, […]

The weird things we swallow and a wonderful man who dedicated much of his life to removing odd objects from people’s insides are the subject of the new book “Swallow.”

Pretty much everyone knows that Superman is the original super hero, and maybe the greatest of that genre. As Jim Crocesang, “You don’t tug on Superman’s cape.” But one super […]

The art collecting world remains as much about collecting name cache as it does about collecting art. Becoming a trusted dealer and banking on that brand name allows you to […]

Historical records suggest that President Lincoln and First Lady Mary Todd may have held two séances to contact their dead son Willie. But even if these stories are not true, […]

2010 was a great year for art publishing, with many presses producing high quality works not only in terms of reproducing great art, but also in publishing important thinkers on […]