Long before the likes of Kim Kardashian, Marie Bashkirtseff sought to secure celebrity through curation of “personal brand.”

Inside the bizarre, secret meeting between Malcolm X and the Ku Klux Klan.

My main purpose in this address is simply to convince you that this desire is one of the great permanent mainsprings of human action... Unless you take measures to prevent it, this desire is going to be one of the chief motives of your life, from the first day on which you enter your profession until the day when you are too old to care.

The history of civilian internment camps.

“The conditions in America today do not much resemble those of 1968. In fact, the best analogue to the current moment is the first and most consequential such awakening—in 1868.”

The author visits the 9/11 Memorial Museum, 13 years after his sister’s death.

In 1944, an eighteen year old boy became famous for throwing eggs at Frank Sinatra. Then he disappeared.

A patriotic parade, a bloody brawl, and the origins of U.S. law enforcement’s war on the political left.

The role of money plays a two-sided role in Borges’ artistic life. On one side of the coin’s face, Borges was blessed with the most privileged, ideal life for a burgeoning literary genius. Educated in Europe, raised by his father to become a serious writer, Borges devoted his entire life to literature. He did not take a full-time job for nearly 40 years. But on the coin’s reverse side, we see that young Georgie Borges did not actually write his great fictions until after his family lost their money.

A look at Chicago’s DJ culture in the ’90s.

One day in 1997, Sneak promised his friend and fellow Chicago DJ Derrick Carter a new 12-inch for Carter's label Classic, then spent hours fruitlessly laboring over a basic, bustling four-four beat. Finally, Sneak gave in and smoked the J he'd had stashed for later in the day. When he came back inside, he carelessly dropped the needle onto a Teddy Pendergrass LP, heard the word "Well . . . ," and realized, "That's the sample, right there." He threaded Pendergrass's 20-year-old disco hit "You Can't Hide From Yourself" through a low-pass filter to give it the effect of going in and out of aural focus, creating one of the definitive Chicago house singles.

Decades ago, a marketing stunt promised Philippine soda drinkers a chance at a million pesos. But an error at a bottling plant led to 600,000 winners—and to lawsuits, rioting, and even deaths.

The All-American Girls Professional Baseball League did everything it could to keep lesbians off the diamond. Seventy-five years later, its gay stars are finally opening up.

The remarkable stories of the nine other women in the Harvard Law class of ‘59.

One of the last interviews with the congressman and civil-rights legend, who died Friday.

The lives of elevators.

Cryptomining in Europe’s most disputed state.

Notes on Beirut’s broken sewage system.

Our founding ideals of liberty and equality were false when they were written. For generations, black Americans have fought to make them true.

To speak of the human as such, as the modernists did, is like taking a piece of the wild, putting it into a petri dish, adding bleach and antibiotics until more than half of what’s in there is dead and then celebrating the barely-living remains as “the human.” Provocatively put, the human is a sterile abstraction, a harmony of illusions.

On the racially motivated destruction of Tulsa’s Greenwood district.

Even within a single apartment building, neighbors experience different temporalities. In one unit, we have a single extrovert experiencing the acute trauma of being forced to work alone from home. Next door, we have parents suddenly juggling childcare and work. At the end of the hall is an immigrant using WhatsApp to track the fate of family members on the other side of the globe who are suddenly physically unreachable due to travel bans. Even members of a single household experience pandemic time differently.

The quest to transform this country cannot be limited to challenging its brutal police.

Our economy is built on Americans of all class levels buying things. What happens when the ability—and desire—to do so goes away?

More than 40 years ago, pioneering author Jim Fixx’s best-selling book brought jogging to the masses, espousing its physical and emotional benefits. Now, those themes resonate more than ever with a homebound society.

One man’s quest to save the music of the Holocaust.