It’s the time of year when white YA writers like to engage in vitriolic Twitter wars that expose biases, necessitate hasty apologies, and require an English degree to understand. In this year’s battle, some harmless tweets about Moby Dick being boring ignited a Twitter altercation in which a well-known YA author lost…

The Crown is a problem for the Crown. Now in its fourth season the show, which takes as its subject the intertwined stories of Queen Elizabeth II’s life and the course of the 20th-century monarchy, is finally tackling the destructive public scandals of the 1990s—particularly the implosion of her heir’s first…

When Carole Jackson was a girl, she wanted “so much to be pretty,” but her reflection in the mirror—especially when she was wearing her school uniform—always let her down.

In 1980, the Christmas windows at iconic London department store Selfridges featured a romantic tableau: two mannequins, a man and a woman, swept up in a waltz, underneath a chandelier, next to a festively decorated Christmas tree. He wore the classic Prince Charming costume, topped with sash and epaulets; she looked…

At some point in the haze of binge-viewing season four of The Crown—released Sunday on Netflix—I noticed that Princess Diana had taken some time out of her busy schedule to sit in an armchair and watch what appeared to be grainy, black-and-white footage of something called “Bagpuss.” Who is she, I wondered to myself,…

A spindle whorl doesn’t look like much. It’s a small cone, disk, or sphere made of a hard material such as stone, clay, or wood, with a hole through the center. Museums often own thousands but display only a handful to the public. Even these special few, singled out for their decorative paint or engraving, are easily…

Before Megan Rapinoe was a World Cup-winning, gold medal-earning, equal pay-defending, marriage equality-advocating superstar who also happened to play soccer, she was a largely unknown athlete from Redding, California, trying to make heads or tails of her future and her own sexuality. Rapinoe, who played soccer from…

Tab premiered in 1963, in a textured glass bottle dotted with Space Age sparkles. An early ad from Mademoiselle showed a graceful hand wearing a pair of bracelets, reaching out for the drink from a peacock chair. “Doesn’t it make sense to be refreshed with sensible, modern Tab?” the ad asked. Nearly immediately, the…

Over the last week, as news networks have conducted voter postmortems about the 2020 election, pundits have been alternately puzzled, handwringing, and smug about the so-called “Latino vote.” Every time a white man in front of a red and blue map pointed to the state of Florida, that man suddenly became an expert on…

President-elect Ulysses S. Grant refused to ride to his inauguration in the same carriage as his predecessor Andrew Johnson. Widely regarded as the most divisively racist president in U.S. history, Johnson, who took office following Lincoln’s assassination, was the first president to be impeached after pardoning…

I was determined to stick it out at the Jezebel offices on Election Day 2016—despite the fact that I was 36 weeks pregnant and my body felt like a wet sack of sand. I wanted to watch America elect its first woman president with my colleagues at this supposedly feminist website. Not as an unqualified victory for all…

As a child, one of the dubious highlights of the annual Fall Festival at the elementary school was bobbing for apples—an unhygienic affectation common to the Northeast, where small children and some adults stick their faces in a tub of water, scrabbling for apples. This tradition—which hits a little different during a…

Many European nations pride themselves upon the quality and variety of their sweet baked foods. The Viennese have a particularly long and illustrious tradition of pastries, and the French often consider themselves to have elevated bakery to an art form. But these elaborate pastries and confections were the work of…

To fully understand Matthew McConaughey—actor, spiritual advisor, and all-around good-time man—one must first understand the concept of “greenlights.” Fortunately, McConaughey lays it out clearly in the opening pages of his new memoir slash spiritual manifesto of the same name. A greenlight is a sign from the…

“If you don’t have your code,” the main character of Tana French’s new novel, The Searcher, tells a little girl with a missing brother midway through the story, “you’ve got nothing to hold you down. You just drift any way things blow you.”

It’s a tough gig, marrying into the royal family. There’s a long list of contradictory rules and expectations, and if you put one foot even the slightest bit wrong, it brings down the wrath of palace functionaries and the tabloid press and self-appointed experts in royal protocol. Meghan Markle is the best example,…

“He shows up in the laundry, on the beach, in shopping center parking lots, and in cars around the schoolyard….Flasher, we call him.” So began a 1977 article in the Palm Beach Post detailing the epidemic of men who exposed themselves to women. “We laugh and giggle and make jokes about him—the fellow in the raincoat…

Akwaeke Emezi’s The Death of Vivek Oji opens and closes with photographs: “If this story was a stack of photographs—the old kind, rounded at the corners and kept in albums under the glass and lace doilies of center tables in parlors across the country—it would start with Vivek’s father Chika.” Vivek, the main…

In 1985, a group of artists formed the activist art group Guerrilla Girls, in response to a Museum of Modern Art exhibition of 169 artists with only 13 women and eight artists of color included. The anonymous group—composed mostly of artists using aliases borrowed from famous women artists, wearing gorilla masks to…

Brendez Wineglass, a 12-year-old Black girl wearing dainty earrings and a broad grin, had a very simple plan for a more just and common-sense future, mirroring that of many children living under the tyranny of sensible bedtimes, mandatory vegetable consumption, and the kid’s table at Thanksgiving. Wineglass was…