The best books for long sticky days are the ones that unwind slowly, ideally over the backdrop of erotic tension and impending doom: This summer, while we’re all stuck more or less away from other people, I’d suggest Donna Tartt’s 1992 novel The Secret History. And if you’ve already read it, try reading it again.

Like many high school girls living in the early 2000s, I thought there was no higher fashion power in the universe than Carrie Bradshaw. I remember watching an episode from the first season, one of those frantic, self-encapsulated episodes that tells the whole story of a relationship in one 30-minute chunk. Carrie…

I remember when reality TV was young, the Osbournes had so much fun throwing hams at people and picking up dog poop. I did not, however, remember that Elton John had a pivotal role in the inception of the genre, specifically that which is focused on the lives of celebrities. But such is his claim in his compulsively…

Let me paint you a picture. It’s May 1999. Amazon exists, but you have never shopped online in your life. You open the latest issue of Reader’s Digest, with the cover lines: A Love Too Strong to Die; Handle Stress Like a Pro; Credit Card Fraud; UFOS: A Second Look; and It’s Tomato Time! You flip through, and your eyes…

Dr. Ross Slotten didn’t set out to become an AIDS specialist. It just happened. He and another doctor had opened a practice in Chicago in 1984, after having established themselves as gay-friendly practitioners. With the clientele of gay men came AIDS. And with AIDS came the realization that Slotten could do little to…

This year, Father’s Day and the birthday of William, Duke of Cambridge, fell on the same Sunday. Kensington Palace went all out on Instagram, with pictures of William and his three children piled cheerfully together on a swing; another of the four rolling around on the grass happily; and—perhaps most arresting of…

Teaching writing to people in their late teens and early twenties is mostly just saying, “Write literally anything on the paper; it’s going to be bad” over and over again until the student writes a bad thing on the paper. Because that’s all being a writer is: writing things that suck, re-writing them, having them…

The picture of Innocence has a conspicuous face. She is round-cheeked with youth, and guilelessly alert, her limpid eyes awaiting anything and suspecting nothing. She might wear white. She likely is white. She could bear a resemblance to the subject of Sir Joshua Reynolds’s late 18th-century painting, The Age of…

In Jezebel’s newest series Rummaging Through the Attic, we interview nonfiction authors whose books explore fascinating moments, characters, and stories in history. For our first episode we spoke with Kristen Richardson, author of The Season: A Social History of the Debutante, a nonfiction work that explores the…

The Fourth of July creeps closer and closer by the day; temps are finally sweltering. In other words, it’s a great time to look back at the swimsuits of previous decades for a little mood board creation.

Megan Reynolds: Last week, my partner-in-crime Emily Alford expounded beautifully on how My Sweet Audrina is an entry in the canon of the female Gothic novel, sitting alongside works like Daphne du Maurier’s Rebecca but meant for teenagers and not adult women. Perhaps that explains why MSA traffics in such high…

The revolution started with a handjob. Or something like that. On August 28, 1956, an astronomer named Frank Kameny was arrested after hidden police officers observed, through a public restroom’s ventilation grille, Kamney make sexual contact with another man while both stood at urinals. Later, during his…

Legally, Katie Darling was already free on June 19, 1865, when Major General Gordon Granger arrived in Galveston, Texas, under federal instruction to occupy the Confederate state. Backed by almost two thousand Union soldiers, Granger stood on a balcony in the center of town reading General Orders, No. 3: “The people…

The various project by the Works Progress Administration, ranging from beloved public buildings to invaluable photograph collections, are an iconic aspect of American history. The beautiful posters advertising the National Parks are particularly famous. But they’re just a small fraction of the total number of posters …

Everything’s a mess, but you know what? It’s still summer, and that means it’s summer reading time. What are you reading, and where are you reading it? Thrillers in the yard? Romance novels in a hammock installed in your living room? Celebrity biographies from the ’70s in your bathtub?

Before re-reading My Sweet Audrina for this book club, I read it exactly once a quarter of a century ago, yet all these years later, I can remember the plot like it’s a story from my own childhood. For years, I’ve gotten drunk and told the story of My Sweet Audrina to friends who are both unfamiliar and refuse to…

Turn-of-the-century seed packets are eye-catching works of commercial art, full of great lush images of roses and other flowers in vivid colors. The Smithsonian Libraries has a collection of 10,000 seed and nursery catalogs, built on a big donation made by Mrs. David Burpee, of the seed company Burpees, many of which…

All over America—and increasingly, across the world—statues are falling to the ground. They’re being pushed or pulled by coordinated teams of protesters or, if the project is too big for anything less than a professional crane crew, covered in vivid, colorful graffiti. It began with Confederate monuments and moved to…

In the space of five days, at least 13 members of the National Book Critics Circle’s 24-member board of directors have resigned following one of its few black directors alleging racism within the organization on Twitter. The nearly 50-year-old non-profit organization—one of the most prominent literary associations in…

From Nella Larsen’s 1929 novel Passing to Philip Roth’s The Human Stain, the act of racial passing has long fascinated the literary world. Born of a culture that values whiteness over blackness and which uses violence to reinforce this order, the literature that examines racial passing has tragedy at its core:…