One common response to the national anthem protests originated by Colin Kaepernick is to disparage them as polarizing. Joe Scarborough, host of Morning Joe, summed up this particular critique in a tweet last weekend: This may be unpopular but it is a political reality: Every NFL player refusing to stand for the national anthem helps Trump politically. — Joe Scarborough (@JoeNBC) September 24, 2017

Painting: JORDAN CASTEEL, BARACK, 2020. OIL ON CANVAS, 30 x 45”. COURTESY THE ARTIST AND CASEY KAPLAN, NEW YORK. Barack Obama was describing to me the manner in which the Mongol emperor and war-crimes innovator Genghis Khan would besiege a town. “They gave you two choices,” he said. “‘If you open the gates, we’ll just kill you quickly and take your women and enslave your children, but we won’t sla

When yellow fever swept through 19th-century New Orleans, immunity became so valuable, people were willing to go to extreme lengths for protection. When a young man named Isaac H. Charles arrived in yellow-fever-ravaged New Orleans in 1847, he did not, as one might expect, try to avoid the deadly disease, which killed as many as half of its victims at the time. He welcomed yellow fever—and, more i

Enough already. When people try to be cheerful about social distancing and working from home, noting that William Shakespeare and Isaac Newton did some of their best work while England was ravaged by the plague, there is an obvious response: Neither of them had child-care responsibilities. Shakespeare spent most of his career in London, where the theaters were, while his family lived in Stratford-

Before tales about Draco Malfoy and Harry Potter, people wrote bawdy or gross stories about Gulliver’s Travels. Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels in 1726 marked the beginning of the modern fan-fiction movement. (Culture Club / Getty) Once upon a time, writing and sharing fan fiction on the internet carried a distinct stigma. Extending other people’s universes or characters was widely seen as an

Title: "Flora: 'Let's talk as man to man'"  (Frederic Dorr Steele / Library of Congress) Not all that long ago, an American statesman of considerable influence wrote an opinion piece for this very publication, about a political issue that directly affects women. It was perhaps the finest example of mansplaining ever published. This election season, the idea of "mansplaining"—explaining without reg

Some female editors have been the target of harassment from their male colleagues—and the gender bias has spilled over into the site’s content, too. Editor's note: This article has been significantly revised post-publication to correct for factual errors in the original version.* She got into the habit of Googling her username, just in case. That’s how, earlier this year, a Wikipedia editor who go

Wes Anderson’s film uses elements of the country’s language and culture to create a fraught sense of unfamiliarity. One of the best sequences in Wes Anderson’s new stop-motion film, Isle of Dogs, is of a sushi chef preparing a boxed lunch. In a bird’s-eye shot, we see the chef’s hands pin a still-living fish, chop off its head and tail, set it to the side in a shallow bowl, and fillet the carcass.

The beloved film's portrayal of studying literature is both misleading and deeply seductive. I’ve never hated a film quite the way I hate Dead Poets Society. I expect that them’s fighting words, at least in some quarters; at least I hope they are. Because I’m trying to pick a fight here. I was in the last year of my English literature Ph.D. program in the summer of 1989, when Dead Poets Society wa

Harry Carey Jr. (L) and John Wayne (R) from John Ford's 1956 film The Searchers (Warner Bros. ) As movie genres go, the Western is a workhorse. It draws from a well of cultural symbols meant to capture the essence of America, including the freedom of the open frontier and the righteous self-determination of man. Standing tall inside this cinematic shorthand is the cowboy himself, a figure commonly

An illustration by Warwick Goble for Beauty and the Beast, 1913 (Warwick Goble) It’s easy to forget—amid the kicky tap-dancing kitchenware, the twinklingly romantic score, and the swooning waltz in both Disney versions—how strange the central concept of Beauty and the Beast is. Here, presented by the foremost corporate purveyor of children’s entertainment, is essentially a story about a woman who

Lucasfilm / Damian Dovarganes / AP / Catwalker / Shutterstock / Paul Spella / The Atlantic Until very recently, the 27-year-old New Yorker who goes by the online alias Ricca was not a Star Wars fan. She’d seen the prequels at some point long ago; she didn’t sit down and watch the original trilogy until last year, when, she said, “it was no longer appropriate not to have seen them as part of the cu

There's a lot of talk around the web about Lena Dunham's new HBO joint Girls and its lack of diversity. Part of the problem is that those of us who fit into that amorphous space of "black alternative" or "Afrobohemia" or whatever we are called today, so rarely see ourselves represented creatively.   It's worth noting the title to Kendra James' piece for Racalious--"Dear Lena Dunham: I Exist." Or c