Veteran journalist Cokie Roberts has died from breast cancer. She was 75.

Want to know how it all turned out for the Crawleys over the course of the 20th century? Well, look to Highclere Castle, which the franchise has used as its Downton, and which is currently taking applications for Airbnb guests. Damn, those stately homes really are expensive to run, huh?

When I was in college in the Hudson Valley, I rented an apartment off-campus in the rectory of a very small Victorian church. I lived above a classics professor, with my bedroom overlooking the graveyard and the woods beyond. Sometimes, late at night, I’d hear the organist practicing. He was also the caretaker of the…

To hear tell of Instagram influencers, you’d think the art of attracting—and more importantly, holding—public attention were something new. But there isn’t a trick in the book that famed 19th-century actor Sarah Bernhardt couldn’t have taught any YouTuber out there.

Brexit has reached new heights of absurdity with the “prorogation” or temporary suspension of Parliament, which involved the special appearance of the cravat-wearing, gold-stick toting “Lady Usher of the Black Rod.” Truly they are having a normal one over there!

Most vacations feel short, but the very end of summer is when they seem most wispy and diaphanous, like they maybe never happened at all.

In July 1959, a young and disconcertingly handsome Vice President Richard Nixon turned up in Moscow in a fashionably skinny tie for the grand opening of the American National Exhibition. The exhibition was hosted by the American Embassy in Moscow and lavishly spent American tax dollars in the hope of narrowing the gap…

The concept of the summer beach read has always been a bit foreign to me. In South Florida, where I’ve lived most of my life, summer is the worst season—too hot, too humid, too rainy to even sit on the beach, let alone read a book.

A big new expedition to the site of the Titanic revealed that—you may want to sit down—the Titanic is falling apart.

A couple of years ago, I elevator-pitched my second novel as “It’s like if Little Women and Picnic at Hanging Rock were the same book.” I was only about 90 pages into writing it and, even as I said the words, not yet sure if they were at all true. So I decided I’d need to re-read Little Women just to make sure. I…

The stereotype of women converging upon public retail spaces for voracious shopping is so deeply engrained that the image seems both self-evident and timeless. Shopping and femininity are presumed to be inextricably intertwined, two sides of the same coin. But that’s nonsense; in fact, when department stores first…

Robert Ballard, the man who found the Titanic, is now searching for Amelia Earhart’s missing plane.

Jia Tolentino, a staff writer at the New Yorker, is on the precipice of releasing her first book, Trick Mirror, a collection of acutely observed essays that is befittingly receiving a compendium of breathless reviews, many of which designate her as the Joan Didion of our time. These accolades are well deserved, of…

Every year, I begin summer with lots of grand plans for all the wonderful things I’m going to read outside in the perfectly burning sunshine, or perhaps inside during a picturesquely torrential thunderstorm. I imagine late nights with page turners and slow afternoons with thought-provoking tomes. But not long after…

I grew up reading fiction about Improper Princesses; novels with one foot in the folktale boom and the other in feminism. These books are about princesses who don’t quite fit into their assigned gender roles and, despite material comfort, want more than they’re given. They want skills, adventures, dignity, power,…

Nellie Bly, the pioneering investigative journalist who went undercover as a patient in a mental asylum to report its abuses as well as traveling around the world in 80 days for a story, is getting her own monument.

As a kid, I spent my summers almost exclusively reading Stephen King paperbacks (never, ever age-appropriate) and whatever novel about anthropomorphic barnyard critters I could find (Watership Down, anyone?). While my tastes have changed as an adult, I’m also not suddenly reaching for frothy bestselling fiction with…

My summer reading list is usually kind of a bummer; during the warmer months I naturally gravitate towards stories of disease and disaster and suffering.

John F. Kennedy Jr. died young; whatever his promise, he never achieved it. He wasn’t a popular politician, or a successful actor, or a musician with a closet full of Grammys. And yet, his death two decades ago prompted wall-to-wall media coverage, absolutely dominating the news cycle for days upon days.

Here’s a bad look: A radio segment by three men on the history of America’s government-fostered tobacco dependence, without once mentioning by name the woman whose book formed the basis for the entire segment.