Wonderful news for everyone who dreams of slicing across snowy landscapes under starry skies, tucked into a nest of damask and velvet: luxury sleeper trains are back!

In 1940, Nancy Mitford helped send her sister, Diana, to prison. Or at least, she tried—the British government probably didn’t need the additional testimony, but she gave it, anyway.

Unfortunately, I am afraid I must relocate my entire life to Yorkshire, England, because the house thought to have inspired Wuthering Heights is now a bustling B&B catering to the Bronte tourist trade—and it is for sale.

Buffy Sainte-Marie has spent more than 50 years at the center of the action, and outside of it. The indigenous Canadian singer-songwriter, a member of the Cree First Nation, was among the artists who comprised the much-mythologized Greenwich Village folk scene in the ‘60s, but her name is often left out among artists…

The stereotype of the incompetent, irrational woman journalist is resurgent. She is familiar and she’s bad news: she’s volatile, unethical, and not very good at her job, and she discredits anyone with a feminine-leaning identity who works for the press. Though we know by now she’s an illusion, a hoary trope in a…

In El Norte: The Epic and Forgotten Story of Hispanic North America, Carrie Gibson torpedoes a popular understanding of North American history by searching beyond the Anglo-centric lens through which it’s often taught. By widening the lens of history and refocusing it on the Spanish roots of North America instead of…

Reprinted from Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments by Saidiya Hartman. Copyright © 2019 by Saidiya Hartman. Used with permission of the publisher, W.W. Norton & Company, Inc. All rights reserved.

“We’ve got some books here I want to show you,” Johnny Carson told a Tonight Show audience in March 1990. He turned to a colorful stack of paperback romance novels.

The best sex, by far, is the sort that leaves you thinking about it the next day, too embarrassed to tell anyone else what happened, but interested enough to ask for more of the same the next time. Sex can be an intellectual pursuit but the best sex leaves intellect behind, instead toeing the line of vulgarity, of…

Toni Morrison first delivered “Women, Race, and Memory” at Queens College, Queens, New York, May 8, 1989. The Source of Self-Regard is out now.

“Here, in the United States, we are alarmed by new calls to adopt socialism in our country,” Donald Trump said in his State of the Union speech, adding that, “Tonight, we renew our resolve that America will never be a socialist country.”

At the 2019 Grammys, while Alicia Keys was showing off her fire piano playing skills while playing two pianos, she shouted out the artist Hazel Scott.

Today we bring you the tale of a medieval shero: Sister Joan of Leeds, who faked her death to escape a convent for a loucher life in a town 30 miles away.

Now joining the ocean of filth online: The British Library’s “Private Case” of obscene literature, which has been fully digitized, including an 18th century written under the frankly hilarious name of “Roger Pheuquewell.” Get it????

Laura Ingalls Wilder’s classic novels, based on her childhood in the late 1860s and 1870s in Minnesota’s Big Woods and on land belonging to the Osage nation in Kansas, are full of admiring descriptions of femininity on the American frontier: dresses, braids, pies, and babies. Laura’s beloved Ma, Wilder writes in a…

Earlier this week, Henri d’Orléans, Count of Paris, died at the age of 85. This throws the question of the rightful heir to the long-kaput French throne into total disarray!!!!

“One woman alone can’t do anything,” activist Eula Hall declared at the inaugural meeting of the Appalachian Women’s Rights Organization. The group had met for the first time at the Mud Creek Clinic in Floyd County, in February 1975. The regional magazine and media outlet for social movement news, Mountain Life &…

The video of MAGA hat-wearing Covington Catholic High School students, who were in Washington DC for the March for Life, in a tense standoff with Black Israelites and a Native American contingent from the Indigenous People’s March, has become hotly debated national news.

After being discovered in a cigarette box, a copy of the British erotic novel Fanny Hill dating from 1880 will go to auction next week. The book by John Cleland is, according to the BBC, “the first example of ‘pornographic prose’ in English,” which is notable! More notable to me, however, is that it utterly delights…

When a group of historians were looking at the teeth of medieval skeletons for remnants of plant microremains, they discovered a bit of lapis luzuli wedged between the teeth of a 45 to 60-year-old woman who was buried at a monastery circa A.D. 997 to 1162. And that’s weird, considering how expensive lapis luzuli was…