“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…

Bernice Sandler, who laid the groundwork for Title IX after she was repeatedly turned down for academic jobs because she was a woman, has died at 90.

I have a cat. Perhaps you have a cat. Dr. Bendor Grosvenor has a cat, who wrecked a painting he’d spent £5,000 to purchase and more besides restoring. Why do we have cats, again?

In the Los Angeles movie theater where I saw Mary Queen of Scots, the woman sitting next to me gasped every time John Knox, played by David Tennant, called Mary a whore. Which is to say, there were times during the film where I had to check and see that she wasn’t hyperventilating because Tennant-as-Knox popped up…

In 1998, Congress passed the Copyright Term Extension Act, which—like its name implies—extended the copyright of works published between 1922 and 1978 by an additional 20 years, from 75 years to 95 years. On Tuesday, January 1, that extension period runs out, and works from Marcel Proust, Agatha Christie, Edith…

On December 28th, 1981, Elizabeth Jordan Carr was born to Judith and Roger Carr in Virginia’s Norfolk General Hospital, making her the first baby conceived via in vitro fertilization in the United States. A week later, the New York Times reported, the family was released from the hospital to return home to Boston.

Here’s a nice little update: the botched “Ecce Homo” restoration, which quickly earned the new name “Monkey Christ” after going wildly viral worldwide, has actually brought new tourists and money into its small Spanish town.