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.

I’m very sorry to report that, while he has removed all the singing, the man adapting Les Misérables as a new BBC miniseries will not be adding back a bunch of carefree sex appeal. Fitting, probably, but still disappointing.

Recently I stumbled across an absolutely terrifying picture of a Christmas tree.

Yesterday, we covered the most popular (and ridiculous) toys for children in 2018. But now let’s rewind to 1898, when they—or at least one five-year-old named Marjorie—wanted toy ducks and a ball for a cat named “KittyKins.”

It’s common to evoke the notion of a simpler time, as evidenced by television programs like Leave It to Beaver and Father Knows Best, depicting white nuclear families cozy in freshly built suburbs. But really, those shows were an imaginary universe created by a very specific set of conditions—and not by widespread…

Before Barbie, who could become anything from a dedicated nurse to a Malibu socialite with the change of an outfit and a thousand accessories, there were the elegant and fragile “fashion dolls” bestowed upon wealthy little girls in the 1860s and 1870s.

For the last two years, archeologists and historians have been saying that a plan to build a 1.8-mile tunnel that goes underneath Stonehenge could have potentially disastrous effects on the surrounding areas and ruin efforts to uncover more evidence about the region’s ancestors. Today, it seems, they might have been…

Every Black Friday, the ugliness of capitalism is laid bare across the country with hours-long lines and throngs of customers trampling each other. But the usual rigamarole pales in comparison to the 1983 holiday season, when Americans went to war over Cabbage Patch Kids.

If you are curious for more details on the crime story of the century—at least for Old Hollywood/museum enthusiasts, anyway—The Ruby Slippers of Oz: Thirty Years Later, a classic text about the shoes, will be rereleased with information about the FBI’s recovery of the stolen memorabilia. But when does the…

In 1971, National Airlines introduced a new slogan: “Fly Me.”

Howard Hughes was among the most famous men of his era—and he would have been the first person to tell you that, as Karina Longworth makes clear in her enthralling new book Seduction: Sex, Lies, and Stardom in Howard Hughes’s Hollywood.

If there is a succinct moral to be found in The Favourite, it might be this: Keep your friends close, but keep your enemies closer, and—while you’re at it—why not make sure they’re actually one and the same?