Everyone’s wedding looks the same on Instagram. There’s a barn, church, hotel, museum, beach, or backyard, twinkly and softly lit by tea lights, or string lights, or Edison-bulb-filled candelabras. The bridesmaids wear $300 satin dresses in jewel tones or in a carefully curated mix of complementary pastels, and hold…

The fantasy of a sexual revolution already fought and won is undone by pretty much any available statistic on straight women’s experiences of sex. There are the heart-rending numbers revealing the prevalence of faked orgasms and the yawning orgasm gap between men and women. That is to say nothing of women’s…

One of the many strengths of Rachel Vorona Cote’s debut non-fiction book, Too Much: How Victorian Constraints Still Bind Women Today, is her ability to make meaning—and light—from intersections between her own life and Victorian literature. Academically trained, Vorona Cote’s Too Much is a meticulous close-reading of…

Harry and Meghan and the success of The Crown have inspired a renewed level of interest in all the people who populate the archaic structure of monarchy. The Windsors’ increased profile means additional attention on a whole cast of characters who would normally slink unnoticed by all but the most obsessive royalist:…

Neither the actress nor the character liked the outfit, but that didn’t matter. It was the early 1980s, and Carrie Fisher wasn’t quite a household name. She was famous, certainly, and she had been acting for years, but very few actresses got to choose what they wore on-screen, especially back then. When George Lucas…

The usually plaid, usually pleated schoolgirl skirt has bled into women’s fashion for the better part of a century, serving as a template for playful, sly gestures for the wearer. On women, it might be seen as an ironic or even earnest nod to youth, while for actual school-aged girls, its formulaic nature provides a…

The Duke and Duchess of Sussex returned from their North American break and started 2020 with a big announcement: They were going their own way. “After many months of reflection and internal discussions, we have chosen to make a transition this year in starting to carve out a progressive new role within this…

The Windsors, never an institution to slouch on Christmas, are going even harder than usual. In addition to their usual festivities—a large gathering for Buckingham Palace staff, the much-photographed walk to church at Sandringham on Christmas Day, and the Queen’s annual address to the nation—Will and Kate joined…

Bestselling romance novelist Johanna Lindsey has died at 67. Perhaps best known for her pirate romances—including Gentle Rogue, which boasts what might be the single most recognizable and iconic Fabio cover—she was beloved by fans and sold something like 60 million books over the course of her career.

Are you racking your brain to figure out where on earth the various Christmas prince movies are set? It turns out they’re basically all the same place: Ruritania.

They’re all over the mystery section, climbing across the shelves, settling their furry behinds onto cute cartoon paperback covers, twining their way through tea shops and bookstores, and lounging on overstuffed armchairs in vacation island bed and breakfasts. I’m speaking, of course, of the stars of the coziest of…

The second movie proved to be the last straw for Willa Cather. Warner Bros. had first adapted her novel A Lost Lady in 1924, a year after the book was published. The film is now lost, so we can only take the New York Times’s word for how terrible it might have been. (It seems unfair to reduce a thing that can’t defend…

I don’t watch Christmas movies for the realism; I watch them for the camp factor. That’s what I assumed A Christmas Prince: The Royal Baby, third installment of the absolutely unhinged Netflix Christmas Prince franchise, would deliver. Mystery Science 3000, but make it peppermint mocha. Instead, I stumbled upon an…

In a gas station in northern Maine, just a few miles from the Canadian border, I saw a handwritten sign advertising “Coyote Faces, $3.99.” I’m incapable of looking away from anything gross, an impulse that serves me poorly in my online life, and so I went closer. Hung from metal clips, I saw a dozen dirty looking…

The latest season of The Crown is stirring up some controversy, thanks to an episode where Queen Elizabeth goes off traveling with her lifelong friend “Porchey,” Lord Porchester, to investigate the latest techniques in racehorse management. She’s not traveling officially as sovereign, creating an aura of…

Prince Andrew has “stepped back” from public duties, in the wake of a disastrous interview in which he failed to convincingly answer questions about his relationship with convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein. What exactly that means is still unclear; the word “unprecedented” is being used. But while there’s no…

Cigarettes were widely considered gross and disreputable at the beginning of the 20th century; by the end, they were on their way out of widespread public acceptability once more. In between, they were ubiquitous. The politics of that arc are the subject of a fascinating new work of history.

When Ronald Reagan and his advisors wanted to undermine the very institution of social programs, he turned to a news story out of Chicago—the tale of one Linda Taylor, who’d bilked the government benefits system out of so much money she was dubbed the “welfare queen.”

Below is an excerpt from The Queens of Animation. In the book, Nathalia Holt traces the careers of the women who broke into the vaunted animation department at Disney in its earliest days, shaping landmark elements of the company’s history from Fantasia’s “Waltz of the Flowers” to the look and feel of Dumbo and Bambi.…

Pompeii has faced so much, from earthquakes to mismanagement and underfunding to—obviously—apocalyptic disaster via volcano. But now it faces a new challenge: overtourism.