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.

There are so many auctions all the time—so many opportunities to own the castoffs of the rich and famous. But this time it’s really, truly something special: Lee Radziwill’s personal annotated copy of a biography of her sister, Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis.

Dr. Robert Ballard managed to find the Titanic’s final resting place but, for now, he has been thwarted by Amelia Earhart’s missing plane.

Because it is Friday, and Friday is a day for browsing comically unrealistic real estate listings, please get a load of my new house which, just as SOON as I scrape together £975,000 and find a lawyer in the United Kingdom, will entitle me to be called “Lord of the Manor of Mythe and Mythe Hook.” Finally, some…

A new study suggests that small pottery cups from Stone Age central Europe were, in fact, basically sippy cups used to feed animal milk to children, allowing earlier weaning and, very likely, a population boom.

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…