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.

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?