Today is “National Boss Day,” the most ridiculous fake holiday that exists.

Between 1969 and 1973, leading up to Roe v. Wade, a Chicago collective called Jane performed nearly 12,000 illegal abortions. These procedures were conducted by “medical nonprofessionals.” According to the New York Times’ new documentary on the subject, “they may have been the housewife next door, the college student…

There is nothing Hollywood loves more than working through its complex relationship to the very notion of fame. And in A Star Is Born, Hollywood tries on a theory borrowed from one of its own founding genres, the Western, rendering fame as a kind of Manifest Destiny.

The folks at AbeBooks put have together a fascinating Flickr album of vintage propaganda posters specifically related to food. It might look like a great source of images for ironic kitchen decor, but it’s really a fascinating and sometimes unsettling chronicle of how various governments tried to influence public…

Just in time for Halloween, the home of John Proctor—who was hanged after being convicted during the infamous Salem Witch Trials, and became the protagonist of The Crucible—is up for sale.

As part of a big restructuring today at Hearst, the company quietly announced that after January 2019, Redbook will become an “online-only destination.” This brings the number of original “seven sisters” women’s service magazines still appearing in print down to four.

A film festival in London is showing incredibly high quality, newly restored early films of the Victorians—in IMAX, no less, and more specifically the absolute biggest screen they could find. It’s being billed as “The Great Victorian Moving Picture Show” and frankly, it sounds fantastic.

In keeping with her history of just really great and diplomatic fashion decisions, Melania is running around Africa wearing an actual goddamn pith helmet—a big, fat metonym for colonialism—square on top of her head.

Here is a historical blind item.

An eight-year-old Swedish girl went swimming and found a thousand-year-old sword. Congrats and also condolences to this kid, who must now unite the forces of good against the advancing armies of darkness.

In 1866, the French painter Gustave Courbet painted The Origin of the World, a painting that depicts a nude, her face cropped out of the frame with vagina,
torso, and breast in the foreground. Now, French historian Claude Schopp has identified the woman depicted in the infamous painting as Constance Quéniaux, “dancer…

Now’s your chance to own a piece of hoax history: two of the infamous Cottingley fairy photos, through which a couple of girls convinced an impressive number of influential people that fairies were in fact real.

A real collector’s item for all the lewd, rude history of sexuality nerds out there: Sotheby’s is auctioning off the copy of Lady Chatterley’s Lover that belonged to the judge presiding over the 1960 obscenity trial that ultimately broke what you could publish in the U.K. wide open.

Today in 1957, nine African American students were escorted by federal troops through a screaming white crowd into Little Rock Central High School, the culmination of a bitter desegregation battle. Though of course the harassment and abuse of the students continued long afterward.

A famous act of political violence is often used to illustrate the utter collapse of civic norms in the run-up to the Civil War: the caning of Charles Sumner by his fellow congressman, Preston Brooks of South Carolina, on the floor of the Senate.

For your information: It’s the fiftieth anniversary of perhaps the best song ever written about telling a bunch of interfering, judgemental hypocrites to eat shit.

Two hundred and seven years ago this September, novelist Fanny Burney—whose works include Evelina and Cecilia—had a mastectomy. She wrote about the experience in detail that can only be described as excruciating.

During World War II, Freddie Oversteegen and her older sister Truus made strategic use of the fact that so many people fail to take teenage girls seriously—by joining the Dutch resistance and killing Nazis.

My preference is always to purchase furniture that’s gently used but solidly made, rather than Ikea. That’s why I’m really hoping I can get a good deal on Marie Antoinette’s two gilded stools and Louis XIV ormolu-mounted writing table, up for auction in Paris. That’s basically the same as Craigslist, right?

Fascinating fact of the day: The coffee filter was invented by a woman who loved coffee, but hated the whole rigamarole with those disgusting grounds.