Culture, Identity & Society

Mariya Kirichok connects J.R.R. Tolkien’s biography, faith, war experience, and love of nature to the enduring themes of Middle-earth.

Dumplings do not tell one simple story of origin. Mariya Kirichok traces the mix of cultural exchange and independent invention behind filled-dough traditions around the world.

In Amsterdam, an uncertain search for salt becomes Shreya Dharavath’s case for moving through unfamiliar places with curiosity, humility, and room for connection.

Forty-nine years after Elvis Presley’s death, his image still reveals how celebrity, commerce and cultural memory reinforce one another.

From Spider-Man to MAGA, Sangwoo Cho examines why promises of restoration have become so persuasive across American culture and politics.

Inside Barcelona's Palau de la Música Catalana, architecture, patronage and Catalan identity meet beneath a stained-glass sun.

Mingei celebrated anonymous everyday craft. Its success in museums and markets forced the movement to confront the institutions it once questioned.

A delivery rider’s poetry joins a larger tradition of working-class writers turning labor, exhaustion, and survival into art.

The 250-year anniversary of the Declaration’s signing reveals how America turned a messy political sequence into one clean national myth.

Formula 1’s calendar is a business portfolio shaped by market strategy, public funding, heritage, and the scarcity of coveted grid slots.

A disputed World Cup suspension became a test of how FIFA protects the appearance and reality of independence when political power seeks access.

The decade’s biggest nostalgia trend is less about flower crowns and more about longing for a social internet that felt spontaneous, shared and human.

The Soviet Union promised equality among its republics, but repression, deportation, and Russification left political and cultural scars that still shape the region.

Two decades after Jon Stewart confronted Crossfire, political commentary has moved online, but its incentives still reward performance, outrage, and partisan theater.

India’s Cockroach Janta Party turned an insult against unemployed youth into a national movement demanding accountability for an examination system in crisis.

Look at the roster of the French national team. Then look at the history of French colonialism in West and North Africa. The connection between those two things is not coincidental. It is the entire story. France's ability to field one of the most competitive squads in the world in 2026 is inseparable from the migration patterns set in motion by its imperial history, the communities that formed in its cities as a result, and the young men who grew up in those communities drea

The United States turns 250 years old this week. The NPR/PBS News/Marist poll released July 1, 2026 asked Americans how they feel about that milestone. The results do not describe a nation in the mood for celebration. They describe a nation that is exhausted, divided, and deeply uncertain about whether the system it inherited is capable of delivering on what it promised. The poll is worth sitting with. Not because any single survey can capture the full complexity of what 330

We are raised to not think outside ourselves, to ignore the unhoused person asking for food, to avert our eyes at the sight of struggling families desperate for medical care. The United States and similar capitalist Western cultures have cultivated a mindset of “not owing anyone anything” and of watching out for yourself above all else. This seems to remain true in closer-knit groups like family and friends as well as in larger community bodies. We have created a culture wher

Everything you see can now be yours with the click of a button: every new shirt scrolled past on Instagram, every new food trend on TikTok. Social media and online shopping have built an algorithm of wanting, and the fastest possible way to satisfy it. Online shopping platforms push products toward consumers with little acknowledgment of the environmental cost on either side of the transaction. As with most technological advances, the focus stays on human convenience, not on

From the earliest traces of humanity, our existence has been accompanied by creation: sculptures, paintings on cave walls, music, and stories. Art has been found on every continent with early human inhabitants, across nearly every style and medium imaginable. Yet humanity is often defined by its more practical inventions, as the agriculturists and the toolmakers. What about the artists? Storytellers Even before the invention of written language, humans were storytellers. Cave