Middlebrow was the mid-century aspiration to climb through culture by checklist — Book-of-the-Month Club, Great Books, Leonard Bernstein on television — and its disappearance says more about aspiration than about art.
Five dispatches from the culture conversation: a genre-crossing album of the year, a record Broadway season, federal arts arithmetic, a registry induction, and vinyl's long second act.
One Social Security statistician priced the cheapest food plan in America, multiplied by three, and accidentally wrote the definition the country still uses.
Washington barely touches the budget. Here's who really pays for the local library.
Americans read more words than any generation in history — and remember fewer of them. The cure is not more information.
Folk was defined by how it traveled — songs passed hand to hand — and streaming changed the meaning of hands.
Mocking the abstract canvas is one of the country's oldest participatory art forms — and the museums keep selling tickets to it.
A country that industrialized craftsmanship out of existence spent two decades and billions of dollars buying it back — one Etsy shop, craft brewery and laser cutter at a time.
The same institutions get rediscovered roughly once a generation — Olmsted's heirs in the 1970s, inner-city parks in the 2000s, the whole system in 2020 — and each rediscovery says more about the country than the parks.
Every January first, another batch of American recordings slips into the public domain — and the fight over who may use the century-old heart of American popular music gets a little stranger.
Independent bookstores have died by the thousands, organized under the American Booksellers Association, and reopened in surprising numbers — because the business model turned out to be about everything except books.
X-rays, tree rings, and pigment chemistry form the forensic toolkit that decides whether a canvas is a masterpiece or a very good fake.
Roughly 86 cents of every public library operating dollar is raised within a few miles of the building, which explains almost everything about how the institution behaves when money gets tight.
A Depression-era relief program put thousands of unemployed writers — including Zora Neale Hurston and Ralph Ellison — on the federal payroll to document the country, until the House Un-American Activities Committee decided it looked like communist sympathy.
In the 1920s, American cities built cathedrals for cinema, with 6,000 seats, pipe organs, and ushers trained like cadets, and then spent forty years demolishing them.
On September 29, 1965, Lyndon Johnson signed a law putting the federal government in the grant-making business for art, and a Republican appointee named Nancy Hanks nearly made it popular.
A small New Deal publicity unit sent Dorothea Lange, Walker Evans, and Gordon Parks across the country, and the pictures they brought back became the permanent image of the Depression.
For two decades, American networks kept full symphony orchestras on staff and millions tuned in weekly, until television fired the musicians and sold the music stands.
Percent-for-art laws have quietly financed American public art since 1959 by taxing construction budgets a penny on the dollar — and they fail the same way they succeed, by being invisible.
The National Endowment for the Humanities announced $75.1 million for 84 projects in January 2026 and $41.4 million for 81 more in July — a semiquincentennial spending plan for museums, archives, and scholars.
The summer 2026 museum calendar runs from a Frida Kahlo survey in Houston to 'Basquiat × Banksy' in Washington and a Pokémon fossil show in Chicago — three theories of the blockbuster, all at once.
It looks like a gift shop. It functions as revenue engine, classroom, taste-maker, and the museum's only gallery you can take home.
Every few years America fights about a sculpture in a plaza, and the fight follows a script — here is the anatomy, from Tilted Arc to whatever erupts next.
As congregations shrink, America's surplus sacred buildings are finding second lives as galleries, studios, and performance halls — architecture doing the adapting.
The 1990 law that returns Native American ancestors and sacred objects to tribes gained real teeth in 2024, and display cases across the country quietly changed.