Left to right: Lady Ottoline Morrell, Mrs. Aldous Huxley, Lytton Strachey, Duncan Grant, and Vanessa Bell, July 1915

The Bloomsbury Group: A Reading List

In 1905, a group of writers and painters gathered in a London home and began a conversation on politics, love, sex, and art that lasted decades.
A woman working late at night on business plans

How to Headhunt for “Singapore Inc”

Some upwardly mobile Singaporeans who have worked abroad may express their buy-in through coming-of-career narratives.
From the cover of Published by the Author

Self-Publishing and the Black American Narrative

Bryan Sinche’s Published by the Author explores the resourcefulness of Black writers of the nineteenth century.
J. Robert Oppenheimer

The Annotated Oppenheimer

Celebrated and damned as the “father of the atomic bomb,” theoretical physicist J. Robert Oppenheimer lived a complicated scientific and political life.
Fernando Pessoa, 1914

“The Poet Is a Man Who Feigns”

Portuguese modernist Fernando Pessoa channeled a grand, glorious chorus of writers—heteronyms, he called them—robust inventions of his unique imagination.
A woman at a desk with digital windows flowing behind her

Digital Overload

How can contemporary biographers contend with the explosion of materials at their disposal?
A cartoon of a woman's hand holding a microphone

Honey Cocaine’s Unexpected Cambodian Canadian Life Story

The Toronto rapper embraces a patois-inflected “bad gal” image to tell a deeply personal story about historical violence.
Lester Young playing at a charity concert held at the Philharmonic Hall, 1953

The Scholars Charting Black Music’s Timeline: Douglas Henry Daniels & Paul Austerlitz

Daniels and Austerlitz tell the story of jazz, from its origins in the blues, gospel, and funk to its impact on music around the world.
An illustration of mermaids from Puck, 1911, by Gordon Ross

Mermaids: Myth, Kith and Kin

Ariel epitomizes mermaids now, but these beguiling creatures precede her by millennia, sparking imaginations the world over with a hearty embrace of otherness.
Photograph: French fashion designer Christian Dior sketches a dress at his salon in Paris, France, February 1948

Source: Getty

Christian Dior vs. Christian Dior

The designer’s impulse to convey his two selves to the public stemmed from a desire to be seen as genuine artist working in a world of artifice.