I used to think it had to do with male sexual fantasies about bikini bottoms, but a journalist disagrees — The appeal of SpongeBob SquarePants used to strike me as nakedly Freudian. Even kindergarteners must sense that there’s something racy about a character who lives in a place called Bikini Bottom, or just about the words “bikini” and “bottom.” But James Parker, a writer for The Atlantic, suggests that such…

They were doing a lot more than you probably learned in school — In American schools the history of black women typically begins with the abolitionists Harriet Tubman and Sojourner Truth. But black women have been arriving on American soil at least since 1619, the award-winning historians Daina Berry Ramey and Kali Nicole Gross show in their estimable A Black Women’s History of…

No law says you can’t open your Mac when everyone else is making potato salad — Americans who earn their living by writing — whether they prefer fiction or nonfiction — tend to take a harsher view of Stephen King’s On Writing than do students or other newbies. I’ve been doing research for a Medium story on why this is so — and on how King’s…

‘The Killer Angels’ shows how the Battle of Gettysburg halted Gen. Robert E. Lee’s invasion of the North — An old joke says that South lost the Civil War because the Confederate Army “couldn’t win on the road.” There’s some truth to the gallows humor. On July 4, 1863, Gen. Robert E. …

Seafaring comes to life in lively children’s stories — Picture books about boats put the wind in the sails of a child’s imagination. Stories of cars and trucks often take readers no farther than the boundaries of a town. Books about boats open up worlds as their captains — young or old — steer their vessels into mysterious and…

It’s a myth that drugs cost so much because R&D is expensive — American news shows often do heartbreaking stories on people forced to choose between a necessity like food and a life-saving medicine with a sky-high cost. Drug companies typically blame such costs on the high cost of developing new drugs. Harvard Medical School’s John Abramson torpedoes the myth in his recent…

It’s a trick question, and if you know mainstream publishing, you’ll know why — Mainstream publishers talk a lot about “lists” — and they don’t necessarily mean bestseller lists or the kind you see on Buzz Feed. Sometimes they’re referring to the books a firm has in its pipeline. A publisher’s “fall list” consists of books coming out in the autumn and typically includes…

Its performances of ‘To Kill a Mockingbird’ let audience members serve as jurors — if they’re white men over 18 — To Kill a Mockingbird is taught by more ninth and 10th grade teachers than any other book of fiction, one study found — but the brutal racism it describes can remain hard to fathom. Harper Lee’s hometown brings it to life with an annual stage adaptation of the novel. At…