If witches didn't exist, early 20th century reverend Montague Summers would have had to invent them

The popularity of botanicas point to the failures of the Catholic Church to properly provide for its own

The famous photographs of Lincoln assassination co-conspirator Lewis Powell show modern self-consciousness being born before an indifferent lens.

A new dystopian novel in the classic mode takes the form of a "dictionary of madness"

Is Indian history—or are Indians, for that matter—actually real?

The short-lived electronic subgenre witch house lingered in the emotional crawlspace beneath contemporary pop

An economy intent on exhausting people has already exhausted everything else

Though males vastly outnumber females in China, shengnü—“leftover women”—haunt the country’s imagination

Looking your best is never just about you; glamour is a spell and a grammar

The account of a self-styled "rogue" sociologist studying upwardly mobile sex workers and drug dealers fails as scholarship and as memoir.

Aspiring for middle-class life in Tehran can become an occult pursuit

The Hollywood witch’s real oath isn’t to the goddess or Satan—it’s to have and to hold

The first book in the subfield of Hello Kitty studies, Pink Globalization explores Kitty's kawaiipolitik

Only director Uwe Boll's incompetence permits his films to make a radical critique of contemporary violence

There is no longer anywhere “off the grid;” you are always on someone’s grid, and you are never far from someone’s battlefield

When I wrote this essay a year ago, there weren’t any literal Nazis in Breaking Bad and the show was about drugs. Neither of those things are true now...