Humanities Magazine – Winter 2024 Issue:

Royalty Reconsidered: The King’s Beer and the Commoner’s Shirt

A new exhibition looks at Europe’s earliest societies

As visitors exit “First Kings of Europe,” the gift shop offers a kind of test. Two craft beers were created for the exhibition, a collaboration between the museum and Off Color Brewing: Beer for Kings, made from top-quality rich and ancient grains, and Beer for Commoners, made from the more modest ingredients of the poor. Beneath the racks of beer hang T-shirts with the art for each. Which identity does the visitor want to take home: commoner or king? The answer for most exhibitions celebrating the awe-inspiring treasures of royalty would be easy, but “First Kings of Europe” is a different kind of show, with an ambitious new approach to how we display and envision power, kingship, and history.

Nazi Spies in America!

Illustration of police officer looking through handcuffs like binoculars

During World War II, Axis espionage inspired a media panic, but amateurish German agents turned out to be “underwhelming”

Sam Lebovic

Harper’s Magazine – OCTOBER 2023: This issue features ‘Craving A Choice’ – Insurgency and its Threat to the Democratic Party; The Spy – An Essay On seeing without being seen, and more…

Against the Current

Joe Biden campaigning in Portsmouth, New Hampshire, July 12, 2019 © Devin Yalkin

Where’s the support for Democratic insurgents?

by Andrew Cockburn

For decades, New Hampshire has generated brisk and gratifying drama with its first-in-the-nation presidential primary. The Granite State momentously destroyed a presidency in 1968, when the Minnesota senator Eugene McCarthy ran against President Lyndon Johnson on an antiwar platform.

The Spy

Intrusive Thought, by Lenz Geerk © The artist. Courtesy the artist and Roberts Projects, Los Angeles

On seeing without being seen

by Rachel Cusk

Not long ago our mother died, or at least her body did—the rest of her remained obstinately alive. She took a considerable time to die and outlasted the nurses’ predictions by many days, so that those of us who had been summoned to her bedside had to depart and return to our lives.