Elon Musk’s 20-year-old estranged daughter responded to his rant about her
Arwa Mahdawi
Ice baths, rare steak and no masturbation: was Walt Whitman the first wellness influencer?
March 2022
BBCPhil/Davis review – Vaughan Williams’ greatest orchestral works given power and brilliance
Continuing celebrations of the composer’s 150th anniversary saw Andrew Davis conduct the Fourth Symphony and pastel shades of the Job masque
January 2022
The big picture
The big picture: Alec Soth’s American road trip oddities
The freewheeling photographer captures the strangeness of everyday life in the United States
October 2020
The networker
We need a new Walt Whitman to imagine a virtual public space
John Naughton
Where are the poet’s modern-day counterparts who will campaign for an internet that’s open to everyone?
June 2020
What Is the Grass by Mark Doty review – Walt Whitman and me
From visions of a shadowy spirit to memories of love and loss … a contemporary US poet pays tribute to the persistent presence of Whitman
November 2019
Eminent Victorians: 19th-century celebrity portraits – in pictures
As a new picture of Billy the Kid goes on sale for $1m, these photographs showcase some of the most significant people of the 19th century to be captured on camera
July 2019
Dead Poets Society: 30 years on Robin Williams' stirring call to 'seize the day' endures
Luke Buckmaster
From its enthusiasm for literature to its rousing finale, Peter Weir’s film is a salute to inspiration itself
June 2019
Walt Whitman: celebrating an extraordinary life in his bicentennial
The poet’s life and works are being explored in three exhibitions in New York, the city that saw him create some of his most profound poems
February 2017
Walt Whitman's lost novel The Life and Adventures of Jack Engle found
Described by Whitman scholar as a ‘a fun, rollicking, creative, twisty, bizarre little book’, the discovery has been made available free online
June 2016
Everyone Is Watching review – a panoramic portrait of New York
Whitman, Mapplethorpe and Edmund White star in Megan Bradbury’s beautifully written debut about what defines America’s most famous city
May 2016
Top 10s
Top 10 landmarks in gay and lesbian literature
From Walt Whitman to Colette and even Virginia Woolf, these books offer readers a vision of how we might live differently, and better
April 2016
Walt Whitman’s lost advice to America’s men: meat, beards and not too much sex
Rediscovered newspaper columns by poet Walt Whitman despair of a lack of ‘manly virility’ and promote the development of a ‘noble physique’
Walt Whitman revealed as author of 'Manly Health' guide
Thirteen-part series unearthed from the New York Atlas, which lays out plan to ‘give America a far nobler physique’
American exceptionalism: the great game and the noble way
Election season is a carnival of boastful patriotism but be uneasy about triumphal rhetoric – the US has done many great things and many terrible ones
March 2016
Volunteer finds letter written for dying soldier by Walt Whitman
Rare letter penned by American poet to wife of private Robert Jabo discovered among civil war pensions applications in US National Archives
August 2015
Paper Towns review – charming, engaging teen movie
John Green’s novel blossoms in a well-acted teen movie that rises above the usual nerdish caricatures
July 2015
Carol Rumens's poem of the week
Poem of the week: from I Sing the Body Electric by Walt Whitman
Readers recommend
Readers recommend: minimalist songs
May 2015
The Daemon Knows by Harold Bloom review – a man of great literary faith
The Yale professor writes confidently about the “dozen creators of the American sublime” he lionises - but he ignores the way power acts on their work
