Julian Lucas

The Smithsonian’s dynamic leader is dredging up slave ships, fending off culture warriors in Congress, and building two new museums on the National Mall.

UNESCO is best known for its prestigious list of World Heritage sites. But its most interesting endeavor might be a survey of humanity’s cultural practices. For two decades, the U.N. agency has been cataloguing the world’s intangible heritage, a label that it has applied to everything from truffle hunting to capoeira. There are more than seven hundred “elements” on the I.C.H. lists—kaleidoscopically arrayed in an interactive tool on UNESCO’s Web site—and browsing them can feel a bit like wanderi…

“My mom was there,” he told me recently. “My kindergarten teacher was there. My brother and sister were there.” He closed his eyes and laughed into his steepled hands. The happening was part of an experimental-art festival in his home town of Washington, D.C., and took place in a former bathroom at a shuttered school. His mother had caught word of it online, and by the time he recognized her voice among the dozen or so spectators it was too late to stop the show. Jacobs-Jenkins spent the next ha…

Cole’s work makes an art—and a necessary virtue—of close looking. Across his fiction, photography, and criticism, he combines forensic rigor with a flâneur’s faith in style and sensibility, aligning aestheticism and ethical vigilance. “Open City” (2011), his début novel, won acclaim for its portrayal of post-9/11 New York, whose buried histories of violence and displacement resurface in the course of a medical student’s wanderings. In Cole’s essays, tranquil Vermeers reveal traces of empire—silv…

Sixty years ago, a Senegalese monastery gave up the organ for the kora, a traditional calabash harp. The monks’ innovations brought the instrument to the world stage—and transformed sacred music.

“Afro-Atlantic Histories,” now at the National Gallery of Art, offers an epic survey of the diaspora.

At sixty-one, the doyenne of African pop is recording with everyone from Burna Boy to Philip Glass—and still searching for new rhythms.

The digital age enabled productivity but invited procrastination. Now writers are rebelling against their word processors.

An hour had elapsed by the time we crossed the lake: seven teens, two elementary-school teachers, one “abolitionist,” and me. I had no idea where we were, only that it was about two hundred miles from Canada, where Justin Trudeau had just won reëlection after a blackface scandal, and forty from the waters of Lake Minnetonka, in which Prince orders Apollonia to “purify” herself in “Purple Rain.” As we stepped ashore, I thought of my enslaved forebears, wondering what they might make of our strang…