The Metropole: Best of 2025, Something Old That’s New

[Editor’s note: To read our other selections for Best of 2025, see here] Media comes at us so fast nowadays, and along with the fragmentation of culture that has accompanied the increasing pace of society, it become much too easy to miss great works, be they film, television, or books. Our senior editors offer a […]

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The Metropole: Best of 2025, Music

[Editor’s note: To read our other selections for Best of 2025, see here] Beyond the obvious – Beyoncé, Taylor Swift, and a handful of others – there are fewer big stars, groups or bands around to set any kind of dominant sound these days. Music journalism, like much of the rest of the industry, has […]

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The Metropole: Best of 2025, Books

[Editor’s note: To see our other selections for Best of 2025, see here] How many times have you bought a book at a conference or at a bookstore, with the full intention of reading it posthaste, only to stumble upon it again twelve months later when you finely dig in? Unlike an album or a […]

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The Metropole: Best of 2025, Television

[Editor’s note: To see our other selections for Best of 2025, see here] One could argue that unlike film and music, television’s aperture has only grown in recent years. The movement of stars and directors from film to TV (which historically had been seen as inferior to the movie industry), bolder attempts at storytelling, and […]

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The Metropole: Best of 2025, Film

[Editor’s note: To see our other selections for Best of 2025, see here] Nearly five years on from the initial Covid outbreak, movies seem to be healing. For the past decade we’ve witnessed the exploits of newer talents like Greta Gerwig, Celine Sung, Jordan Peale, and Shawn Baker, among others who have delivered movies that […]

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Crabgrass Catholicism: A Discussion With Father Stephen M. Koeth About Religion and Suburbanization

By Colin Wood and Stephen M. Koeth Stephen M. Koeth’s bold new monograph, Crabgrass Catholicism: How Suburbanization Transformed Faith and Politics in Postwar America contributes to an expanding field of religious, urban, and political historiography, while elucidating how America’s largest religious denomination shaped and was shaped by postwar suburbanization. The book offers a salient reappraisal of […]

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Into the Woods: Meiji Jingu and the Hunger for Modernity

Editor’s note: This is our final entry in The Metropole theme for November 2025, Metropolitan Consumption. To see additional posts on the theme from November, see here. By Emi Higashiyama Tokyo epitomizes hunger. A metropolis spanning 2,195 square kilometers and home to 14 million people, the city operates less like an organism and more like […]

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You Can’t Eat Home Runs: Hunger and Games on Atlanta’s Southside

Editor’s note: This it the second post in our series for November, “Metropolitan Consumption.” All other entries for the theme can be found here. By Clif Stratton Atlanta will mark the sixtieth anniversary of the Summerhill Riot (hereafter Summerhill Rebellion) in 2026.[1] The spontaneous revolt of the urban poor occurred on September 6, 1966 after […]

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Congratulations to Our 2025 Graduate Student Blogging Contest Winner!

This year’s contest, The Metropole’s ninth, saw entries that considered the topic of “Light” from widely ranging perspectives, and both of this year’s entrants drew praise from the judges for “using the looseness of the blog format to make connections that might be harder in a more rule-bound academic article.” Alexandra Miller’s “Playing With Fire: […]

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Healing Wounds of Light: Birds, Cities and the Fast, Slow, and Forgotten Violence of Artificial Illumination

This post is an entry in our ninth annual Graduate Student Blogging Contest. This year’s theme is “Light.” By Charlotte Leib “Surely you’ve heard about the penguins,” behavioral ecologist Joanna Burger remarks. I am speaking with Burger, a Distinguished Professor of Biology at Rutgers, because I’ve reached an impasse—the historian’s equivalent of night. I’ve been […]

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