Michael Waters

Kelly Killoren Bensimon is no stranger to a career pivot. In 2009, she joined the cast of the Real Housewives of New York after having worked as a model and jewelry designer. Two years later, she left the show and did what many people with a bit of fame and a lot of marketing savvy do: She wrote books. She launched a line of fragrances, then candles, then outerwear. But by 2017, she’d realized that her skills were suited to what might have once seemed like a more quotidian job.

Around the 1920s, a certain class of parents—those with enough money to indulge their kids from time to time—started to panic. Toy companies and trinket manufacturers were buffeting kids with ads, and children were pestering their parents for gifts. Many parents wanted their kids to have these new luxuries, but they also wanted them to understand that money had limits.

In February 1987, members of a queer-student group at Queens College, in New York, started jotting down their private thoughts in a communal composition book. As in a diary, each entry was signed and dated. Members wrote about parties they’d attended, speakers they wanted to invite to campus, questions they had about their sexuality. The book, now housed in an archive at the college, was also a place to vent and snipe. In November 1991, a student wrote in all caps, “I HATE QUEENS COLLEGE.

Fifty years ago, you couldn’t watch a live televised event without the possibility that a nude person might beeline past the camera. Streaking burst onto the scene in the 1970s, when media outlets began writing about college fraternities embracing the practice, and it quickly grew into a cultural phenomenon. Streakers crashed the Oscars, the Olympics, Wimbledon, a handful of rugby games, a Pan Am flight, and a plaza on Wall Street.

One of the through lines in Grease, the 1978 John Travolta and Olivia Newton-John musical, is the squelching of chewing gum. Members of the Pink Ladies, a rebellious clique of high-school girls, repeatedly appear on-screen either smoking cigarettes or chewing the confectionery. In the film, gum identifies the rule breakers: It was so core to Grease that a production designer claimed that he ordered 100,000 sticks for the actors.

About a year before Christine Mallinson gave birth to her first child, she and her husband agreed that all of their children would take her last name. The decision came down to family cohesion: The couple wanted their children—they eventually had two—to share a last name with the only cousin near their kids in age, who was Mallinson’s niece.

On a frigid January day, Ella Flagg Young—the first woman to serve as superintendent of the Chicago public-school system—took the stage in front of a room of school principals and announced that she had come up with a new solution to an old problem. “I have simply solved a need that has been long impending,” she said.

At the LGBTQ senior community where John James lives in Philadelphia, residents keep busy with trips to the garden or—before the pandemic—screenings of Strangers on a Train in the rec room. James does not care for any of that right now. Each morning, he combs through medical-research databases and downloads every paper he can find on COVID-19 treatments, scribbling notes about the parts that stand out. Most days, he reads papers at his desk until 1 a.m.