Twenty-first-century progressives revere the 19th-century French novelist Émile Zola as one of their own—a daring writer whose often shockingly explicit writing challenged conventional sexual and moral proprieties. But a new study of Zola’s last years reveals that it is actually progressives who might find themselves most scandalized by some of the views the novelist expressed […]

When 20th-century feminist utopian Charlotte Perkins Gilman looked at home cooking, she saw only a primitive tangle of inefficiencies.  It is far more efficient, she opined, to have professionals prepare meals using modern culinary equipment suitable for quantity production. What Gilman failed to see, however, were the considerable benefits that come with home-cooked family meals. […]

Long known as a land of Confucian social solidarity, Japan has felt the influence of American-style individualism in recent decades, an influence corrosive of marriage and family life. Indeed, in a recently published study, social psychologist Yuji Ogihara of Kyoto University and the University of California, Los Angeles, measures the increasing strength of such individualism […]