July 2026

The moment someone died, a Victorian family hurried to drape every mirror in the house in black. And it wasn’t to shield themselves from their own grief. It was to shield themselves from the beyond. When death came to a

On the historical women who were silenced for knowing too much—and the fictional ones I built in their image. On the evening of February 1, 1922, Mabel Normand left the Los Angeles bungalow of director William Desmond Taylor in a

In the nineteenth century, knowing your plants was the mark of a well-bred woman. It was also, should she ever decide she needed it, one of the quietest ways in the world to commit murder. Botany was one of the

In the mid-1920s, a young woman named Louise Brooks left Kansas, danced in George White’s Scandals, and then joined the Ziegfeld Follies on 42nd Street. An infatuated Paramount producer named Walter Wanger signed her to a five-year contract after seeing