Hiking through the Hollywood Hills, one finds a lot of garbage. There's the usual bottles and cans of various types, old bits of carpeting, couches, bones, bicycles, even old cars sometimes. They all have (little h) history. Someone had to truck it up there and leave it, either to get rid of it, or to live in it, whatever. But very little has (capital H) History to it. more ›

It started, as many good things do, with the internet. In the early aughts (what all the cool kids are calling the ‘00s these days), a group of people assembled in an imaginary space to collect and trade cheesecake photos taken in the late nineteen forties to the early nineteen sixties. As the site describes it, this is not pornography; it is “young ladies in various modest states of undress.” (Though let’s not fool ourselves, my conservative grandparents, raising their children contemporaneously in New Jersey would have considered these girls fallen, and trashy. Still, in the tide of starlets who “accidentally” leak their amateur porn and nudie photographs and the press that both hounds and glorifies them, these pictures seem charming and innocent.) more ›