Quillette

15/10/2026

What makes a song "folk"? Stephen Wade, America's foremost archivist, has spent a lifetime finding out from the players themselves. Ronald Radosh reviews his new book, from Lead Belly and Earl Scruggs to the politics of the folk revival.

A wonderful new book by Stephen Wade, America’s greatest living folklorist, chronicles the history of the country’s folk music.

15/10/2026

In 1835, Maria Monk's Awful Disclosures told readers that nuns in a Montreal convent murdered infants and hid them in a lime pit. Investigators who examined the building found no trace of it, yet the book became one of the bestsellers of its era. This new Quillette essay sets that episode beside the 2021 unmarked-graves announcement and asks why stories of murderous clergy have proved so easy to believe, and so hard to retract.

Two centuries before the claimed discovery of non-existent ‘unmarked graves’ in British Columbia, a wave of bestselling ‘convent exposés’ purported to detail mass r**e and child murder among priests and nuns.

14/10/2026

“Populists are pretty good at diagnosing problems. They’re not great at solving them, whether they’re on the left or the right.”

Claire Lehmann puts the challenge to former Treasurer Josh Frydenberg: who’s going to be honest with voters about the deficit?

🎧 Full interview: https://youtu.be/SNIKl0hVKB4

13/10/2026

13/10/2026

Claire Lehmann interviews former Treasurer Josh Frydenberg on Bondi, antisemitism, capital gains tax, Daniel Andrews’ lockdowns and his new memoir, A Grateful Son.

“The tragedy of Bondi was so preventable, because the writing was on the wall.”

Frydenberg also explains why he believes young Australians who can’t get on the homeownership ladder are losing faith in the system, and why Australia now needs “honesty over knee-jerk reassurance.”

🎧 Listen or watch here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SNIKl0hVKB4

13/10/2026

Join us on WhatsApp 📲

https://whatsapp.com/channel/0029VbA9iJvKrWR1VwYBDZ3O

Follow Quillette's WhatsApp channel. We are a platform for free thought, committed to reason, science, and humanism.

Here we will share our latest articles, essays, and podcast episodes—no noise, just ideas.. Join 319 followers for the latest updates.

13/10/2026

For decades, archaeology's consensus held that cultures changed through the spread of ideas, not the movement of people. Over the past ten years, ancient DNA has overturned that view.

The latest from Razib Khan.

Ancient DNA has given historians a new archive, and in two decades it has settled long-running arguments about who migrated, who conquered, and who replaced whom.

12/10/2026

is often held up as the model for equal pay in sport. Every Grand Slam pays its men's and women's champions the same. But at the 2026 US Open, Alexander Zverev spent 92% longer on court than Elena Rybakina for an identical $5.5 million prize, because men play best-of-five and women best-of-three. Jukka Savolainen uses the full tournament data to ask whether "equal pay" means much when the work required isn't equal, and why the Grand Slams make the commercial value of each draw so hard to test.

Grand Slam champions take home identical prizes, but the men must win 50 percent more sets to get there.

10/10/2026

Can your genes excuse a crime?

Damien Morris reviews Kathryn Paige Harden's Original Sin and argues that its answer amounts to a kind of secular Calvinism.

https://quillette.com/2026/10/10/the-genetics-of-crime-and-punishment-original-sin-kathryn-paige-harden-review/

Despite her professed atheism, Kathryn Paige Harden insists on making quasi-religious claims about free will and moral responsibility.

10/10/2026

History keeps showing that the people punished for challenging the consensus are often the ones who were onto something. ⁠
⁠
Read more: https://quillette.com/
⁠
⁠
⁠
⁠
⁠