The Believer is a monthly magazine where length is no object. It features long articles, interviews, and book reviews, as well as poems, comics, and a two-page vertically-oriented Schema spread, more or less unreproduceable on the web. The common thread in all these facets is that The Believer gives people and books the benefit of the doubt (the working title of this magazine was The Optimist).
On each issue, Charles Burns's beautiful illustrations adorn the cover; our regular raft of writers, artists, and photographers fill the pages; and the feel of the Westcan Printing Group's gorgeous "Roland Enviro 100 Natural" recycled acid-free heavy stock paper warms your heart.

An exuberant history of American dance, told through the lives of virtuoso performers who have defined the art The history of American dance reflects the nation's tangled culture. Dancers from wildly different backgrounds learned, imitated, and stole from one another. Audiences everywhere embraced the result as deeply American. Using the stories of tapper Bill "Bojangles" Robinson, Ginger Rogers and Fred Astaire, ballet and Broadway choreographer Agnes de Mille, choreographer Paul Taylor, and Michael Jackson, Megan Pugh shows how freedom-that nebulous, contested American ideal-emerges as a genre-defining aesthetic. In Pugh's account, ballerinas mingle with slumming thrill-seekers, and hoedowns show up on elite opera house stages. Steps invented by slaves on antebellum plantations captivate the British royalty and the Parisian avant-garde. Dances were better boundary crossers than their dancers, however, and the issues of race and class that haunt everyday life shadow American dance as well. Deftly narrated, America Dancing demonstrates the centrality of dance in American art, life, and identity, taking us to watershed moments when the nation worked out a sense of itself through public movement.