American Tricon

This week, a triple header from the series American Icons, which focuses on works of art that changed the way we think about America.

First is Nathaniel Hawthorne’s “Scarlet Letter”: his 1850 novel about a woman being shamed for having an affair. Anna Sale produced this Icon segment in 2013, before starting her hit podcast Death, Sex and Money. Just four years later, her interpretation of the classic novel resonates very differently in 2017, as the country grapples with how to define consent and sexual misconduct.

Cole Porter’s “Anything Goes,” on the other hand, celebrates the opposite tendency in American culture: the devil-may-care slide towards looser morals. And in “Untitled Film Stills,” Cindy Sherman captured the way that being a woman—or maybe being a person—is just playing a role.

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