Seyward Darby

What do a Real Housewife, an Olympic athlete, and a doula have in common? They’re all being paid by an ad-tech startup as influencers — peddling not products but ideologies: Like baseball, selling influence is a pastime that rarely gets reinvented. There are only so many ways to get a person to do the thing […]

A writer who grew up in poverty describes how lying, at first a means of survival, transformed into something deeper and darker: I spun lies from truth with such skill that I sometimes lost track of which was which. Living with lies is much easier if you can manage to keep them simple. Selling them, […]

The most tearjerking, hilarious, satisfying, and shocking death scenes in 2,500 years of culture, chosen by Slate editors and contributors. Needless to say, this piece contains spoilers: Pac-Man in Pac-Man Author: Toru Iwatani Year: 1980 Original medium: Video game What fictional entity has as much experience with death as an arcade character, for whom existence is but a […]

Steve Bannon is still scheming. And he’s still a threat to democracy: There’s a scene I keep looping back to in Errol Morris’s 2018 documentary about Bannon, American Dharma. Bannon is recalling his Hong Kong days in the 2000s, when he was working for Internet Gaming Entertainment. He notes how stunned he was to discover how […]

How do we understand Americans’ utter disinterest in protecting one another — and themselves — from COVID? One writer looks to Sigmund Freud for answers: As Freud saw, the real opposite of both love and hate is in fact something else altogether: indifference. And here lies the true horror of the death drive: it is […]

For the film’s 25th anniversary, Vulture compiled an oral history of Contact, the sci-fi movie that defied Hollywood norms and made it big anyway. Here are Jodie Foster and Matthew McConaughey: Foster: Nobody was computer literate at the time. I remember the first day with the technical adviser, [“We had Gerry Griffin on the movie,” Zemeckis […]

She has the game; she has the personality. She even has a compelling origin story. Yet few people outside of the WNBA faithful even know who Jonquel Jones is: In February, Jones tweeted out her own frustrations. “It’s all a popularity contest and politics in wbb. In mbb you just gottah be the best. In wbb you […]

June Huh wasn’t interested in mathematics until a chance encounter during his sixth year of college. Now his profound insights connecting combinatorics and geometry have led to math’s highest honor: It took Huh six years to graduate. In that sixth year, he enrolled in a class taught by the famed Japanese mathematician Heisuke Hironaka, who won […]

In the waning days of the Cold War, Rainer Sonntag helped fuel a neo-Nazi movement that still plagues Germany today. He was also a Communist spy—and he worked for Vladimir Putin: Author Regine Igel, who has studied extremism in modern Germany, believes that the East German intelligence apparatus was engaged in “massive and long-term support […]