Seyward Darby

An essay on the author’s “Tinder decade” — ten years spent swiping, dating, ghosting, getting ghosted, and considering how the app shapes lives: I learned to be buoyant in the face of disappointment. So many of these dates were just people plucked out of a random void and returned to that void after. The memory […]

An authority on child sex trafficking has spent decades trying to understand whether the unthinkable happened to her, too. Together with a journalist, she went looking for evidence — and found it: Agents told Kate her father was “upset” about her allegations. “He said he wouldn’t admit to something he didn’t do just to give […]

Andres Beckett dreamed of competing in a punishing rodeo event known as the Suicide Race. But more difficult than charging down its dangerously steep track was earning a spot at the starting line: It’s not hard to see what makes the race so dangerous. There’s the hill itself, more than 200 feet of earth pitched […]

A profile of three women carrying pregnancies after New York legalized paid surrogacy in 2021: In the days following the overturning of Roe v. Wade, photos of herself with her IFs went viral on TikTok. Portia, who wore a long red dress, cradled her bump, her IFs in the foreground. Were the three a throuple? Was she placing her baby for […]

Glen McCurley was living a quiet life in Fort Worth when new DNA evidence linked him to a notorious crime: the killing of a teenager named Carla Walker, more than 45 years prior. Police suspect it wasn’t his first murder — or his last. The story of how he got caught takes some surprising turns, […]

An interview with the pioneering writer, progressive activist, and historian of all things Los Angeles, on the heels of his decision to cease treatment for his terminal cancer: SD:  The act of organizing seems to rest on hope for changing the world, but your books paint a grim picture: ecological collapse, political corruption, white supremacy, […]

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 […]