Tag: Slate

Compromise and political reform only take you so far; sometimes you need to shake the whole system.

How do you hold down the fort when the fort is on fire?

This week, we’re sharing stories from Jane Mayer, Michael J. Mooney, Elisa Gabbert, Nicole Chung, and Ashley Fetters.

“To my surprise, Disney World was not a difficult place to be while in mourning. To me it didn’t feel like an escape from grief, so much as a continued break from unendurable real life.”

“He once describe Miss Piggy to me as having come from a litter of 17 pigs, but her mother only had 16 nipples. And if you don’t know that about her, I don’t know that you can really express who she is.”

A survey of recent reads says that psychedelic drugs like psilocybin and LSD are not only enjoying a renaissance — they might actually be helpful to humans.

Here are five stories about utopian societies.

For so long, conversations about money were considered gauche. With every essay and podcast episode, that taboo is broken down.

Below, our favorite stories of the week. Kindle users, you can also get them as a Readlist. Sign up to receive this list free every Friday in your inbox.

At Slate, correspondent Isaac Chotiner has a fascinating discussion with Rukmini Callimachi, The New York Times‘s intrepid correspondent on the al Qaeda and ISIS beat. The interview reveals the very human aspects of a reporter who is dedicated to revealing the very human aspects of terrorists—including her husband’s request that she not check her phone […]

Six stories about our relationships with our hair.

The best stories of the week, as chosen by the editors of Longreads.

Below, our favorite stories of the week. Kindle users, you can also get them as a Readlist. Sign up to receive this list free every Friday in your inbox. * * *

The best stories of the week, as chosen by the editors of Longreads.

How do you write about someone without her involvement?

On September 21, Eliel Cruz tweeted, “If you’re an LGBT journalist and you don’t produce even one piece of content for #BiWeek you’re not an LGBT journalist.” Cruz’s words hit me in the chest.

[Marcia] Mogelonsky speculated that red was nonthreatening and lacked the acidic quality that can turn people off lemons and other citruses. But it’s not only that. The importance of the color red, sometimes over or in place of specific flavors, is notable. What is fruit punch, when you think about it, but a generic, noncommittal […]

Always the kind of personality who cut through false distinctions, Coleman could boast a lineage both in punk rock and, with his collective-improvisation aesthetic, in the very music that punk rock often claimed to set out to destroy, hippie psychedelia and stadium rock. Bassist Jack Bruce of Cream, who had a jazz background, told the […]

Many people say the 1960s ended at Altamont, when the Hell’s Angels fatally stabbed an eighteen year-old black man named Meredith Hunter during a huge, Woodstock-like music festival. The Rolling Stones were playing “Under My Thumb” during the murder, just feet away. In Slate, Jack Hamilton writes about the album the Rolling Stones recorded after […]

As we drive to an office in nearby Pembroke Pines, Wilson briefs me on the bourgeoning business of international kidnapping. The White House’s recent acknowledgment of the accidental killing of two al-Qaida hostages in Pakistan in January, as well as the dark news from Syria in recent months, both overshadows and underscores the fact that kidnappings are […]

Below, our favorite stories of the week. Kindle users, you can also get them as a Readlist. Sign up to receive this list free every Friday in your inbox. * * *

Nick Leiber | Longreads | March 2015   The first battery, a pile of copper and zinc discs, was invented more than 200 years ago, ushering in the electric age. Subsequent versions led to portable electronics, mobile computing, and our current love affair with smartphones (1,000 of which are shipped every 22 seconds). Now batteries […]

Andrew Odlyzko, a mathematician and bubble expert, proposes a simpler theory explaining speculative panics in his study on the British Railway Mania of the 1840s. Odlyzko credits Railway Mania in part to a “collective hallucination,” an extreme form of groupthink wherein a significant chunk of society feverishly buys into a shared dream with no regard for the skeptics and […]

Our favorite stories of the week, featuring, The New Yorker, Die Zeit, Jezebel, The New York Times, and Slate.

Here are five stories born of adultery. Read about technological advancements for philanderers and their cuckolds, personal perspectives from the cheater and the cheatee, a forbidden lust-fueled crime story, and a piece on how adultery became bedfellows with American popular culture and music—back in 1909. 1. “The Cuckold” (James Harms, Guernica, February 17, 2014) “The cuckold […]

Below, our favorite stories of the week. Kindle users, you can also get them as a Readlist. Sign up to receive this list free every Friday in your inbox. * * *

Whales make calls for a number of reasons—to navigate, to find food, to communicate with each other—and for certain whales, like humpbacks and blues, songs also seem to play a role in sexual selection. Blue males sing louder than females, and the volume of their singing—at more than 180 decibels—makes them the loudest animals in […]

When I was 3, my parents tried to plop me into a ski resort day care so the three of them could explore the mountain, but apparently I refused to sit around rearranging blocks with those other babies. My mom tried unsuccessfully to position me between her legs and launch me onto my own skis, […]

In 2013, for the first time in the 55-year-history of the Billboard Hot 100, not one black artist lodged a number-one single. (Of the eleven songs that held the spot for some portion of the year, four were hip-hop, and four featured black singers or rappers in guest roles.) There’s been round, sustained clamor over Macklemore’s […]

Below, our favorite stories of the week. Kindle and Readmill users, you can also get them as a Readlist. Sign up to receive this list free every Friday in your inbox.