When Josephine Anderson, a formerly enslaved Floridian, was visited by a white government interviewer in the fall of 1937, she told him a ghost story. Anderson described to Jules Frost a “white man” ...

Is genetically engineered food dangerous? Many people seem to think it is. In the past five years, companies have submitted more than 27,000 products to the Non-GMO Project, which certifies goods that ...

In 1996, the New Yorker published “Hating Hillary,” Henry Louis Gates’ reported piece on the widespread animosity for the then–first lady. “Like horse-racing, Hillary-hating has become one of those ...

Jesus Christ, Ulysses S. Grant, Ernest Hemingway, and Zach Galifianakis. Photo illustration by Lisa Larson-Walker. Photos by Getty Images, Library of Congress, Wikimedia Commons. Brian Petre has a ...

Though it may look cool, the Herman Miller Rollback chair of 1977 is not the perfect office chair. Office chairs are like shoes, but not as much fun. We spend much of our time in them. They emphasize ...

The classic American emergency exit sign—the bold red letters spelling out E-X-I-T—seems at first glance like an unimpeachable bit of sign design. The contrast between the letters and the background ...

The plight of life on foot in America was nowhere more poignantly expressed than in the conviction, just last year, of a Georgia woman for vehicular manslaughter. What brought the case to national ...

Photo illustration by Slate. Logos courtesy WTF, The Read, Welcome to Night Vale, and Radio Diaries. Sarah Koenig photo courtesy This American Life. Paul F. Tompkins photo by Barry ...

The button—with its self-contained roundness and infinite variability—has a quiet perfection to it. Running a cascade of buttons through your fingers feels satisfyingly heavy, like coins or candy; ...

“Manhattan is just all bank branches,” said Jonathan Franzen as he walked through the living room of his home in Santa Cruz, California. When he visits his former neighborhood on the Upper East Side ...

Daniel Engber is a columnist for Slate. The fourth-graders were unanimous: Quicksand doesn't scare them, not one bit. If you're a 9- or 10-year-old at the P.S. 29 elementary school in Brooklyn, N.Y., ...

Photo by Maddy Crowell I thought a bottle of red wine would be an appropriate gift to bring to utopia. It was June in Pondicherry, a sleepy beach town off the Bay of Bengal characterized by its ...