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 ...

Photo illustration by Lisa Larson-Walker. Photos by Spencer Platt/Getty Images News Photo illustration by Lisa Larson-Walker. Photos by Spencer Platt/Getty Images News,Mikhail Svetlov/Getty Images.

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 ...

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 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 ...

It’s so nice to be needed even after you’re dead. That’s what I was thinking during the rehearsal dinner for Pocahontas and John Rolfe at the Williamsburg Lodge, off Route 60 in Virginia. Actors play ...

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 ...

This essay originally appeared in Boom: A Journal of California. In March 2011, after signing our names so many times that our wrists ached, my wife and I took into our weakened hands the keys to a ...

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; ...

First page from The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano, or Gustavus Vassa, the African. Courtesy of the British Library This document supplements Episode 2 of the History of American ...

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 ...