When U.S. customs law met abstract art in the form of a bird, “shimmering and soaring toward the ceiling while the lawyers debated whether it was an ‘original sculpture’ or a metal ‘article or ware not specially provided for’ under the 1922 Tariff Act.”
The emotional toll on drone pilots.
This isn't an essay or simply a woe-is-we narrative about how hard it is to be a black boy in America. This is a lame attempt at remembering the contours of slow death and life in America for one black American teenager under Central Mississippi skies. I wish I could get my Yoda on right now and surmise all this shit into a clean sociopolitical pull-quote that shows supreme knowledge and absolute emotional transformation, but I don't want to lie.
A survey of sex on a Saturday night in New York City.
A collection of profiles whose subjects—Frank Sinatra, Axl Rose, Matt Drudge, and more—wouldn’t cooperate with the writer. New at Slate.
An exposé of extralegal killing.
A profile of actress Christina Ricci.
When the Rolling Stones played Altamont.
A profile of the actress and screenwriter.
How the former Bush advisor is “reengineering the practice of partisan money management in hopes of drumming Barack Obama out of the White House.”
The rise and fall of an antiquities collector turned grave robber.
The secret is an exclusive 22-year-old archive of viewer-submitted clips.
Bill Ferguson does not believe his son, Ryan, killed a popular newspaper editor. To prove it, he’s drained his savings, performed public re-enactments of the crime, and alienated almost everyone in his Missouri city.
On the scene of the darkest games in Olympics history.
Part of our Olympics primer, on the Longform blog.
The frenzied few days before the wedding of Prince Charles and Diana Spencer.
A radical new treatment for auditory hallucinations.
How and why did 200 pages of the Aleppo Codex, “the oldest, most complete, most accurate text of the Hebrew Bible,” go missing?
Two men named Nathan committed murders. Only one received a death sentence.
The life and films of Werner Herzog.
Just days after suffering a concussion, a 17-year-old fullback hangs himself. Inside his family’s journey to learn if a brain injury is to blame.
The 1900 death of Fritz and the battle to define his legacy.
The 1920s experiment to reverse-engineer wild cows.
A college president on the bizarre experience of being informed by NBC News that he had hired a war criminal to teach French.
How Curt Schilling’s video-game company went bust.
An Englishman’s account of the first modern Olympic games.
