“I found it both freeing and disturbing to spend time on a platform that didn’t ask me to pretend that I was on the Internet for a good reason.”

The making of the “five-thousand-page, five-volume book, known formally as the Dictionary of American Regional English and colloquially just as DARE”:

What joking names do you have for an alarm clock? For a toothpick? For a container for kitchen scraps? Or an indoor toilet? Or women’s underwear? When a woman divides her hair into three strands and twists them together, you say she is_____her hair? What words do you have to describe people’s legs if they’re noticeably bent, or uneven, or not right? What do you call the mark on the skin where somebody has sucked it hard and brought blood to the surface?

Whoever wants to enchant America’s conservative base as well as independents looking for a steady hand amid economic upheaval must try to grasp what has carried Cain this far — what not only shields him from spectacular attempts at self-immolation but also, with each incident, seems to make him stronger. Why, with this candidate, do the laws of physics seem not to apply?

Imagine a community of great possibilities and prosperity built by Black people for Black people. Places to work. Places to live. Places to learn and shop and play. Places to worship. Now imagine it being ravaged by flames.

On Thanksgiving weekend, I received a phone call informing me that we had just captured approximately 300 al-Qaeda and Taliban. I asked all our assistant secretaries and regional bureaus to canvass literally the world to begin to look at what options we had as to where a detention facility could be established. We began to eliminate places for different reasons. One day, in one of our meetings, we sat there puzzled as places continued to be eliminated. An individual from the Department of Justice effectively blurted out, What about Guantánamo?

I can’t ask anything. Once in a while if I’m forced into it I will conduct an interview, but it’s usually pro forma, just to establish my credentials as somebody who’s allowed to hang around for a while. It doesn’t matter to me what people say to me in the interview because I don’t trust it.

The main thing that attracts me to Buddhism is probably what attracts every artist to being an artist—that it’s a godlike thing. You are the ultimate authority. There is no other ultimate authority. Now, for some artists that’s difficult, because they want to have the art police. They want to have the critic who hands out tickets and says, “That’s too loose.”

A profile of legendary L.A. crack dealer Freeway Rick Ross, now out of jail and trying to sell everything from weaves to his own biopic, written by a journalist who has known him for decades.

How a serial killer and his teenage accomplice used listings for “the job of a lifetime” to lure their victims, all down-and-out single men, to the backwoods of Ohio.

The question for researchers isn’t “How smart are dolphins?” It’s “How are dolphins smart?”

When an accountant decided to call foul on Halliburton’s financial record-keeping, he thought he was doing the right thing. He spent 10 years fighting for the courts to agree.

The holdings of the Seattle Art Museum are historically male-dominated. When Matthew Offenbacher won a prize for his own art, he decided to use it to beef up their queer and female holdings.

Why Berhanu Nega traded a tenured position in Pennsylvania for the chance to move to a rustic Eritrean bungalow and lead a revolutionary force against an oppressive regime.

There are a thousand ways to buy weed in New York City, but the Green Angels devised a novel strategy for standing out: They hired models to be their dealers.

To read the transcript of Erin Hunter’s trial, which runs all of 81 pages and can be digested in half an hour, is to encounter a disregard for human dignity instrumental in producing the most sprawling system of incarceration in the world.

Terry Albury, an idealistic F.B.I. agent, grew so disillusioned by the war on terror that he was willing to leak classified documents—and go to prison for doing it.

Lance Butterfield was the captain of the football team, had a 4.0 GPA and a girl he loved. It wasn’t enough for his dad. And then his dad became too much for him.
Part of our guide to Skip Hollandsworth’s true crime writing at Slate.

In 2017, the Hall of Fame Louisville coach’s career collapsed under a string of scandals, leading to his firing from the school he had coached for 16 years. Now, Pitino is finding himself in Greece, coaching Panathinaikos, working for a self-styled Bond villain, and enjoying a new chapter of his life.

In the years before World War II, Zacharewicz shined at Cannes and was wooed by Samuel Goldwyn but when the Nazis occupied Poland, he was sent to Auschwitz for defending his Jewish countrymen: “For him, the choice was easy.”