Twenty years ago, ‘Grand Theft Auto III’ set a new standard for open-world video games. The titles it inspired have grown bigger and busier, but it takes more than massive maps to give gamers the freedom they felt on their first trip to 3-D Liberty City.

If you are young and you should write asking to see me and learn how to be a somber literary man writing pieces upon the state of emotional exhaustion that often overtakes writers in their prime -- if you should be so young and fatuous as to do this, I would not do so much as acknowledge your letter, unless you were related to someone very rich and important indeed. And if you were dying of starvation outside my window, I would go out quickly and give you the smile and the voice (if no longer the hand) and stick around till somebody raised a nickel to phone for the ambulance, that is if I thought there would be any copy in it for me.

In 1981, Mauritania became the last country on Earth to abolish slavery. The law had little effect; at least 140,000 people are still enslaved today. Their best hope for freedom is an abolitoinist named Biram Dah Abeid.

A woman travels with a band on the way to their next show.

“You are reading this because you have no idea what NASA is doing. And NASA, tongue-tied by jargon, can’t figure out how to tell you. But the agency is engaged in work that can be more enduring and far-reaching than anything else this country is paying for.”

Relief pitcher Donnie Moore is best known for giving up a crucial home run during Game 5 the 1986 ALCS. It’s not what led to his suicide a few years later.

Catch shares are touted by the government and environmental groups as the solution to overfishing. But for a new generation under the system, the economics consist mainly of “absentee landlords, brokers and bankers, [and] fish quota that costs more than your house.”

“For the first few days after the surgery, it was difficult to separate out my newly implanted sense from the bits of pain and sensation created by the trauma of having the magnet jammed in my finger.”

Welcome to Wakaliwood, where a resourceful producer in the slums of Kampala makes action movies like Who Killed Captain Alex? Uganda’s First Action Movie for about $200 apiece.

In California, Jeff Lee is a business school student at Stanford with an almost unhealthy work ethic and a penchant for selfies. In Malaysia, he’s teaching women how to win beauty pageants.

In 2009, three followers of an Oprah-endorsed motivational speaker named James Arthur Ray died in an Arizona sweat lodge. Now, after serving two years in prison for negligent homicide, Ray is trying to get back on the self-help circuit.

A comic who had previously refused to discuss his private life opens up for the first time, riding high on the surprise success of Blazing Saddles more than thirty years into his career.

David Headley helped plot the Mumbai terror attacks. Now his best friend is on trial for conspiring with him. The prosecution’s key witness: David Headley. The story of an informant trying to save his own life from the witness stand.

The police told Lara McLeod to report her rape. Then they arrested her for lying.

The city of Cleveland is on the hook $18.7 million in judgements for police brutality. They have a plan to get out of paying. And if it works, cities across the country could starting using the same maneuver.

In 2006, Alexander Litvinenko, a former Russian spy working for British intelligence, was poisoned. As he lay dying, he worked with detectives to find his killer.

When he disappeared four years ago on Turkey’s tallest mountain, Donald Mackenzie wasn’t trying to reach the summit. A true believer, Mackenzie was looking for Noah’s Ark.

Every time a bicyclist rides on an open road, we entrust their lives to a safety net of legal protection and basic human decency. That system has failed.

Kate Matrosova was a classic overachiever and, at 32, had everything to live for. Still she set out alone into the mountains of New Hampshire—and a deadly storm.

An oral history of Saturday Night Live.

Part of our guide to SNL for Slate.

On the mysterious disappearance of a beloved coding legend (and his code) with stops along the way for a short history of programming languages, an ethnography of code-based communities, and an inquiry into what it means to “die young without artifact.”

On Easter Sunday, 2008, a boat called the Alaskan Ranger went down in the Bering Sea. Forty-seven people were left to fend for themselves in 32-degree water. Forty-two survived.

Ten years ago, a pair of legendary TV executives decided it was time to change the formula for football broadcasting. One bet on Dennis Miller. The other bankrolled Vince McMahon and the XFL.

A survey on where the industry is headed. Says one agency veteran: “Marketing in the future is like sex. Only the losers will have to pay for it.”