65 stories from Slate
The cast and crew of Hadestown recall the night Broadway shut down"and consider what it will take to eventually reopen.
What's it like to be the woman who runs Dance Theatre of Harlem? On this episode of Women in Charge, Allison Benedikt talks to Virginia Johnson, artistic director and founding member of Danc…
The final court decision in the famous "monkey selfie" case reaffirmed that animals have no IP rights under U.S. law, which requires human authorship. For now, the same is true for any works…
It was know as the Laff Box, and it was mocked up - jerry-rigged, almost - by mechancial engineer Charlie Douglass. You've heard it on everything from The Munsters and Gilligan's Island to C…
At some point in the future, could an A.I. company manufacture something akin to a neural bridge, allowing ordinary people to occasionally share their experiences? Maybe. Elon Musk recently …
"Major event" exhibitions like the Yayoi Kusama Infinity Mirrors show and the traveling David Bowie Is show "achieve two important goals for any museum: They increase attendance, and they in…
Amos Barshad: "It's been years since the site had the kind of cultural cachet on which it built its empire. But music fans of a certain age can still rattle off the acts that landed notoriou…
Behind the aphorism's sudden ubiquity lies a long and surprising history"one that yields a fresh perspective on our present technocultural moment. It suggests that Facebook's business model …
Ohhhhkaaaay, Silicon Valley PR machine: "AR board games promise a host of advantages over their real world counterparts. They eliminate the need to set up complicated boards and remove the f…
"[Sierra] Boggess, who got her start as Ariel in Broadway's The Little Mermaid in 2007 before joining the casts of Phantom of the Opera and School of Rock, [had been cast as] Maria in a Roya…
"A 2017 European Parliament report floated the idea of granting special legal status, or 'electronic personalities,' to smart robots, specifically those which (or should that be who?) can le…
France's protectionist laws, which require a 36-month window between a film's theatrical opening and its streaming debut, seem like the last gasp of a rapidly dying era. And the manner in wh…
Parul Sehgal: "It's constant panic, and guilt, and shame. Also pajamas. No, it's a great gig, I'm not going to lie. ... It's monkish, but if you are into that sort of thing, it's bliss. But …
"For years, the Lloyd Webber canon has been a bit of a cultural punching bag. It's not hard to see why: His two most popular musicals are, respectively, a nearly plotless anthology sung by p…
Linguist John McWhorter explains the reasons (such as our language's mongrel origins) in this Lexicon Valley podcast.
Scientists studying the site have been able to present some remarkable theories. For one, we haven't found any direct evidence of a king. The city's extensive mural paintings contain no obvi…
"Twitter illustrated the enduring obsession with the latter last week when the 'We need a Disney princess who' meme - which ranged from earnest ('We need a Disney princess who's vegan and fi…
In a backstage interview with Coltrane during intermission at the Stockholm concert, a local jazz DJ noted that some critics were finding his new sound "unbeautiful" and "angry," then asked,…
Heck, it's even hard to critique science and scientific studies without looking like someone possessed by a perfection genie. "Sometimes, though, this is the only way to effect change. It wi…
Customers feared it, but "Beats executives likely knew this would be the case when they accepted the acquisition: that Beats would become a shadow of its former self, with its resources, tal…
"In this episode of Watch Smarter, Slate's video series about hidden tropes in pop culture and beyond, we trace the surprising history of cartoon sounds we all know but have never quite unde…
Linguist John McWhorter gives a rundown of what we know about how Washington, Jefferson, Adams, Franklin, and their fellow spoke. (podcast)
While The Man in the High Castle, for instance, had one of the lowest costs per first stream after its first season, $63, that number jumped up to a whopping $829 following the production…
Right-wing culture warriors and the Hollywood old guard like to argue that it's because liberal Hollywood has lost touch with its audience, but there's an ugly undertone to leveling that acc…
Videos and anecdotes of octopuses escaping from predators (and research labs), manipulating tools (and researchers), and so on have made the clever cephalopods the internet's favorite animal…
