Wikimedia Commons/White House Historical Association It’s a familiar chapter in our history, part of the triumphant narrative of westward expansion: In 1803, the United States bought a massive chunk ...

ANCHORAGE, ALASKA—Until the summer of 2014, 16-year-old Florence Mbabazi had spent all of her short life in northern Rwanda’s Gihembe Refugee Camp, a humming sprawl of more than 3,000 mud houses with ...

Photograph by Jason Kempin/Getty Images. As people were getting ready for the holiday season and its accompanying waist expansion late last year, Dr. Mehmet Oz let viewers of his TV show in on a ...

In the summer of 2004, Angela Duckworth, then a graduate student in psychology at the University of Pennsylvania, went up to West Point to study 1,200 new cadets. The first-years were about to start ...

In his 1919 manual for screenwriters, Ten Million Photoplay Plots, Wycliff Aber Hill provided this taxonomy of possible types of dramatic "situations," first running them down in outline form, then ...

Unlike a construction company paid by the government to build a bridge, Walmart doesn't have to disclose how much the government pays it through the food stamp program. Photo-illustration by Slate.

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 ...

Daniel Engber is a columnist for Slate. Rep. Joseph Resnick planned to take Pepper's story to the Capitol even before anyone knew she was dead. The cigar-chomping congressman had been recruited to ...

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 ...

The play’s the thing, wherein I’ll catch the conscience of the King. — Hamlet, Act 3, Scene 2 1. Foul Deeds Will Rise Is it possible to kill 1 million people and then forget about it? Or if it has ...

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., ...