Equatorial Guinea is more than your average headline-making, human rights-eschewing African nation. Likening the country’s uneasy street-silence to that of Pyongyang, deported journalist Peter Maass reveals an unparalleled culture of fear blanketed by an international media blackout. But for the Whitehouse, ExxonMobil and Teodoro Obiang—Equatorial Guinea’s torturous leader—the poverty, abuse and dead-quiet are business as usual.
posted on Jun 24, 2008 - View this thread

The short films (1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6) of Scott Blaszak.
posted on Jun 11, 2008 - View this thread

Michael Lewis gets a vasectomy.
posted on Jan 22, 2008 - View this thread

Just in time for Flash Friday, Slate lists the best free online games. The first one they mention, The Tall Stump, has been on MeFi previously, but there's more—even an Infocom-style text-based game.
posted on Dec 21, 2007 - View this thread

American Lawbreaking. "This series explores the black spots in American law: areas in which our laws are routinely and regularly broken and where the law enforcement response is … nothing. These are the areas where, for one reason or another, we've decided to tolerate lawbreaking and let a law—duly enacted and still on the books—lay fallow or near dead." The first two entries are prescription drug abuse and internet pornography.
posted on Oct 15, 2007 - View this thread

If European and North American societies are morally responsible (print-friendly) for safeguarding free speech, should we also take financial responsibility for its proponents' safety (pf)? Hitchens seems to think so.

Today's moral dilemma is brought to you, of course, by the West's favourite Voltairian nightmare: prominent Islam critic, former Dutch MP, and scholar at the American Enterprise Institute, Ayaan Hirsi Ali.
posted on Oct 9, 2007 - View this thread

Taking a cue from Doritos (Frito Lay) which sponsored a contest for a user-submitted video ad to be aired during Super Bowl XKL, Mitt Romney’s campaign decided to follow suit, challenging “…you to make his campaign’s new official TV advertisement...using images and materials supplied on the campaign website.” “An online vote will help determine the winner.” Folks create ads. Folks vote for their favorite ad. “Way! He'll Set America Straight” [video] (produced by Bruce Reed) garners more votes than the other top nine finalists combined. “[T]he campaign promised 10 finalists, but today it posted only nine...” Guess which one is missing?
posted on Sep 26, 2007 - View this thread

Ronald Reagan: A Graphic Biography From the writers of Malcolm X: A Graphic Biography. [via]
posted on Sep 8, 2007 - View this thread

The 9 soap commercials Ingmar Bergman made are a little known part of his oeuvre. Slate's Dana Stevens explains how they came about.
posted on Aug 7, 2007 - View this thread

Slashdot poster has brilliant legislative reform idea: "Source Control for Bills in Congress." What if sneaky changes to pending legislation showed up as soon as they were made instead of in ominously worded media reports months later?
posted on Mar 7, 2007 - View this thread

Restaurant crybaby lashes out at NYT's Frank Bruni (pdf). Jeffrey Chodorow's new restaurant (where each diner is constantly threatened with impalement by samurai sword, apparently) got a (funny and) decidedly lukewarm review in the Times. So he took out a full-page ad to complain about it (pdf linked above), price tag: at least $30k. He also whines about it on his new blog. The word "critic" is deployed in scare quotes.
[via this Slate piece by a former NYT food critic; interesting in itself]
posted on Feb 23, 2007 - View this thread

Slate's Explainer is generally a pretty entertaining and interesting read. Now, they've posted a list of the questions they couldn't answer this year. I was wondering whether some of the AskMe crowd might just be able to knock a few off the list.
posted on Dec 21, 2006 - View this thread

Slate's ongoing "Survivalist" series lays out the steps that you can take to prepare for the disasters threatening to snuff out civilization in general (and, apparently, New York City in particular). Find out how to survive nuclear terrorism, an earthquake, a skyscraper collapse, an electronic apocalypse, and global warming.
posted on Sep 10, 2006 - View this thread

". . . after 3 minutes of reading your new site my eyes started hurting and my stomach tied up in knots." "I am in misery." Slate redesigns its website once again (previous designs here and here), loyal readership freaks out. The interweb responds here and here (note the presence of at least two positive reviews; not all is lost dear Slate!)
posted on Jun 29, 2006 - View this thread

Never Coming Home is about the families of five young men killed in Iraq. Slate presents a short documentary that focuses on the bereavement of the parents, or in one case, a brother. This portrait of grief and sacrifice is brought to life through the use of still photography and the recorded voices of family members.
posted on Jun 12, 2006 - View this thread

Daniel Gross, economics columnist for Slate, wrote on April 7 : "...if (Bush appoints) an A-list Wall Street CEO (for Treasury Secretary), I'll buy a copy of Dow 36,000 and eat the first chapter." Bush appointed Goldman Sachs CEO Henry Paulson on May 30. Today, Gross makes good on the promise.
posted on Jun 9, 2006 - View this thread

Poulpe Pulps: A gallery of pulp and comic cover art featuring octopi. Via Slate, who just commissioned a few new pulp covers for classic books.
posted on May 25, 2006 - View this thread

The Year in Culture: a different kind of 2005 roundup—influentials are asked to mention significant cultural points of the year. Hitchens on intelligent design ruling: "Just for once…one can hear the lucid tones of reason, detachment, culture, and irony"; Gladwell on the Streets: "the British take an African-American musical form and wonderfully reinvent it" (again); others muse about rare high points in South Park, or of Brokeback Mountain and the future of movies, or the Rove-esqueness of Cindy Sheehan, et cetera.
posted on Jan 7, 2006 - View this thread

Dahlia Lithwick in Slate urges Democrats to grow a spine, and use the Alito hearings to provide the American public with some liberal talking points for a change. "If the Scalias, Thomases, Alitos, and Borks of the world had their way ... there would be no meaningful gun control. States could have official churches. Hard-fought federal worker, environmental, and civil rights protections would disintegrate. What you currently think of as the right to privacy would disappear. These are the questions Senate Democrats need to ask of Sam Alito: Should property rights trump individual rights? Should the right to privacy be interpreted as narrowly as the framers might have intended? Do you believe that a return to the morals and mores of two centuries ago is in the best interest of this nation?"
posted on Nov 7, 2005 - View this thread

Co-winner of the Nobel prize in economics Robert Aumann of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem gave a very interesting interview about how he became interested in economics, math, and the "topology of bagels." How he applied logic from the Talmud to bankruptcy and other economic events was described nicely at Slate here.
posted on Oct 21, 2005 - View this thread

In the summer of 1995 there was a week-long heat wave in Chicago. Over 700 people died. Most of them were the elderly, poor, and African-Americans. Link above is a Slate article by Eric Klinberg who wrote the definitive Heat Wave: A Social Autopsy of Disaster in Chicago (2003) in which he concludes that "a city, in its decision to operate like a corporation, experienced the breakdown of massive social services" and the resulting "widening cracks in the social foundations of America's cities".
posted on Sep 9, 2005 - View this thread

The Consciometer - What if scientists could precisely measure when life begins and ends?
Common sense, law, medicine, and philosophy have long considered consciousness a central aspect of our moral existence as human beings. Sometime in the next decade or so, neuroscientists will likely identify the specific neural networks and activity that generate the vague but vital thing we call consciousness. An interesting read from Slate
posted on Jun 14, 2005 - View this thread

Blinked is Malcom Gladwell's latest short, concept driven book about how instant judgements are often correct, but equally often dangerous. Two reviews on S****.com and S****.com [ad thingie to watch] make for great reading themselves. Gladwell's long been a favorite of mine, and I don't think I'm alone here. Previously cited works include one of the best essays I've ever read, about the ultimate pitchman.
posted on Jan 13, 2005 - View this thread

Linguists Gone Wild Linguists from The American Dialect Society and the Linguistic Society of America recently met to vote for the Words of the Year, in various categories—Most Useful, Creative, Unnecessary, Outrageous, and Euphemistic; Most and Least Likely To Succeed; and an overall Word of the Year... no one really cares unless we pretend that These Are Important Words That Define Us as Americans. Still, that's marginally better than the alternate interpretation: This Is How Scholars Waste Their Time When They Could Be Doing Real Work.
posted on Jan 12, 2005 - View this thread

Gift cards are evil. Or so says Dan Gross at Slate. I love Slate, but too many things in this article are just ridiculous. (more inside)
posted on Jan 5, 2005 - View this thread

Tom Wolfe resurrects his feud with Irving et al What are the chances that a literary bun toss would reignite, the match lit by the author with a new book due for publication. Maybe Martin Amis will swing buy and bitchslap them all.
posted on Oct 28, 2004 - View this thread

The Road To Abu Ghraib A generation from now, historians may look back to April 28, 2004, as the day the United States lost the war in Iraq... It was a direct—and predictable—consequence of a policy, hatched at the highest levels of the administration, by senior White House officials and lawyers, in the weeks and months after 9/11. Yet the administration has largely managed to escape responsibility for those decisions; a month from election day, almost no one in the press or the political class is talking about what is, without question, the worst scandal to emerge from President Bush's nearly four years in office... Given the particular conditions faced by the president and his deputies after 9/11—a war against terrorists, in which the need to extract intelligence via interrogations was intensely pressing, but the limits placed by international law on interrogation techniques were very constricting—did those leaders have better alternatives than the one they chose? The answer is that they did. And we will be living with the consequences of the choices they made for years to come.
posted on Oct 27, 2004 - View this thread

Slate translates Kerry to English. A lot of the argument lately is that Kerry doesn't really offer up a concete stand on his viewpoint. This article from William Saletan sums up what he believes Kerry is trying to say based on the speech he gave in New York earlier, and how he really stands in opposition to President Bush. Thoughts?
posted on Sep 21, 2004 - View this thread

What the heck? Now even Slate is saying that you should ditch IE and switch to Firefox. But, as they say in the article, Slate is owned by Microsoft...
posted on Jul 1, 2004 - View this thread

The Condensed Bill Clinton: Slate reads My Life so you don't have to.
posted on Jun 23, 2004 - View this thread

In the swing states, it's not just the economy anymore, stupid. "The more you talk to West Virginians, the more you stop wondering how Democrats lost the state four years ago and start wondering how they ever won it."
posted on Jun 22, 2004 - View this thread

Prom Story In a series of essays at Slate (1, 2, 3) a journalist in his mid-20s lightheartedly recounts the experience of escorting a 17-year-old girl to her high-school prom (purely for journalistic purposes, it's worth noting). Posters at Slate's reader discussion forum, in spite of its supremely cumbersome interface, express their strong (and not always coherent) disapproval, based mostly on the age difference between the author and his prom date. The author of the essays responds: "As the film critic Richard Roeper (who is much older, and much more influential than myself) pointed out in Esquire recently, this is indeed a strange cultural moment, one made all the stranger by the fact that we're not supposed to admit [it] actually exists." I'm not the biggest fan of journalists who engage in seemingly socially taboo behavior for the sole purpose of writing an article, but this made for interesting reading nonetheless.
posted on Jun 17, 2004 - View this thread

Exit Strategy How to get out of the quagmire that is Iraq:

To implement this exit strategy, we will have to practice running quickly. It is further recommended that, while running, the eyes be cast down, to avoid witnessing any last-minute people trying to kill us. We will have to establish excellent communications so that the moment that final person begins dying, we can all begin running quickly at the same time, eyes cast down, quickly, to our vehicles, to get to the airport and get out of the country.

posted on May 25, 2004 - View this thread

Why $2 Gas Is Amazing Gasoline is now selling at more than $2 a gallon, which, after inflation, is higher than it's been since 1981. But that's not the amazing part. Actually, there are three amazing parts.
posted on May 22, 2004 - View this thread

The Harry Potter series and the Left Behind series are more alike than you might think...
posted on May 18, 2004 - View this thread

Jesus Christ: Choose your own savior.
Everyone claims their Jesus is the "real" one, the only authentic Christ unperverted by secular society or religious institutions... Nowadays, even nonbelievers assert a superior understanding of who the actual Jesus really was and what he stood for.
posted on Apr 15, 2004 - View this thread

Where Has All the Acid Gone? (Anyone think our old friend will be making a return trip any time soon?)
posted on Apr 5, 2004 - View this thread

Bush lies about taxes
posted on Mar 24, 2004 - View this thread

He couldn't stand the complexity of the facts or the ambiguity of intelligence. William Saletan of Slate suggests an interesting strategy to oust Bush. Will it work? Should John Kerry take Saletan's advice? Republicans, what say you?
posted on Mar 6, 2004 - View this thread

Derailing The Friedmans. An interesting Slate piece on the neutrality of the Oscar-nominated documentary "Capturing The Friedmans." It starts: "When a documentary filmmaker uncovers overwhelming evidence that the subject of his film was wrongly convicted, shouldn't he take a stand on the man's innocence?"
posted on Mar 1, 2004 - View this thread

The lamest press releases of the 2004 campaign.
posted on Jan 16, 2004 - View this thread

Screwing the young. American government benefits will give a typical man reaching age 65 today a net windfall of more than $70,000 beyond what he paid in. A luckless 25-year-old, by contrast, can count on paying $322,000 more in payroll taxes than he will ever get back in benefits.
posted on Dec 10, 2003 - View this thread

The secret love-child of Rush Limbaugh and Perry Mason gets his day in court. Vince Foster conspiracy theorist nutjob challenges SCOTUS on whether the government can deny a FOIA request on the grounds of invasion of personal privacy. Amusing write-up by Dahlia Lithwick.
posted on Dec 5, 2003 - View this thread

What's really undermining the sanctity of marriage? Dahlia Lithwick has an interesting piece in Slate commenting on the real threats to marriage in light of Massachusetts Supreme Court's declaration that gay marriage is protected by the Constitution. Lithwick lists:
1. Divorce (~43-50% of all US marriages end in divorce)
2. Frivolous marriages (i.e. it is easier to get married than it is to drive a car, buy a gun, buy alcohol, etc.)
3. Birth control (is marriage "only for procreation"?)
4. The various challenges to our time and attention that take away from quality time with our spouses

Can MeFiers please share with those of us yet to be betrothed your secrets in keeping a marriage successful?
posted on Nov 26, 2003 - View this thread

This guy has hit the nail on the head. I've been marveling at how it was possible to completely screw up the sequels to what I consider the greatest action movie of all time. Matt Feeney has precisely and eloquently pinpointed everything wrong with the Matrix sequels.
posted on Nov 10, 2003 - View this thread

Has the economy got you down? Studies show that if you give suicide the ol' college try your income will increase 36.3%
posted on Oct 29, 2003 - View this thread

Morality and Logical Coherence
A case in point.
If stem-cell research is morally questionable, the procedures used in fertility clinics are worse. You cannot logically outlaw the one and praise the other. And surely logical coherence is a measure of moral sincerity.
And failing that test would be a measure of what?
posted on Oct 24, 2003 - View this thread

Google: the God that failed? is the title of the article on MSN Slate. All of us know Microsoft is working on a new search engine technology. Till date everyone considers Google to be the Guru. MS obviously doesn't like that, so what it is doing? Well, the same thing it always does - to survive competition, eliminate it. The reasons being given by the article are pretty silly and more aimed at 'faming down' Google.
posted on Jul 22, 2003 - View this thread

a little hint of things to come in 2004 from the bush team. slate link with popups
apparently they are still working on content for few areas, specifically: the environment and "more hispanic photos"
posted on Jun 24, 2003 - View this thread

Times Reporter Who Resigned Leaves Long Trail of Deception The New York Times runs a long article detailing its preliminary findings in the matter of Jayson Blair, The Times' young staff reporter who made up sources, facts, and anecdotes in potentially hundreds of stories. Does this investigation help the Times avoid permanent disgrace? Or does this just confirm what you've always thought about the Times? Slate magazine is attributing part of the problem to affirmative action (Blair is black). Is AA relevant here?
posted on May 10, 2003 - View this thread