Click the image below to enlarge. For the interactive map, see the desktop site. Click an illustration to learn more. X Share | Tweet Interactive by Chris Kirk Alabama Meatloaf Yes, Alabama, I know ...

Photo illustration by Slate. Logos courtesy WTF, The Read, Welcome to Night Vale, and Radio Diaries. Sarah Koenig photo courtesy This American Life. Paul F. Tompkins photo by Barry ...

When Josephine Anderson, a formerly enslaved Floridian, was visited by a white government interviewer in the fall of 1937, she told him a ghost story. Anderson described to Jules Frost a “white man” ...

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 ...

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 ...

London is a city without an organizing principle. Its streets aren't numbered, like New York's, or lettered, like those in Washington, D.C. It's not laid out on a grid, like Chicago, and no Haussmann ...

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., ...

In 1996, the New Yorker published “Hating Hillary,” Henry Louis Gates’ reported piece on the widespread animosity for the then–first lady. “Like horse-racing, Hillary-hating has become one of those ...

The Wapiti sow with her cubs in June, 2011, before she was a suspect in any crimes Photograph by James Yule. On Friday a hiker was found dead in Yellowstone National Park. CNN reports that based on a ...

This essay originally appeared in Boom: A Journal of California. In March 2011, after signing our names so many times that our wrists ached, my wife and I took into our weakened hands the keys to a ...

Listen to Lexicon Valley Episode No. 4: Jumpin’ Salty in the O Mike Vuolo Mike Vuolo is a radio and podcast producer and the host of Lexicon Valley. Subscribe in iTunes ∙ RSS feed ∙ Download ∙ Play in ...