Readers and audiences have turned to Shakespeare's greatest plays for their insights into power and performance, sex and religion, demagoguery and populism. But what political currents were likely ...

This month, Slate is republishing some of our favorite stories. Here’s today’s selection: Matthew J.X. Malady’s Good Word columns were a delight for dedicated linguists and word dabblers alike. This ...

President Donald Trump holds a news conference on Wednesday in Washington. Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images Recently on Trumpcast, Jacob Weisberg discussed the three most pressing cases for impeaching ...

This short story was commissioned and edited jointly by Future Tense—a collaboration among Arizona State University, New America, and Slate—and ASU’s Center for Science and the Imagination. It is the ...

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 ...

George Saunders’ Tenth of December, his fourth short story collection, was published to much fanfare in 2013. The centerpiece of the ballyhoo was a New York Times Magazine profile pronouncing it “the ...

Russian President Vladimir Putin attends a meeting of the Presidential Council for Strategic Development and Priority Projects at the Kremlin in Moscow on Nov. 25. Sergei Ilnitsky/Pool/Reuters “The ...

A playwright in his mid-30s wants to pen an epic tale of ambition, authority, and power. He turns to his nation’s history, to characters familiar to his audience from school and legend. He performs a ...

“Manhattan is just all bank branches,” said Jonathan Franzen as he walked through the living room of his home in Santa Cruz, California. When he visits his former neighborhood on the Upper East Side ...

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 ...

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” ...

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 ...