The Internet, we’ve been told, is the greatest library in the history of man—immediate, boundless, constantly expanding. In practice, though, many of us experience the Internet more like history’s ...

The button—with its self-contained roundness and infinite variability—has a quiet perfection to it. Running a cascade of buttons through your fingers feels satisfyingly heavy, like coins or candy; ...

Citizen Kane’s Xanadu fell into disrepair before it was ever finished. Hogwarts is now a tourist trap in Florida. Even Eloise’s quarters at the Plaza Hotel have recently been relocated to Brooklyn. Of ...

This piece originally appeared on Patton Oswalt’s website. 1. Thievery “Develop a little self-righteousness. A lot of that is an ugly thing, God knows, but a little spread over all your scruples is an ...

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 ...

What you see at left is the front of her report card from the Manhattan Trade School for Girls, a vocational school she attended in the late 1920s, after she had finished the eighth grade. As you can ...

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 ...

With overlapping civil wars in Syria and Iraq, a new flare-up of violence between Israel and the Palestinians, and tense nuclear talks with Iran, Middle Eastern politics are more volatile than ever ...

The Vault is Slate’s history blog. Like us on Facebook, follow us on Twitter @slatevault, and find us on Tumblr. Find out more about what this space is all about here. In a 1785 letter to the Marquis ...

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 ...

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” ...

Photo by Kamil Krzaczynski/Reuters Recently, Tony Perkins of the Family Research Council reintroduced a tired refrain: Legalized gay marriage could lead to other legal forms of marriage disaster, such ...