All this controversy over some little white string? Dmytro Panchenko/Thinkstock My French roommate Julie had just come into the bathroom to get something. “What are you doing with that string in your mouth,” she said, with a look of horrified surprise. It turns out she had never seen floss. We were both in our 20s, and my dentist had spent over a decade instructing me to floss, so I was a little h

Joseph Stiglitz speaks onstage during the 2015 Clinton Global Initiative’s Annual Meeting on Sept. 28 in New York City. JP Yim/Getty Images Joseph Stiglitz, the Nobel Prize–winning economist, has served as the chairman of the Council of Economic Advisers under President Clinton and as the World Bank’s chief economist. In 2010, he acted as an adviser to the Greek government and became one of the mo

Former New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg attends the opening of the Mica and Ahmet Ertegun Atrium at Jazz at Lincoln Center on Dec. 17, 2015, in New York City. Mike Coppola/Getty Images By now, the Michael Bloomberg presidential trial balloon is a ritual. At some point in a presidential election—usually on the eve of voting—someone will run a story on the former New York mayor’s presidential a

It was the will of Satan (shown here partying in Sacatepequez, Guatemala, last year) that decided Roe v. Wade. Photo by Johan Ordonez/AFP/Getty Images Conservatives are increasingly citing their right to religious liberty to defend using state property to proselytize and disobey laws protecting women and LGBTQ people from discrimination. But those efforts are getting a little more complicated, tha

This article originally appeared in Business Insider. First invented in 1903, the original Crayola box contained only eight colors, including red, orange, yellow, green, blue, violet, brown, and black. It sold for only a nickel. A chart posted on Reddit shows how Crayola crayon colors have grown from eight basic hues to dozens in a little over 100 years. Now, there are 120 colors in the Crayola co

Culturebox Tagalog in California, Cherokee in Arkansas What language does your state speak? Last month, I wrote about the fun and the pitfalls of viral maps, a feature that included 88 super-simple maps of my own creation. As a follow-up, I’m writing up short items on some of those maps, walking through how I created them and how they succumb to (and hopefully overcome) the shortfalls of viral car

A U.S. Navy Marine Mammal Program bottlenose dolphin named K-Dog wearing a locating pinger, performed mine clearance work in the Persian Gulf during the Iraq War. U.S. Navy photo by Photographer’s Mate 1st Class Brien Aho On Veterans Day, it’s important to recognize those who have risked life and limb in the name of their country. But being a veteran isn’t a description limited to Homo sapiens. As

The XX Factor No, the New York Times Did Not Sexualize Breast Cancer Earlier today, my colleague Amanda Marcotte wrote about the New York Times’ decision to run an A1 above-the-fold photograph of an Israeli breast cancer survivor, her tank top lowered to expose a lumpectomy scar and part of her areola, to illustrate a story about breast cancer screening. Marcotte laid out three ways of looking at

Although Richard Tuschman enjoys going to the theater, he is slightly more attracted to the sets and lighting than to the drama unfolding onstage. He was also attracted to the quiet sense of drama found in the paintings of Edward Hopper, and he used them as a launching pad for a personal project he began almost two years ago titled “Hopper Meditations.” Tuschman has worked predominately as a comme

The XX Factor This Awesome Ad, Set to the Beastie Boys, Is How to Get Girls to Become Engineers This is a stupendously awesome commercial from a toy company called GoldieBlox, which has developed a set of interactive books and games to “disrupt the pink aisle and inspire the future generation of female engineers.” The CEO, Debbie Sterling, studied engineering at Stanford, where she was dismayed by

New worlds to conquer. Photo by Larry Busacca/Getty Images for Amazon Fashion David Streitfeld at the New York Times has a feature piece about how despite Amazon’s surging stock it isn’t turning a profit that I think fundamentally miscasts the situation. Streitfeld seems to see a business failing that the stock market is forgiving for irrational reasons. The term “bubble” gets bandied about. But t

NPR’s excellent food blog, The Salt, draws our attention to a public health campaign created by researchers at Drexel University and New Mexico State University called “Don’t Wash Your Chicken!” (No beating around the bush for this campaign.) The centerpiece of the campaign is a horrifying 14-second animated video that portrays germs, represented by green goo, splattering everywhere as a woman was

The Vault The Entire History of the World—Really, All of It—Distilled Into a Single Gorgeous Chart 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. This “Histomap,” created by John B. Sparks, was first printed by Rand McNally in 1931. (The David Rumsey Map Collection hosts a fully

In March, I found myself standing on the white sand of the beach-lined shores of Oura Bay in northern Okinawa, Japan, looking out on a postcard view of green islets set in azure waters. It could have been the site of a Club Med resort. Instead, behind me were the beige stucco barracks of Camp Schwab, home to the 4th U.S. Marine Regiment. This quiet spot is ground zero for a political storm that th