Writing by Publication: Slate
My writing on Slate, but not on the Vault.
2017
- “The Handsy Boss and the Sexy Secretary” (Slate, December 19, 2017)
- “Preserving Today’s Internet” (Slate‘s Future Tense blog, December 11, 2017)
- Peggy Noonan’s Willful Blindness (Slate, December 1, 2017)
- “Can I Be A Screen-Free Parent Without Being Horrible About It?” (Slate, November 29, 2017)
- “We’ve Got The ’70s-Style Rage. Now We Need the ’70s-Style Feminist Social Analysis” (Slate, November 20, 2017)
- “Angry, Scared, Armed People” (Slate, November 3, 2017)
- “How Predators Take Advantage of Photo Ops to Assault Women” (Slate, October 27, 2017)
- “Time in a Bottle” (Slate, September 8, 2017)
- “The Nazis were Obsessed With Magic” (Slate, August 24, 2017)
- “Dismantled but Not Destroyed” (Slate, August 18, 2017)
- “Spectacle of Hate” (Slate, August 17, 2017)
- “What Good Is Fear?” (Slate, July 20, 2017)
- “A New Study Looks at What Becoming a Mother Does to Your Self-Esteem” (Slate, July 6, 2017)
- “What Is The Far Right’s Endgame? A Society That Suppresses The Majority” (Slate, June 22, 2017)
- “What Really Happens After Societal Collapse” (Slate, June 21, 2017)
- “Your Child Care Conundrum Is An Anti-Communist Plot” (Slate, June 14, 2017)
- “Bad News: We’re Sexist” (Slate‘s XX Factor, June 7, 2017)
- “The Creepy Bill O’Reilly Kids’ Book That Teaches Children to Beg for Help” (Slate‘s XX Factor, April 21, 2017)
- “Introducing Fascism” (Slate, January 20, 2017)
- “The Weird Science That Inspired Mary Shelley” (with Daniel Hubbard) (Slate‘s Future Tense, January 13, 2017)
2016
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- “Before Having My First Child I Bought and Stocked a Chest Freezer. Here’s What’s Inside” (Slate’s Double X blog, December 28, 2016)
- “‘Inexplicable, Terrible, and Capricious'” (review of Jonathan Lamb’s cultural history of scurvy), (Slate Book Review, December 8, 2016)
- “Feeling Overwhelmed by Holiday Chores? Try Spreading Them Out Into an Exciting, Monthlong Calendar” (Slate‘s Open Source Holiday blog, December 7, 2016)
- “When to Rename a Building, and Why” (Slate, December 5, 2016)
- “Is Racism a Disease?” (Slate, November 17, 2016)
- “There Is No Solace in the Past” (Slate, November 9, 2016)
- “How Did They Count All Those Ballots Before Voting Machines?” (Slate, November 8, 2016)
- “When Did Losing Candidates Start Calling the Winner to Concede?” (Slate, November 8, 2016)
- “Take the Long View of a Toxic Election with #VisitASuffragist” (Slate‘s Double X blog, November 7, 2016)
- “No Girls Allowed” (a theory of Trump and boyishness) (Slate, October 28, 2016)
- “How The Birth of a Nation Uses Fact and Fiction” (Slate‘s Browbeat blog, October 14, 2016)
- “Ready for the End” (essay on prepper fiction) (Slate Book Review, October 6, 2016)
- “Curiosity in the Face of Immensity” (review of David Macaulay’s The Way Things Work Now) (Slate Book Review, October 4, 2016)
- “Deepwater Horizon” (movie review) (Slate, September 28, 2016)
- “America Has Always Seen Ambitious Women As Unhealthy” (Slate, September 16, 2016)
- “How Do Descendants of Slaves Find Their Ancestors?” (Slate, September 2, 2016)
- “When Malcolm X Met Fidel Castro” (Slate, August 30, 2016)
- “The Epidemic Archives of the Future Will Be Born Digital” (Slate‘s Future Tense blog, August 23, 2016)
- “Sorry, Twitter: Male Self-Citation in Academia Isn’t Really ‘Mansplaining'” (Slate‘s Double X blog, August 2, 2016)
- “What Bill O’Reilly Doesn’t Understand About Slavery” (Slate, July 28, 2016)
- “19th-Century For-Profit Colleges Spawned Trump University” (Slate, July 27, 2016)
- “Is 2016 The Worst Year In History?” (Slate, July 22, 2016)
- “Why It Makes No Sense To Judge Groups of People By Their Histories of Invention” (Slate‘s Future Tense blog, July 20, 2016)
- “Is the Greatest Collection of Slave Narratives Tainted By Racism?” (Slate, July 6, 2016)
- “Victorians’ Fears About The Ills of Modern Technology Sounded A Lot Like Ours” (Slate‘s Future Tense blog, July 1, 2016)
- “Why Free State of Jones Isn’t Just Another White Savior Movie” (Slate, June 23, 2016)
- “Where is the Uncle Tom’s Cabin of Gun Control?” (Slate, June 20, 2016)
- “What Gun Control Advocates Can Learn From Abolitionists” (Q&A with Manisha Sinha) (Slate, June 14, 2016)
- “Some Things Are Worth Forgetting” (Q&A with David Rieff) (Slate, May 13, 2016)
- “America’s Lost History of Border Violence” (Slate, May 5, 2016)
- “Andrew Jackson’s Adopted Indian Son”(Slate, April 29, 2016)
- “Toward a New Theory of the Bad Dad and Husband” (Slate, April 28, 2016)
- “A Hamilton Skeptic on Why the Show Isn’t As Revolutionary As It Seems” (Slate, April 5, 2016)
- “How ‘She Just Wants Attention’ Became America’s Hottest Sexist Insult” (Slate, April 4, 2016)
- “The Art of the New Deal” (Slate, March 31, 2016)
- “Can You Tell When This Vintage Home Movie Was Filmed?” (Slate, March 30, 2016)
- “Roller Skating Socials and a Black Rosie the Riveter” (on two websites exploring the archive of the black press) (Slate, March 8, 2016)
- “The Most Accurate Part of The Witch? It Nails the Desperate, Crazed Mindset of Early American Settlers” (Slate‘s Browbeat blog, February 29, 2016)
- “America’s Other Original Sin” (on Native Americans and slavery) (Slate, January 18, 2016)
- “Is History Written By Men, About Men?” (with Andrew Kahn) (Slate, January 6, 2016)
2015
- “Who Was Hugh Glass?” (Slate, December 23, 2015)
- “The ‘Childhood’s End ‘ Miniseries is a Waste of One of Sci-Fi’s Greatest Tropes” (Slate‘s Future Tense blog, December 14, 2015)
- “The Ten Best Podcast Episodes of 2015” (Slate, December 14, 2015)
- “A New History of Prohibition” (Slate, December 11, 2015)
- “The Best Coffee-Table Books of 2015 For History Lovers” (Slate, December 10, 2015)
- “Learning The History of My Town Made Me Feel More At Home Here” (Slate, November 5, 2015)
- “Less Guilt, More Action: What I learned from making Slate’s History of American Slavery series” (Slate Plus, October 14, 2015)
- “How to Write Erudite History For Teenagers” (an interview with M.T. Anderson) (Slate, October 9, 2015)
- “Slavery Myths, Debunked” (with Jamelle Bouie) (Slate, September 29, 2015)
- “Vox’s Victorians” (on the idea of cosplaying your way into a previous era) (Slate, September 10, 2015)
- “What Happened Here?” (A quiz testing local historical knowledge) (Slate, August 20, 2015)
- “Are We in the Midst of a New Civil Rights Era?” (Slate, August 6, 2015)
- “The Surprising Demographics of American Slavery” (Slate, June 11, 2015)
- “Boyhood” (on a unique archive of childhood drawings) (Slate, May 28, 2015)
- “Where to Read History on the Web” (Slate Plus, May 4, 2015)
- “Thousands of Women Ran for Office Before They Could Vote” (Slate, April 14, 2015)
- “The Pen” (A revisionist history of America’s oldest women’s prison—written by current prisoners). (Slate, March 22, 2015)
- “Red Summer” (on black self-defense in 1919) (Slate, March 4, 2015)
2014
- “A Gift Guide for Young Historians” (Slate, December 17, 2014)
- “The 25 Best Podcast Episodes Ever” (with David Haglund) (Slate, December 14, 2014)
- “What Did Gettysburg Smell Like? A Sensory History of the Civil War” (Slate, November 24, 2014)
- “History, or Just Horror?” (Slate, November 6, 2014)
- “‘Unclaimed Treasures of Science'” (Slate, July 13, 2014)
- “The Pre-Pregnancy Contract” (Slate Double X, July 10, 2014)
- “Taking Rube Goldberg Seriously: What Fictional Inventions Say About American Ingenuity” (Slate, April 24, 2014)
- “Forget Madonna and Angelina. Josephine Baker Adopted 12 Children From Around the Globe” (Slate, April 18, 2014)
- “The Awful Emptiness of ‘Relatable'” (Slate‘s Lexicon Valley blog, April 11, 2014)
- “Crappy Taxidermy Internet Meme Is Really Sort of Sad” (Slate‘s Wild Things blog, April 8, 2014)
- “When Smartphones Attack” (review of Alena Graedon’s The Word Exchange) (Slate Book Review, April 9, 2013)
- “Bizarre and Colorful Vintage Circus Posters Featuring Animal Performers” (Slate‘s Wild Things blog, February 26, 2014)
- “Should We Destroy Our Ivory Art Out Of Guilt? Prince William Seems to Think So” (Slate‘s Wild Things blog, February 19, 2014)
- “Snapshots of History: Wildly Popular Accounts Like @HistoryInPics Are Bad For History, Bad For Twitter, and Bad For You” (Slate, February 5, 2014)
- “How Janet Malcolm Turns Emily Dickinson’s Poetry Into Visual Art” (Slate‘s Browbeat blog, January 23, 2014)
- “The Fascinating Things You Learn From Reading Very Old Polls” (Slate‘s Browbeat blog, January 17, 2014)
2013
- “The Snake-Eaters and the Yards: The Vietnamese Tribesmen Who Fought Alongside American Special Forces Won the Green Berets’ Admiration–And Lost Everything Else” (Slate, November 27, 2013)
- “‘Be White To Your Dogs.’ Why People Are So Outraged About A Canadian Survival Story” (Slate‘s Wild Things blog, November 12, 2013)
- “The Best Animal Songs Ever Written: Our Neko Case Playlist” (Slate‘s Wild Things blog, November 1, 2013)
- “Arrested Development, Season 4: Jessica Walter is the Best Actor on Arrested Development” (chat with June Thomas) (Slate‘s TV club, June 3, 2013)
- “Arrested Development, Season 4: Tobias Gets Served” (chat with Lowen Liu) (Slate‘s TV Club, May 20, 2013)
- “The Way of the Egghead Is Hard” (review of Aaron Lecklider’s Inventing the Egghead) (Slate Book Review, April 5, 2013)
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