My Dearest Ivanka Trump,

At press time, Slate will publish a post headlined ‘The Slate Post You Are Currently Reading: An Oral History.‘ Within four hours of publication, it will fall off Slate‘s Most Read list; within two days, it will completely sink into the vast digital backwater, accessible to people who search for it, but otherwise unread. It will launch no careers, fundamentally change nothing about the way we live or the stories we tell ourselve

On Saturday, New York Times reporters Maggie Haberman and Michael S. Schmidt broke a blockbuster story explaining that the White House counsel, Donald F. McGahn II, ‘cooperated extensively‘ with Robert Mueller‘s investigation. According to the Times, McGahn spoke to the special counsel‘s office for as much as 30 hours, on at least three separate occasions. Although what he said remains unknown, Haberman and Schmidt report

White House counsel Donald McGahn has ‘cooperated extensively‘ with special counsel Robert Mueller‘s investigation, sharing key details that investigators say they would not have known about otherwise, the New York Times reveals. McGahn sat down for at least three voluntary interviews with investigators that totaled 30 hours, providing ‘detailed accounts about the episodes at the heart of the inquiry into whether President

Filmmaker, activist, and musician Boots Riley has some thoughts about Spike Lee‘s BlacKkKlansman: He is not a fan. Riley, the writer/director behind Sorry to Bother You, tweeted out a fiery essay Friday cataloguing the ways Lee‘s film departs from the true story it was based on (significantly, when it comes to Ron Stallworth; not very much, when it comes to Jesse Washington) and analyzing the political impact of the changes Lee and hi

President Donald Trump took to Twitter Saturday and railed about an issue that has been gaining traction on Fox News and other conservative outlets: ‘censorship.‘ In a string of tweets, the commander in chief said social media ‘is totally discriminating against Republican/Conservative voices.‘ The president insisted that ‘we won‘t let that happen.‘ His tweets came at a time when the issue is being increas

Officials at the University of Alabama announced a ten-year, 600 million project to upgrade the school‘s athletic facilities. The initiative is called ‘The Crimson Standard,‘ which, surprisingly, is not the title of a John Grisham novel (I had to check). According to the fundraising website, the goal is to ‘provide the environment necessary to recruit and train the best student-athletes and position our programs as nationa

If it had not been for George Papadopoulos‘ lies, federal authorities may have been able to detain a man they suspected was part of Russia‘s efforts to meddle in the 2016 presidential election, the special counsel said Friday night. In a court filing, special counsel Robert Mueller called for Papadopoulos to be sentenced to up to six months behind bars saying his repeated lies about contacts with Russian operatives ‘caused damag

On Thursday, actress Garbrielle Union posted an Instagram photo of herself in a swimsuit. At the time of writing, it has earned 1,017,781 likes. That‘s a lot of engagement! The post has also elicited 26,454 comments, one of which may or may not have caused a massive rift in the NBA community. (The comment did not cause a massive rift in the NBA community, but it‘s fun to write the words ‘massive rift in the NBA community.‘

What should have been a day of joy ended up being filled with worry and uncertainty as a father has not been able to seen his newborn baby after immigration agents arrested him on the way to the hospital. Joel Arrona Lara, a 36-year-old undocumented immigrant from Mexico, was driving his wife, Mara del Carmen Venegas, to the hospital in San Bernardino, California on Wednesday. They were headed for a scheduled Cesarean section when they had to sto

What if artificial intelligence can‘t cure cancer after all? That‘s the message of a big Wall Street Journal post-mortem on Watson, the IBM project that was supposed to turn IBM‘s computing prowess into a scalable program that could deliver state-of-the-art personalized cancer treatment protocols to millions of patients around the world.

Former CIA Director John Brennan gave his first sit-down television interview since President Donald Trump stripped his security clearance and said the commander in chief is ‘drunk on power‘ and could spark a tragedy for the country. ‘The fact that he‘s using a security clearance of a former CIA director as a pawn in his public relations strategy I think is so reflective of somebody who, quite frankly-I don‘t want to

Kofi Annan, the diplomat from Ghana who led the United Nations for two successive five-year terms starting in 1997, died Saturday. He was 80 and died after a short illness, according to a statement issued by the Kofi Annan Foundation. Annan, who was born in Ghana, was the first black African to lead the United Nations and also the first to rise from within the staff of the multilateral organization.

To listen to this episode of Amicus, use the player below:

USB-C was pitched years ago as the one connector to rule them all. Paired with the USB 3.1 standard, it can transfer data quickly, up to 10 gigabits per second. It can deliver a lot of power-up to 100W, which is enough to charge most laptops without a hefty power brick. One of its biggest benefits is its shape: Unlike previous USB designs, USB-C, a thin oval-shaped connector that plugs into the pins in a device‘s port, can go in right-side

There are two types of people: those who usesleeping masks, and those who have never tried sleeping masks. I am fervently the former. My journey into voluntary sightlessness began while backpacking through Southeast Asia in my mid-20s. To fall asleep in the dozens of different dormitories, I took to blindfolding myself with a thin silk scarf. It didn‘t even cross my mind to purchase a real sleeping mask until coming across an expertly craft

Thanks to a number of new technologies, indoor cycling has become a growing part of the exercise and fitness world. In the old days, indoor cycling systems like trainers, which allow a bike to be ridden indoors, barely resembled the experience you‘d get out on the road. Workouts typically needed to be short to compensate for discomfort. Now, tools like indoor turbo trainers simulate the sensation of climbing hills or the natural side-to-sid

For the past week, former Donald Trump aide Omarosa Manigault Newman has been promoting her new tell-all book with claims that she has heard tapes, recorded on the set of The Apprentice, in which Trump can be heard using the N-word. There is reason to consider Manigault Newman an unreliable narrator, but rumors regarding the existence of these tapes didn‘t start, and likely won‘t end, with her. Here‘s what might happen if such a

Listen to Slate‘s The Gist:

Listen to Slate Money viaApple Podcasts,Overcast,Spotify,Stitcher, orGoogle Play.

Former White House aide Omarosa Manigault Newman has been dominating the news this week, so much so that if the Trumps were at all worthy of sympathy, you might have some for them now. Son of the president Eric Trump tried to let off some steam with a subtweet about ‘disloyal people‘ on Thursday night, but it ‘backfired spectacularly,‘ as HuffPost put it, because Twitter users immediately chimed in to remind Eric of all th

Saeed Ahmed speaks with a warm smile befitting of his name-Saeed means ‘happy‘ in Arabic. As he talks to me, goat after goat is removed from a meat hook behind him. Skinned and gutted but with eyeballs still bulging from their heads, each goat is heaved over to a band saw by Ahmed‘s butchers. First their rear hooves are lopped off, then front hooves, then head.

The Department of Justice is attempting to compel Facebook to break the encryption on its Messenger app so that officials can eavesdrop on the calls of a suspect in a case involving the MS-13 gang, Reuters reported Friday.

On Thursday evening, the election board of Randolph County, Georgia, met to discuss a startling proposal to eliminate three-fourths of the county‘s polling places months before the November election. A rural, impoverished, and predominantly black county, Randolph has just nine polling locations, all of which were open during the May primaries and July runoffs. The election board may soon shut down seven of them, including one in a precinct