Slate Articles

The Longform Guide to Elephants

Robyn Jodlowski — Sat, 18 May 2013 11:30:00 GMT

Every weekend, Longform shares a collection of great stories from its archive with Slate. For daily picks of new and classic nonfiction, check out Longform or follow @longform on Twitter. Have an iPad? Download Longform’s app to read the latest picks, plus features from dozens of other magazines, including Slate.

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Scandals Galore, Sensory Deprivation, and Bitter Beer Backlash

Byron Boneparth — Sat, 18 May 2013 11:00:00 GMT

“Scandal Jujitsu: How is Obama coping with multiple scandals? By playing them off against one another,” by William Saletan. It’s been a bad week for the White House, with scandals over the 2012 Benghazi attacks, IRS targeting of conservative groups, and Justice Department monitoring of AP reporters’ phone records all making national headlines. Saletan criticizes the administration’s tactic of justifying the AP phone record surveillance by tying it to Republican’s concern about Benghazi-like security breaches. He writes that it’s a cynical move and a failure in messaging that won’t make any of these headaches go away.

Wine Drinkers of the World, Unite

Christopher Hitchens — Sat, 18 May 2013 09:30:00 GMT

The other night, I was having dinner with some friends in a fairly decent restaurant and was at the very peak of my form as a wit and raconteur. But just as, with infinite and exquisite tantalizations, I was approaching my punch line, the most incredible thing happened. A waiter appeared from nowhere, leaned right over my shoulder and into the middle of the conversation, seized my knife and fork, and started to cut up my food for me. Not content with this bizarre behavior, and without so much as a by-your-leave, he proceeded to distribute pieces of my entree onto the plates of the other diners.

The Dreaded C-Word

Stefan Fatsis — Fri, 17 May 2013 22:33:19 GMT

A person’s head collides with an object. Unprepared for the impact, the head jerks in a violent whiplash motion. The person collapses, rolling on the ground and holding his head, before rising slowly and unsteadily. Eyewitnesses testify that the person was confused or disoriented.

A Den of Liberals

David Weigel — Fri, 17 May 2013 22:29:46 GMT

Maybe it wasn’t the best idea for acting IRS Commissioner Steven Miller to resign before talking to Congress. He appeared before the House Ways and Means Committee on Friday as a sort of human sacrifice; the first bureaucrat to resign in the scandal, and not even the one Republicans or Tea Partiers wanted. Miller had been a deputy commissioner during the years of scandal, and the IRS inspector general’s report didn’t tie him to any bias or malfeasance.

The Children of Pahiatua

Anne Applebaum — Fri, 17 May 2013 21:49:23 GMT

WELLINGTON, New Zealand—A fish restaurant in New Zealand seemed an odd place to discuss a war that took place several thousand miles away and several decades ago, but there we were: Sea bream was served, sauvignon blanc was poured, the rain drummed down outside, and I listened while three septuagenarians smiled, laughed, and told me of the unimaginable tragedy they had lived through as children.

What the State Birds Should Be

Nicholas Lund — Fri, 17 May 2013 21:06:18 GMT

This article originally appeared in the Birdist.

Frances Ha

Dana Stevens — Fri, 17 May 2013 20:01:59 GMT

Noah Baumbach’s Frances Ha, a black-and-white, French New Wave–influenced coming-of-age-in-New-York tale, has the earnest, wonky charm of a homemade valentine. The addressee is the 29-year-old actress Greta Gerwig, who plays the title character, co-wrote the script with Baumbach, and is also the director’s girlfriend—they became a couple after working together on Baumbach’s 2010 film Greenberg. If you’ve been waiting for an excuse to sit and watch Greta Gerwig just sort of behave for an hour and a half, your Sunday matinee plans are set. That’s not to say that Frances Ha dispenses completely with structure, plot and theme—it’s just that Baumbach treats those elements with more insouciance than is usual in his films, which have tended of late to be hyper-verbal, slightly sadistic drawing-room comedies (Margot at the Wedding, Greenberg).

Is Wal-Mart in Trouble?

Matthew Yglesias — Fri, 17 May 2013 18:23:48 GMT

No company likes to admit problems, but yesterday’s quarterly earnings report from Wal-Mart featured a remarkable amount of excuse-making, even by corporate standards. The company surprised analysts by reporting a 1.4 percent quarterly decline in comparable-store sales across the United States. In other words, Wal-Mart’s American stores sold less stuff this past quarter than the quarter before. Wal-Mart blamed this drop on essentially everything under the sun except people not wanting to shop at their stores: “A delay in income tax refund checks, challenging weather conditions, less grocery inflation than expected, and the payroll tax increase” were all said to have created “considerable headwinds” for America’s No. 1 retailer. And perhaps they did, but companies all across the land dealt with the same issues and most of them did better than Wal-Mart.

Secrets and Scoops

Emily Bazelon — Fri, 17 May 2013 17:52:32 GMT

In the wake of the story this week that the Justice Department scooped up two months’ worth of the phone records of reporters and editors at the Associated Press, University of Chicago law professor and Slate contributor Eric Posner and Slate senior editor Emily Bazelon have been arguing over whether this is an overreach by the Department of Justice and an intrusion on the newsgathering function of the press (Emily), or an entirely justified effort to find and prosecute a scurrilous government leaker who imperiled the country’s counterterrorism operation in Yemen (Eric). Here’s an edited version of their exchange: