Slate Articles

Arrested Development, Season 4

David Haglund — Fri, 24 May 2013 13:00:00 GMT

In Slate’s Arrested Development TV Club, two fans will IM about each episode of Season 4 once they finish watching it. Today, Brow Beat editor David Haglund and editorial assistant Emma Roller prep for the launch of the new season.

A Red Carpet for Beijing

Fri, 24 May 2013 12:30:00 GMT

Economist Dambisa Moyo snickers when she hears talk that the Chinese are trying to take over Africa. What they want, as she argues forcefully in her latest book Winner Take All, are natural resources, which are in abundant supply around the African continent.

Bob Dylan’s World

Thomas Bollier — Fri, 24 May 2013 11:35:38 GMT

Bob Dylan’s music, it’s often said, happens in a world of its own—where the highway is for gamblers and you’re always 1,000 miles from home. It’s a surreal, ethereal realm, lawless but for chance, allusion, and rhyme.

One Hundred Ways to Ruin Ice Cream

Jennifer Reese — Fri, 24 May 2013 11:32:00 GMT

Memorial Day weekend marks the beginning of summer, the season of rising mercury, swimming pool openings, and sweltering family barbeques. Ice cream, the king of all things summer, has seen a re-emergence as a trendy artisanal treat, with boutique stores now publishing cookbooks of recipes for their wacky, wild flavors. Last summer Jennifer Reese reviewed four of these ice cream cookbooks. The original story is below.

Is Kaitlyn Hunt Being Punished Because She Is Gay?

Emily Bazelon — Fri, 24 May 2013 11:15:00 GMT

Kaitlyn Hunt, an 18-year-old Florida student, is getting lots of sympathy after being criminally charged over her sexual relationship with her 14-year-old girlfriend. Hunt and the younger girl were basketball teammates. Hunt’s parents say the girl’s parents went to the police, “because they blamed Kaitlyn for their child's homosexuality,” as CBS put it. Hunt’s family put up a Facebook page called “Free Kate,” with links to T-shirts, bracelets, and a petition. More than 45,000 people have signed it. The Florida ACLU has spoken out on her behalf, saying this is a harmless, consensual relationship.

Play the Slate News Quiz

Ken Jennings — Fri, 24 May 2013 09:55:00 GMT

Welcome back to Slate’s weekly news quiz. I’m your host, 74-time Jeopardy! winner Ken Jennings.

Corrections

Fri, 24 May 2013 08:45:00 GMT

In a May 23 “Weigel” blog post, David Weigel misspelled Thor Halvorssen’s last name.

We Don’t Need Another Hero

David Weigel — Thu, 23 May 2013 22:45:08 GMT

The roll-out of Anthony Weiner’s midlife crisis-cum-mayoral campaign has gone about as well as the candidate could have hoped. He announced it via video, beating the tabloids’ print deadlines, evading eponymous puns for one precious day. When he met the press, he juggled questions about his younger and more vulnerable days without a droplet of flop sweat. “People may decide they want to come forward and say, here’s another email that I got or another photo,” he yawned in a radio interview, repeating a stock line. “I’m certainly not going to do that.”

Obama’s Post-9/11 World

Fred Kaplan — Thu, 23 May 2013 22:25:54 GMT

President Obama’s speech today on U.S. counterterrorism policy was actually two speeches in one. The first outlined a supposedly new, restrictive policy on drone strikes that was neither new nor restrictive. The second called for shutting down the Guantánamo detention center—not a new position for the president but the revival of a long-dormant one, unfurled in blazing colors along with a vision of a genuinely new way of approaching global terrorism.

President Ruthless

Eric Posner — Thu, 23 May 2013 21:47:57 GMT

In his speech today about the future of American counterterrorism operations, President Obama said that he will order drone strikes less frequently and redouble efforts to transfer some detainees out of Guantánamo. He suggested a more focused approach to terrorist threats in light of the diminished capacity of al-Qaida. Yet he also maintained the administration’s long-standing legal approach. The speech thus may well confirm the view among Obama’s civil libertarian critics that he is the most lawless executive since, um, George Bush. They are right to see the continuity from one president to the next, but they are wrong to believe that Obama has violated the law.