Writing

Neuroscience has found that passive acceptance is a natural response to prolonged stress.

Most of us think zoning out on Netflix counts as rest. Neurology says real downtime is unstructured, goal-free time that lets the imagination network do its work.

Smarter thinking isn’t about you. It’s about your team.

A conversation with psychologist Peter Glick about how paternalistic beliefs undermine women’s careers by excluding them from challenging assignments and depriving them of honest feedback.

Willem Dafoe on range, instinct, and why he doesn’t pull from his own life experiences to fuel a performance.

Pentagram graphic designer Paula Scher on why success kills creative work and failure is the engine of breakthrough.

Two years into her marriage, her husband told her he might be gay. The lonely years that followed shaped the storylines she’d write for Sex and the City.

Despite great success as a standup comedian and former host of Comedy Central’s Standup Nation, Greg Giraldo was tortured by a constant sense of failure.

Street criminals are selective about their victims. Unfortunately, many of us unwittingly give off signals that mark us as easy targets.

The lolcats, the Internet’s most famous felines, may be hilarious. But in their yearning, I see nothing less than the tragedy of the human condition.

We live in the age of distraction. Yet one of life’s sharpest paradoxes is that your brightest future hinges on your ability to pay attention to the present.

Our choices in books, movies, music, and art go to the core of who we are. What your tastes reveal about you.

What happens when you hold a mirror up to seven comedians? Analyzing humor from the experts who make people laugh.

The last in-depth interview he gave, nine days before his death, recorded over the telephone on Friday, June 13, 2008.

Examining the psychology of personal consumption

The hidden risks of recreational Viagra.

The truth about couples and how to reignite the flame

How to stick to diet, exercise, or worse. Modern medicine can work wonders, but only when we actually use it.

A hundred years after Freud, one man may have figured out why we dream. You’ll never think the same way about nightmares again.

Scrutinizing the frontrunners. Word for word, the presidential candidates revealed.

Cinnamon Stillwell never thought she’d be the founder of a political organization. She certainly never expected to start a group for conservatives, most of whom became conservatives on the same day—September 11, 2001. She organized the group, the 911 Neocons, as a haven for people like her—“former lefties” who did…

As one of the first women in broadcast journalism — and a 30-year veteran of ABC News — Lynn Sherr is accustomed to the spotlight.

In his two decades of making films, Spike Lee has earned a reputation as one of the most brilliant — and angriest — American directors.

Shell-shocked troops are coming back from Iraq with snakes in their heads. A new virtual reality treatment offers hope for vets.

Will Shortz is one of those people who seem to hurtle inexorably toward their destinies from the day they are born.

Why we should start measuring bias.

Appoint Blank and Atomic Relief, two Slate Today’s Papers columns by Jay Dixit.

When Joey Gay heard that Pips Comedy Club in Sheepshead Bay, Brooklyn, was for sale, he discovered his life’s purpose.

NEW YORK BLOGS: The Duel for the Dirt.

It’s comedy night at the Parkside Lounge, a dark dive on the Lower East Side, but nobody is laughing.

When commanders gave the order for firefighters and emergency workers to withdraw from the Pentagon crash site on Sept. 11, some heard it and evacuated. But others did not.

Drug trials are failing because placebos are working too well. What’s happening in our brains—and what it means for medicine.

As family members waited for news of survivors, they had to contend with prank phone calls, Tony Soprano jokes and the dull ache of dwindling hope.

Last month, Hatewatch shut down, declaring that the battle against hate groups has been won. It hasn’t.

This month a panel of medical experts responded to a Web pornographer who tried to auction supermodel eggs.

In 1938, when a struggling young playwright named Tennessee Williams read a newspaper account of four gruesome murders in a Philadelphia prison, he was outraged—and inspired.