Decoder Ring: The Fast Decline of the Slow Dance
Judging from teen dramas on Netflix, the slow dance seems to be alive and well. But when you talk to actual teens, it’s clear this time-honored tradit...
Slow Burn
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About
Clarence Thomas is one of the most powerful figures in America today. Nearly every issue of national consequence has his fingerprints all over it, from voting rights to gun rights and from abortion access to affirmative action. But nothing about his journey from rural Georgia to the Supreme Court was inevitable.In the eighth season of Slate’s Slow Burn, host Joel Anderson traces Justice Thomas’ surprising path from youthful radical to conservative icon. You’ll hear about why he came to despise the race-based admission policies that personally benefitted him, how he credited his political rise to the Black self-sufficiency preached by Malcolm X, and what the American people didn’t hear during his explosive confirmation hearings.
One Year: 1955 - The Hiroshima Maidens
Ten years after the atomic bombing of Hiroshima, 25 women who’d been disfigured by the blast came to the United States. Those Japanese survivors would...
One Year: 1955 - The Cutter Incident
Jonas Salk’s polio vaccine transformed America and the world in ways that seemed unimaginable. But in 1955, there was a moment when everything was in ...
One Year: 1955 - Siberia, USA
When Alaskans wanted their own mental-health facility, a rumor took hold all over America. This week, Evan Chung traces the origins of that far-right ...
One Year: 1955 - The Weather Girls
In the early days of television, women struggled to find their place. In 1955, they got it: forecasting the weather, on stations all across the countr...
One Year: 1955 - The Crockett Craze
In 1955, the frontiersman Davy Crockett became the most famous man in America, more than a century after his death at the Alamo. This week, Evan Chung...
One Year: 1955 - The Team Nobody Would Play
The Cannon Street All-Stars dreamed of playing in the 1955 Little League World Series. Their biggest obstacle didn’t come on the field. In the year th...
Decoder Ring: Think Catchphrases Are Dead? Eat My Shorts.
Once you start listening for catchphrases in everyday life—you can’t stop hearing them. From the radio era’s “Holy mackerel!” to Fonzie’s “Ayyy!” to U...
Decoder Ring: The Quest for a Homemade Hovercraft
When Slate’s Evan Chung was a kid, he was obsessed with a mysterious advertisement that ran for decades in the scouting magazine Boys’ Life. Under the...
Decoder Ring: A Brief History of Making Out
Kissing—the romantic, sexual, steamy kind—is so ingrained in us that it just seems like a fact of life. Like breathing or eating, we just do it. But w...