Slow Burn

Lawn ornaments are everywhere—but for something so ubiquitous, they’re also mysterious. What’s the person with the flamingo or the gargoyle in their yard trying to say—and why do they want to say it s...

If you’re lucky, it’s possible you’ve never thought much about sitting. It’s just something your body does, like breathing or sleeping. But in the last decade or so, sitting has stepped into the spotl...

“Hysteria” is an ancient word carrying thousands of years of baggage. Though the terminology has changed, hysteria has not gone away, and in its most baffling instances it can even be contagious. The ...

In the late 1970s, a new and unusual concept for a restaurant chain emerged in California—video games plus bad pizza plus animatronic characters. The result was Chuck E. Cheese’s Pizza Time Theatre, a...

Adults have a long history of trying to find morals and lessons in children’s literature. But what happens when a seemingly innocent book about a boy and a hungry mouse becomes fodder for the culture ...

(While we work on the next season of Slow Burn we're showcasing new episodes from Slate's narrative podcast Decoder Ring.) Oscar-winner Warren Beatty first secured the rights to the comic book charact...

Whatever happened to selling out? The defining concern of Generation X has become a relic from another era. How that happened is best illustrated by one of the idea’s last gasps, when in 2001, Oprah W...

There is a prominent bird in the 2000 film Charlie’s Angels that makes absolutely no sense. This so-called Pygmy Nuthatch doesn’t look or sound like it should, or live where the characters say it does...

The fear that the Earth could be destroyed by a killer asteroid is an anxiety that pops up all the time in fiction and is grounded in fact. But funnily enough—actually being pancaked by a giant space ...

In 1980, a variety show debuted on NBC called Pink Lady and Jeff. Its stars were a pair of Japanese pop idols known for catchy, choreographed dance numbers. Pink Lady was inescapable in Japan: selling...