Atlas Obscura on Slate is a blog about the world's hidden wonders. Like us on Facebook, Tumblr, or follow us on Twitter @atlasobscura. In the 1950s and '60s, Bombay Beach in California was a thriving ...

Is genetically engineered food dangerous? Many people seem to think it is. In the past five years, companies have submitted more than 27,000 products to the Non-GMO Project, which certifies goods that ...

When Josephine Anderson, a formerly enslaved Floridian, was visited by a white government interviewer in the fall of 1937, she told him a ghost story. Anderson described to Jules Frost a “white man” ...

Louis B. Mayer, circa 1935. Photo by General Photographic Agency/Getty Images This week, the new season of You Must Remember This, the podcast that tells the secret and forgotten history of 20 ...

Photo by Maddy Crowell I thought a bottle of red wine would be an appropriate gift to bring to utopia. It was June in Pondicherry, a sleepy beach town off the Bay of Bengal characterized by its ...

Daniel Engber is a columnist for Slate. The fourth-graders were unanimous: Quicksand doesn't scare them, not one bit. If you're a 9- or 10-year-old at the P.S. 29 elementary school in Brooklyn, N.Y., ...

“Manhattan is just all bank branches,” said Jonathan Franzen as he walked through the living room of his home in Santa Cruz, California. When he visits his former neighborhood on the Upper East Side ...

In 1996, the New Yorker published “Hating Hillary,” Henry Louis Gates’ reported piece on the widespread animosity for the then–first lady. “Like horse-racing, Hillary-hating has become one of those ...

Illustrations by Lisa Larson-Walker. A few months ago, Natasha Chenier submitted a piece to Jezebel about her sexual relationship with her dad. She described meeting her biological father for the ...

In the outskirts of San Antonio, Texas, where guys dressed like the Marlboro Man loaf at gas stations and kids hang out at two-step dance halls, a sarcastic 55-year-old biologist from Zimbabwe is ...

Photo illustration by Lisa Larson-Walker. Photos by PhotoAlto/Sigrid Olsson/Getty Images, shironosov/Thinkstock. In 2013, within two weeks of beginning the highly competitive Disney-ABC Writing ...

The Vault is Slate's history blog. Like us on Facebook, follow us on Twitter @slatevault, and find us on Tumblr. Find out more about what this space is all about here. In this two-page outline for the ...