Want to Earn Six Figures as a Writer? Try Ghostwriting.
Shifts in the book industry have been a boon to writers who work quietly behind the scenes
What Makes a Person Patriotic?
We drove from Milwaukee, Wis., to Kansas City, Mo., stopping along the way to talk to people about civic duty & national pride
How Civil Must America Be?
The culture wars here may be about guns, or about religion, or they might be about money. But they may really be about manners
State Secrets: the Life of America’s First Openly Gay Diplomat
This post is part of Outward, Slate’s home for coverage of LGBTQ life, thought, and culture. Read more here.
Update: Tom Gallagher died on July 8, 2018, shortly after this story was published. This story has been updated to reflect the fact that reporting after he died suggested Gallagher’s memory about an encounter with a Washington Post reporter may have been mistaken.
Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, 1962
The emperor receives distinguished guests and state visitors in the Throne Room of the la...
Update: Tom Gallagher died on July 8, 2018, shortly after this story was published. This story has been updated to reflect the fact that reporting after he died suggested Gallagher’s memory about an encounter with a Washington Post reporter may have been mistaken.
Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, 1962
The emperor receives distinguished guests and state visitors in the Throne Room of the la...
Letter of Recommendation: The Rothko Chapel
A quiet, lonely place to share the grief of solitude
Percy Ross Wants to Give You Money! - Longreads
Jacqui Shine | Longreads | July 2017 | 23 minutes (5,700 words) Percy Ross was a trash-bag tycoon, a serial entrepreneur who had made millions in plastics in the 1960s and relished spending it. But in 1977 he staged an astonishing reinvention. Ross would become a philanthropist — and not just any philanthropist, but one for people like him: a “blue-collar millionaire,” as he put it. He’d give money away the way he’d gotten it, in bills small and large, and always when it was needed the most. He’...
The Highbrow Puppets That All America Loved in 1950
One of the most important shows in early television, it was NBC’s first public color broadcast and one of the first shows aired nationally. Its 4 million fans included John Steinbeck, Thornton Wilder, Orson Welles, and Adlai Stevenson. Edward Albee based the protagonist of The Sandbox on one of its characters. Tallulah Bankhead was such a fan that she asked friends to keep notes on the episodes she missed while she was traveling. “ ‘Addicts,’ ” wrote one journalist, “is not too strong a word to...
What Perry Mason Taught Americans About the Criminal Justice System
When it launched on television in the late 1950s, “Perry Mason” represented the birth of the courtroom procedural; it’s still a familiar, if not over-used, genre. For decades, Raymond Burr’s Perry Mason, a criminal defense attorney who almost always emerged from the court victorious was America’s most loved lawyer. The character has been cited in more than 250 judicial opinions, and when Black Panther leader Huey P. Newton was charged with murder in 1968, a party official reportedly asked their...
'The Monkey is OK!': How 'Law & Order: SVU' Tackled Animal Rights
Since the flagship show debuted in 1990, Dick Wolf’s Law & Order franchise has fully saturated the American airwaves. The original Law & Order and the Law & Order: Criminal Intent spinoff ended in 2010 and 2011, respectively, but both appear in cable syndication at all hours. Law & Order: Special Victims Unit, now in its 19th year on NBC, focuses on a fictional New York Police Department sex crimes unit. Mariska Hargitay has played the role of Detective (now Lieutenant) Olivia Benson since its d...
The Miracle of Hair on The People v. O.J. Simpson: Brow Toupees, Bad Beard Trims, and ‘the World’s Tiniest Wig’
The first documented evidence of a joke about Los Angeles prosecutor Marcia Clark’s hair — “Who’s more likely to have a bad hair day, Marcia Clark or Alan Dershowitz?” — dates back to August 18, 1994, when the Los Angeles Times credited “investigative comedy reporter Tony Peyser” with the quip. Clark was the lead prosecutor in the O.J. Simpson trial, and, like nearly everyone it involved, she was quickly becoming an unwilling celebrity. Over time, Clark’s changing hairstyle, like Simpson’s white...
About
Jacqui Shine is a writer and historian. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in The New York Times, The Atlantic, Slate, The Wall Street Journal, The Awl, the Lapham’s Quarterly blog, Pacific Standard, the Chicago Reader, The Sun, Vulture, the Boston Review, the Los Angeles Review of Books, Buzzfeed, The New York Times Magazine, Longreads, Ambrook Research, and The Chronicle of Higher Education. Her story on the history of The New York Times' Style Section was nominated for a 2015 Mirror Award for excellence in media industry reporting. She is a contributing editor at The Sunday Long Read and a manuscript reader for the Virginia Quarterly Review. She writes the Substack newsletter Well, Actually. More information is available at her website.