Slate Picks

What Happened at Slate This Week?

Jamelle Bouie shares a few good tabs.

Illustration by Charlie Powell.

Illustration by Charlie Powell.

Greetings Slate Plus-sters. This past week was a great one for the magazine—as usual. Here are a few of my favorite stories.

Our primate columnist (an incredible title) Eric Michael Johnson tackled Internet misogyny, discussing it in the context of a community of baboons who managed to create a calm, nurturing space for themselves in the wild. “If baboon societies are able to change the interaction between males and females based on the influence of culture,” he wrote, “surely we can too.”

Slate excels at foreign coverage, and James Ciment’s story on Liberia’s Ebola crisis does a fine job of sketching the nation’s history and its deep connection to the United States, as well as making a case for helping Liberians defeat the disease that’s threatening their country.

On a less dire note, I liked Aisha Harris’ look at the recent career of Denzel Washington, who has been stuck in generic action movies for the past decade despite his tremendous skills as an actor. And while I don’t watch a lot of television, Willa Paskin’s review of the new sitcom Black-ish makes me think I’ll give it a shot.

Two things I love besides politics are photography and food, which is why I really enjoyed this gallery of black-and-white-film photos from Mark Steinmetz, as well as this short post from Brian Wansink on the right design for a school lunch tray.

As for things outside the Slate world, you should read National Journal’s Lucia Graves on the unbearable whiteness of Washington, D.C.’s bike-sharing program, and you should check out Tom Breihan at Deadspin on Face/Off, the greatest action movie of the 1990s (this is a true thing and I dare you to dispute it).

And that’s all I have. See you another time!