The classic American emergency exit sign—the bold red letters spelling out E-X-I-T—seems at first glance like an unimpeachable bit of sign design. The contrast between the letters and the background ...

Photo illustration by Slate. Logos courtesy WTF, The Read, Welcome to Night Vale, and Radio Diaries. Sarah Koenig photo courtesy This American Life. Paul F. Tompkins photo by Barry ...

The salsa bar at Taco Time in The Dalles, Oregon. 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 early ...

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 ...

Without, the night was cold and wet, but in the small parlour of Laburnam Villa the blinds were drawn and the fire burned brightly. Father and son were at chess, the former, who possessed ideas about ...

There's a warehouse about 20 minutes north of Boston, in a minor maze of buildings behind a barbed-wire fence. Ventilation ducts crisscross the ceiling over stacks of polyurethane pods, where half a ...

ANCHORAGE, ALASKA—Until the summer of 2014, 16-year-old Florence Mbabazi had spent all of her short life in northern Rwanda’s Gihembe Refugee Camp, a humming sprawl of more than 3,000 mud houses with ...

Citizen Kane’s Xanadu fell into disrepair before it was ever finished. Hogwarts is now a tourist trap in Florida. Even Eloise’s quarters at the Plaza Hotel have recently been relocated to Brooklyn. Of ...

Courtesy of V&A Museum. If you live in Europe or the Americas, you likely pick up a fork every day and give no thought to it, unless you’re selecting flatware for a wedding registry or you happen to ...

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 ...

Painted by John Giles Eccardt. Favorite examples of poetic endings include the interrogatives of Shelley (“If winter comes, can Spring be far behind?”) and Yeats (“How come we know the dancer from the ...

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” ...