I Gave Slate’s Exact Time and Date of Birth to Some Astrologers. They Had Many Findings.

Downtime Slate Rising For the magazine’s 30th birthday, I gave our exact date and time of birth to some astrologers. They had many findings. By Enter your email to receive alerts for this author. Sign in or create an account to better manage your email preferences. Unsubscribe from email alerts Are you sure you want to unsubscribe from email alerts for Heather Schwedel? Oct 10, 20265:50 AM Illustration by Tolga Akdoğan. Happy 30th to Slate! Explore 30 years of sharp takes, unsolicited advice, and endless internet debates at our throwback homepage. Warning to longtime readers: This article contains unironic astrology. When Slate launched in 1996 with a mission “to bring thought-provoking, high-caliber journalism to the Internet’s World Wide Web,” to quote a press release from the time, its founders were eager to discover all the advantages an online magazine might have over a legacy publication. We would be nimble and interactive and unencumbered by the hassle of printing and distributing physical media. But there was another benefit to being a newbie online magazine that I’m pretty sure none of Slate’s editors were thinking about at the time: Unlike our older, stodgier competitors, we would have a record of not just the date and place we launched but the exact minute (which happened to be June 24, 1996, at noon Pacific time in Redmond, Washington, the site of Slate’s original Microsoft-era headquarters). This information would ensure that when the day came that someone wanted to look into Slate’s astrology—perhaps someone who would grow up to be an enterprising longtime Slate staffer but who, circa mid-1996, was still attending elementary school in New Jersey—it would be possible to access the magazine’s full natal chart. Most people are familiar with their sun sign based on their birthday, but a chart can paint a much fuller picture beyond that, based on what the sky looked like at the precise time and location of someone’s, or, as it happens, something’s birth. Without a birth time and place, you can fill in some of a birth chart, but not all of it: The rising signs and the houses will be indeterminate. While it seems like publications like the New York Times (born Sept. 18, 1851, a Virgo sun) and the New Yorker (born Feb. 21, 1925, a Pisces), both of which have birth dates but not times on the record, are doing just fine without complete birth charts, it only seemed right, maybe even fated, to celebrate Slate’s 30th birthday by digging deep into its astrology. I’m actually pretty sure this idea would have appalled the magazine’s original editorial team, a rational-minded bunch who probably associated astrology with Nancy Reagan and hadn’t yet lived through its 2010s revival. And yet a magazine evolves over time; new writers arrive and put their stamp on it. My stamp is that I like astrology and wanted to see what it could tell us about where Slate’s been and where it’s going. Sorry, Michael Kinsley. Though I have a hobbyist’s interest in astrology, I’m not qualified to interpret a chart on my own, so I sought out multiple readings: two video calls with different astrologers, and two reports I ordered via Etsy. I mentioned to the astrologers I was having calls with that the chart was not for me but my workplace. If you’re wondering if they thought it was weird that I was asking them to do a chart for a company instead of a person, the answer is no: Many astrologers include charts for businesses or brands among their standard offerings. Hello, why wouldn’t you want astrological insights into your brand? For the reports, I just submitted the information as if it were for a chart for a person named Slate. (Slate, incidentally, has been growing in popularity as a first name since the 1990s, though it’s still relatively uncommon.) I, of course, already knew all about Slate, the website not the name, but I was curious to see whether the personality astrologers discerned from a birth chart would bear any resemblance to the Slate I knew. I love astrology, but even I was skeptical at first when it came to Slate’s “big three.” In astrology, the combination of the sun, rising, and moon signs are known as the big three, and Slate’s, I discovered, are Cancer sun, Virgo rising, and Libra moon. This seemed off to me initially. I was expecting the magazine to be a brainy air sign, maybe an Aquarius. The Cancer sun part was especially hard to square, Cancer being the sign of emotions, deep feelings, and connectedness. But when I spoke to Ace Anderson, who does readings for Green Witch Creations, a shop in Sedona, Arizona, he managed, without being at all previously familiar with Slate, to explain how this big three fit together in a way that did actually sound quite Slate-y. The Cancer sun is in the 10th house, he began, the part of a chart that focuses on career and public reputation. “For the sun to be there, that places this energy of the magazine in a way that people automatically will look to for information concerning those bigger-picture things,” Anderson said—it was very auspicious, in his opinion. Combining this with its rising sign in service- and routine-oriented Virgo, “when people first experience the magazine, the experience that they’re having is one of that this magazine will provide a structure, a service, a routine that is comfortable for me,” he said, which brought to mind the idea of our readers making a daily visit to our homepage. The moon represents emotions and what’s going on behind the scenes, and according to Anderson, Slate’s Libra moon balances the emotions of the magazine. (Libra’s sign is the scales, so I also took it as a nod to Slate’s tradition of robust legal coverage.) “The magazine wants to be balanced, wants to include everybody, wants to really make sure that the information that’s being provided, right, is fair and balanced, in a warm, informative way,” Anderson said. “It’ll be opinionated but not black or white.” It tickled me to hear this man who had never so much as read Slate perceive from our chart alone that we specialize in reasoned, accurate, non-black-and-white opinions. I mean, sure, I guess he could have Googled us, but researching a company and reverse-engineering a description that makes sense would actually be a lot more work than doing a normal reading, so I trusted that he was purely going by the stars. I was also pleased to learn I wasn’t exactly wrong to guess that Slate has a lot of air in its chart. Kimberly Peterson, of Celestial Navigation Astrology in Salem, Massachusetts, observed that Slate has a grand air trine, which she described as “kind of like a superpower” involving the three air signs. Anderson said Slate actually has a stellium, meaning three planets that are relatively close together, in its 9th house, where Mercury, Mars, and Venus are all in Gemini. “It’s the perfect alignment because it’s all about exploring things and talking about things and having communication about things, but it’s not from a training standpoint, necessarily,” he said. “This information or this energy is more geared towards just exploration, just for the interest of knowing the answer, the interest of filling in the why, but not to solve anything.” Even when readings varied slightly, I still saw Slate reflected back to me. In the system Peterson uses, Slate’s sun was in the 11th house rather than the 10th. “Cancer is very nurturing and protective, empathetic, kind of like this healing, helping kind of energy,” she said. “And it’s in the 11th house, which is community and groups, and it’s very humanitarian and charitable. It’s very big-picture thinking.” It still fit, kinda … or was I just a sucker who would find truth in anything an astrologer told me? I found, or thought I found, similar resonances in the reports I ordered. “Your larger story is about turning curiosity into a life direction, then allowing your voice to become useful beyond the private world of your own thoughts,” read a snippet of the in-depth natal chart reading from LuxeAstro Astrology on Etsy. “You come alive when conversation opens a door, when an idea changes the scale of a question, or when someone invites you to see beyond the familiar script.” It just seemed so us … unless it was so everyone? I wanted to believe that Slate was unique and that destiny was on its side, but, like A.I., astrology has a way of making everything sound flattering and plausible. Part of what I set out to do in getting Slate’s birth chart was to find out more about where it was going, but at the same time I was scared, mostly that I would find out something I didn’t want to know. I didn’t want to have to report in my fun little astrology article something like that one of the astrologers had predicted the company’s imminent death. We’re doing fine, don’t worry, but the outlook for journalism in general is not, shall we say, bullish. Blessedly, no one I consulted was quite so fatalistic. Peterson talked about our North Node, an aspect of a birth chart that’s supposed to represent the company’s evolutionary path and what it’s supposed to grow toward, whereas the South Node represents past lives. Slate, apparently, is supposed to evolve in a Libra direction, “which is great because the moon’s already there,” as Peterson pointed out. With our South Node in Aries, we’re evolving away from “war and intensity and stress and things like that” toward “love and beauty and harmony,” and, I’m guessing, more jurisprudence coverage. Could it also mean more relationships and business partnerships? One thing about astrology is that there are really a lot of ways to interpret it. At 30 years old, Slate is in its Saturn return, meaning Saturn is back in the same spot it was when Slate was born. “You’ve got the Saturn return going on in the eighth house, and the eighth house is that whole ego-death kind of thing,” Peterson told me. For people, a Saturn return represents the transition to adulthood, when you’re reevaluating whether your life is on the right track. It’s not so different for companies. “It’s like you’re kind of setting yourself up for the next 30 years,” Peterson said. “The decisions right now that you’re all making are supposed to be long term, like until the company is 60 kind of a thing.” But no pressure or anything! “It’ll be like that until 2028, so you’ve got a little time, but yeah, it is kind of one of those big times where you’re supposed to really be thinking about the future. So honestly, getting an astrology reading for the company is pretty cool way to do that.” I mean, I thought so. But maybe that’s just my Gemini moon talking. Holidays Journalism Hobbies Slate's 30th Anniversary