Take a Trip Back to 1996 With Us for Slate’s 30th Anniversary

Slate Fare And if you’re one of the first 100 people to complete the challenges, we’ll mail you some fun stuff! Photo illustration by Slate. Photos by Mario Ruiz/Getty Images and Fisher Price/Getty Images. Travel back to the ’90s for a six-week experiment in real-world connection. Sign up for Party Like It's 1996 here. Slate was born in 1996, the year of the Macarena, Tickle Me Elmo, and the Nintendo 64. Back then, a great night out meant showing up at the bar to see who was around, belting “Wonderwall” in front of strangers, and telling the bartender where you were headed next so your friends could track you down. For our 30th birthday, Gen X writer and longtime Slatester Dan Kois is reviving the lost art of hanging out. Party Like It’s 1996 is a challenge series; it’s going out for the first time starting on Aug. 10, and each week after you sign up, a new mission will hit your inbox. This series is going to live on Slate in perpetuity, and you can initiate it any time—whenever you sign up, you’ll get an email per week for the six weeks following. And regardless of when you sign up, for every challenge, you can get one collectible badge—just report within the email that you completed it (we’re using the honor system here!) and the badge will appear in the next email you receive in this series, filling your collector’s case one slot at a time. One entry per person. If you sign up by Aug. 14 and do the challenge along with Dan Kois in real time as the series goes out for the very first time, we’ll send you some fun stuff in the mail after the series’ inaugural run ends on Sept. 14! (And again, if you miss the inaugural send, don’t worry—you can still sign up at any time in the future and receive the challenges for six weeks after that point!) Enter your email in the box below to participate: Party Like It’s 1996 Six challenges to help you bring back the lost art of hanging out. The first 100 people to sign up can earn ’90s swag worth checking the mail for. The more challenges you complete, the bigger the package we send you at the end. Complete one challenge and get: A trading card themed around that challenge. Complete two challenges and get: Two trading cards. Complete three challenges and get: Three trading cards and a secret digital playlist full of ’90s bangers. Complete four challenges and get: Four trading cards, a secret digital playlist full of ’90s bangers, and a surprise ’90s music CD in a custom illustrated jacket. Complete at least five challenges and get: Five trading cards, a secret digital playlist full of ’90s bangers, a surprise ’90s music CD in a custom illustrated jacket, and a handwritten postcard from Dan Kois! If you join the live send, Dan will also be soliciting your reports from doing the challenges, and your anecdotes and photos could end up in one of these emails. And if you convince your friends to join, we’ll have another reward to offer you—more details on that soon! Relationships Friendship Party Like It’s 1996