Slicing $ell_p$-balls reloaded: stability, planar sections in $ell_1$

We show that the two-dimensional minimum-volume central section of the $n$-dimensional cross-polytope is attained by the regular $2n$-gon. We establish stability-type results for hyperplane sections of $ell_p$-balls in all the cases where the extremisers are known. Our methods are mainly probabilistic, exploring connections between negative moments of projections of random vectors uniformly distributed on convex bodies and volume of their sections.