Stream of Reading (Prepare to be Forwarded) – An Archive of What I'm Reading
The Post-Dirtbag Left For years, “Chapo Trap House” and other podcasts have paired anti-capitalist ideas with the rhetorical style of social media. Is a new form emerging? July 26, 2021 Two shows harness a progressive energy, but they differ sharply in affect.Illustration by Miguel Porlan On the evening of January 6th, while National Guard troops were…
How the ad exchanges are sending your money to a very bad man Welcome back to BRANDED, the newsletter exploring how marketers broke society (and how we can fix it). Here’s what’s new with us: Seb Gorka is a neo-Nazi. This is not an opinion or a personal interpretation. It’s a well-documented fact. He has…
The chilling spectacle of watching the political class redeem a criminal, again. Photo: Gary Hershorn/REUTERS Photo: Gary Hershorn/REUTERS Photo: Gary Hershorn/REUTERS I am not an art critic, but I don’t think George W. Bush’s new portraits are very good. They inspire nothing but malaise and communicate a dilettante energy. Painting is to Bush what politics…
It’s wild how these adtech platforms are violating U.S. sanctions against Russia Placing ads with the enemy Welcome back to BRANDED, the newsletter exploring how marketers broke society (and how we can fix it). Here’s what’s new with us: Two weeks ago, the U.S. Treasury made a very rare move. They announced new sanctions against…
A working theory of how major brands ended up in bed with War Room: Pandemic Here’s what’s new with us: How do your ads end up on Steve Bannon’s TV show? Hi folks, Nandini here. Last week, I was checking in on Steve Bannon’s latest media venture War Room: Pandemic when an odd commercial break…
I made a mistake and got optimistic on New Year’s Eve. I blow dried my hair, and put on mascara, and got a bottle of bubbly wine that was much nicer than the kind I usually buy and not nice enough to be called champagne. I put on a silly pink jumpsuit and played a…
.entry-header In December 2016, when then-President-elect Donald Trump summoned tech leaders to Trump Tower for a roundtable discussion, there was considerable debate about whether or not executives like Amazon’s Jeff Bezos, Google’s Larry Page, Apple’s Tim Cook, and Microsoft’s Satya Nadella should accept the invitation. I argued that they absolutely should in this Daily Update…
One day in March of this year, a Google engineer named Justine Tunney created a strange and ultimately doomed petition at the White House website. The petition proposed a three-point national referendum, as follows: 1. Retire all government employees with full pensions. 2. Transfer administrative authority to the tech industry. 3. Appoint [Google executive chairman]…
With the , it shouldn’t be surprising that tech companies—specifically those in the app space—have swooped in left and right to . Want to monitor your blood pressure? . Mental health got you down? . And of course, there are apps to ease of the multimillion-dollar headache plaguing the country at large: . And none…
data preprocessed in process/process-data.js data processed in process/freebird/process-graphic.js asset wrapper : start ASSET : START If you own a mobile phone, its every move is logged and tracked by dozens of companies. No one is beyond the reach of this constant digital surveillance. Not even the president of the United States. The Times Privacy Project…