Stream of Reading (Prepare to be Forwarded) – An Archive of What I'm Reading
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The empire begins with a brothel. It stands, sturdy and square, at the heart of a gold-rush boomtown in northwest British Columbia, a monument to careful branding. The windows of the Arctic Restaurant have no signs offering access to prostitutes—even in a lawless Yukon outpost in 1899, decorum rules out such truth in advertising—but Friedrich…
Editor’s Note: This piece was originally published on July 19, 2018. On Wednesday, two representatives of the United States government held press briefings, both of them touching on one of the most astonishing news stories of the Trump presidency—a series of events that had begun two days earlier, when Donald Trump traveled to Helsinki to…
1. The Aristocracy Is Dead … For about a week every year in my childhood, I was a member of one of America’s fading aristocracies. Sometimes around Christmas, more often on the Fourth of July, my family would take up residence at one of my grandparents’ country clubs in Chicago, Palm Beach, or Asheville, North…
The fires on the streets of Ferguson, Missouri, had barely stopped burning when the Department of Justice released an extraordinary report on the city’s police department. In the findings of the 2015 investigation of the Ferguson Police Department, the DOJ’s Civil Rights Division detailed how a municipality had built its social contract on a slow-rolling…
It’s late on a Friday afternoon in March, and I’m sitting across from Stephen Miller in his spacious, sunlit West Wing office, trying to figure out whether he’s trolling me. To hear more feature stories, see our full list or get the Audm iPhone app. This is no easy task. A provocateur as skilled as…
This column is a reprint from Unwinnable Monthly #102. If you like what you see, grab the magazine for less than ten dollars, or subscribe and get all future magazines for half price. ——— Three fingers of analysis when just two will do. ——— I recently wrote my boss a jokey email wherein I couched a legitimate but…
Horseshoe crabs are sometimes called “living fossils” because they have been around in some form for more than 450 million years. In this time, the Earth has gone through multiple major ice ages, a Great Dying, the formation and subsequent breaking up of Pangaea, and an asteroid impact that killed the dinosaurs and most of…
I could only have seen it there, on the waxed hardwood floor of my elementary-school auditorium, because I was young then, barely 7 years old, and cable had not yet come to the city, and if it had, my father would not have believed in it. Yes, it had to have happened like this, like…
Monster Hunter and the Mainstream By Rob Rich • April 9th, 2018 This column is a reprint from Unwinnable Monthly #101. If you like what you see, grab the magazine for less than ten dollars, or subscribe and get all future magazines for half price. ——— Here’s the Thing is where Rob dumps his random thoughts and…
We’ve known for some time now that Americans are increasingly dying younger, but the scale and nature of the problem has been a little bit murky. There was speculation that the downturn in American life expectancy was all thanks to “deaths of despair,” but some experts have said that might not be the full story,…