Stream of Reading (Prepare to be Forwarded) – An Archive of What I'm Reading
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Illustration: Angelica Alzona (GMG) SOMEWHERE IN IOWA—Here is what happened, right before everything began to go to hell: It was June of 2015. The president was Barack Obama. I was a reporter for Gawker.com, a thriving independent media outlet. The 2016 presidential election was a year away, and the campaign season had just begun in…
The cable channel FX announced today that it is launching a weekly documentary series focusing on the inner workings of the New York Times. This is not to be confused with the new Showtime documentary series about the New York Times. Unfortunately for these desperate, gullible TV executives: media is fucking boring. Do you think…
Do you think that being asked to leave a restaurant, or having your meal interrupted, or being called by the public is bad? My fascism-enabling friends, this is only the beginning. One thing that people who wield great power often fail to viscerally understand is what it feels like to have power wielded against you….
Our nation’s present uproar over the deleterious effects of social media on society and fretting about the decline of trusted news outlets is nothing new. What’s new is the fact that the straightforward ways to prop up the Real Journalism industry have never been more obvious. For two decades, professional thinkers—most of them employed in…
Image by Jim Cooke/ GMG Blue blazers. Blue checked shirts. Collar open. No tie. Brown shoes. Black shoes. Or Nike shoes. New, new, all new. Soft leather satchels with bold brass zippers. Good cufflinks. Good watches. Better than you know. Hundred dollar haircuts. Straight razored shaves. Shaped cuticles. Manicured nails. Clean, soft, tailored. New. Talking…
“CEO” is a term for someone who is paid more money than you because they are able to project a large degree of confidence about their wrong ideas. Don’t take my word for it—it’s science! The duties of CEOs vary somewhat from company to company, but they all have a few things in common: They…
JFK with no taxis, via NYTWA There’s a bigger lesson here than “Fuck Uber.” By now you may be familiar with the outlines of this story: On Saturday evening, after Trump’s Muslim ban was announced, thousands of protesters began to gather at New York’s JFK airport. The New York Taxi Workers Alliance—the union for an…
Image by Jim Cooke Realistically, there is only one way out of our predicament. We know that we live in an age of staggering economic inequality. The top 10% of earners now take in nearly half of all our national income, a portion that has been rising steadily since the Reagan era. Meanwhile, the average…