Stream of Reading (Prepare to be Forwarded) – An Archive of What I'm Reading
WILMINGTON, Del. (AP) — Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen said Sunday that the federal government would not bail out Silicon Valley Bank, but is working to help depositors who are concerned about their money. The Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation insures deposits up to $250,000, but many of the companies and wealthy people who used the bank…
Why do right-wing men hate Greta Thunberg and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez so much? Researchers have some troubling answers to that question. Climate skeptic Bjørn Lomborg has built his global brand on keeping his cool. “Cool it,” his best-selling book told those worried about the warming planet. For some reason, however, he seems to have difficulty sticking…
“The Trump Administration is revoking California’s Federal Waiver on emissions in order to produce far less expensive cars for the consumer, while at the same time making the cars substantially SAFER,” Trump tweeted. The President made the announcement while visiting California for fundraisers. He was in his hotel in Los Angeles when he sent…
In the run-up to the 2018 midterms, a major element of Democratic Party messaging was that the party would serve as a check on President Trump and the Republican Party. Incoming Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi “will place the emphasis on investigations by Democratic-led committees in the House to keep the Trump administration in…
The selling point of Joe Biden’s campaign for president is that our current political nightmare is just a momentary aberration. Joe, good old Joe, friend of Barack, has come to deliver us back to normalcy. Consider what normalcy means. Last night, Biden held one of his endless high-dollar fundraisers in Miami. The press pool report,…
NEW YORK—In April of 2016, I went to a huge Bernie Sanders speech in Washington Square park, which spilled out into the surrounding streets around NYU. Last night, I went to a (not quite as huge, but still big) speech by Elizabeth Warren, in the same park, under the same noble white arch. What’s the…
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…
In a memo he sent before leaving the company, a former Google employee criticized the internet giant and its employees, noting that he regularly encountered racism during his experience as a Black worker at the company. The memo, obtained by Motherboard, is titled “The Weight of Silence,” and argues that Google is lacking in diversity,…
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…
A harrowing scenario analysis of how human civilization might collapse in coming decades due to climate change has been endorsed by a former Australian defense chief and senior royal navy commander. The analysis, published by the Breakthrough National Centre for Climate Restoration, a think-tank in Melbourne, Australia, describes climate change as “a near- to mid-term…