Stream of Reading (Prepare to be Forwarded) – An Archive of What I'm Reading
AirPods are a product of the past. They’re plastic, made of some combination of carbon, hydrogen, oxygen, nitrogen, chlorine, and sulfur. They’re tungsten, tin, tantalum, lithium, and cobalt. The particles that make up these elements were created 13.8 billion years ago, during the Big Bang. Humans extract these elements from the earth, heat them, refine…
xA specter is haunting the straight white liberal sixtysomething American dad—the specter of his damn socialist kids. A generation that grew up eating Cold War propaganda with their cornflakes confronts one in which socialism regularly outpolls capitalism, and it’s happening across the breakfast table. New Yorker writer Adam Gopnik’s new book, A Thousand Small Sanities:…
Sen. Elizabeth Warren on Monday proposed eliminating the student loan debts of tens of millions of Americans and making all public colleges tuition-free, staking out an ambitious stance on one of the central policy debates of the 2020 Democratic primary. Student debt and college affordability have become a key dividing line in the Democratic race, between more…
President Donald Trump instructed his acting chief of staff, Mick Mulvaney, to fire Alles. Alles remains in his position as of now but has been asked to leave. The USSS director was told two weeks ago there would be a transition in leadership and he was asked to stay on until there was a…
But once you realize McConnell has already achieved his life’s dream, and ascended to the limits of his ambition, his behavior suddenly starts to make more sense. He’s not trying to cap off his career with a legislative masterstroke, because he doesn’t care about legislation. He already won. He’s the Senate majority leader, his parliamentary…
Photo: Hamilton Nolan BURLINGTON, IOWA—There’s a very nice visitor’s center on the river here. Right by downtown. They’ll tell you everything about Burlington, including the fact that it’s about to flood. That visitor’s center was totally empty on Thursday, even though the national press corps was just two blocks away. We had much more stupid…
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…
“What does it take for a Donald Trump voter to renounce their decision?” is a question worth exploring as 2020 approaches, especially considering the fervency of his followers, who often seem less interested in policy, and more fixated on the bogus immigration threat and alleged conspiracies against their beloved leader. On Monday, the Washington Post…
This article originally appeared on VICE UK. Every single and lonely millennial is on at least two dating apps. Without them, it would be impossible to meet someone at a Time Out-approved Bavarian beer hall pop-up and split an Uber home for profoundly disappointing sex. The amount of rutting you can actually get done off…
Ever since Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, the fiery Democratic Socialist from the Bronx, toppled the ten-term incumbent in her New York district, analysts have wondered whether she can be as much of a renegade in Washington as she was on the campaign trail. So far, all signs suggest she will be. In the mere week since Ocasio-Cortez…