Stream of Reading (Prepare to be Forwarded) – An Archive of What I'm Reading
On Friday, Marvel released the first for four collaborations with Netflix, “Daredevil,” which follows the trials of a blind lawyer who fights for the rights of the downtrodden in courtrooms by day and back alleys by night. The series superficially resembles Christopher Nolan’s “Batman” trilogy, in that it presents a view of urban life whose…
An interview with the author Rachel Held Evans about her new book and searching for authenticity in the church simpleinsomnia/Flickr “I caution against the idea that the way to get young people into church is to be hip and cool and have a pastor who wears skinny jeans.” Rachel Held Evans could have been talking…
We are living in a cultural moment in which people with the normiest of normative identities — those jealously guarding an armful of poker chips in the game of social capital — are, in some quarters, behaving as if they’re under siege. In January, Jonathan Chait took on the scourge of “political correctness” for New…
Jonathan Touboul is a mathematician and a neuroscientist. He holds a PhD in math from France’s prestigious École Polytechnique, where he won a prize for his thesis on how to simulate neurons in the brain. He publishes papers with titles like “Pulsatile localized dynamics in delayed neural-field equations in arbitrary dimension” and “The propagation of…
Hope he had on a hard shell. A man dressed as a taco crashed into a car as he skateboarded down the Williamsburg Bridge pedestrian ramp in a ridiculous scene captured by Baby’s All Right, a bar at 146 Broadway. Baby’s All Right’s Ben Wilkes was filming his co-worker Jon Newport skateboard in a taco…
Entry Text It’s 2015, and on average, women still make 78 cents to a man’s dollar. A new report goes beyond that oft-quoted statistic, and examines this discrepancy along racial, geographical and educational lines.The American Association of University Women’s (AAUW) “The Simple Truth about the Gender Pay Gap” report breaks down the wage gap in…
I recently had an argument with a friend about games that require a constant internet connection. “I don’t see what the big deal is,” he kept repeating. “Everybody has the internet.” What’s funny about this is that my friend lives with his parents while attending college part-time and working a low-paid internship; his parents pay…
When Captain America: The Winter Soldier came out, it seemed pretty obvious where its sequel was going: Steve Rogers would track down the Winter Soldier, A.K.A. Bucky Barnes. This would wrap up the arc of the trilogy, leaving things open for Barnes or Sam Wilson to take over as Captain America once Chris Evans’ six-movie…
Unlike early birds (people who have a genetic tendency to go to bed and wake up early), late risers, also known as night owls, have a natural tendency to go to bed late and sleep even later. And that’s just fine. Although you may sleep through the early morning hours, which many early birds claim…
The Turing test detects if a machine can truly think like a human. The Bechdel Test detects gender bias in fiction. If you were to mash the two together to create a particularly messy Venn diagram, the overlap shall henceforth be known as the Ex Machina Zone. In writer/director Alex Garland’s thought-provoking new film—out Friday—we…