Stream of Reading (Prepare to be Forwarded) – An Archive of What I'm Reading
Selfies are, by name, if not in practice, a relatively new phenomenon. In the few short years since selfies became “a thing,” they’ve gone on to spawn (and facilitate) countless memes, jokes, and even a lucrative peripherals industry. They are a bona-fide sensation, albeit one that’s been derisively linked to narcissism and even psychopathy. But now, as selfies settle into part of the…
I was raised in the woods by first-person shooters, and those woods were just a blocky texture on invisible walls. I evolved from a mammal-mouse driving Doomed dinosaur keyboard-aimers to extinction. I’ve selected the greatest gun in gaming history. I played Blood back when blinking counted as attempted suicide. I’ve been shooting for so long…
Anybody who spends time in a car or bus in Manhattan knows that traffic congestion isn’t getting better and, indeed, may be getting worse. The average daytime speed of cars in Manhattan’s business districts has fallen to just under 8 miles per hour this year, from about 9.15 miles per hour in 2009. City officials…
With only a week and change to go before the July 29 official release of Windows 10, Microsoft has gone ahead and enabled the ability to stream games from the Xbox One to Windows 10 devices. With the feature emerging from preview into the hands of the masses, all one needs to remote play Xbox…
Very, very mild spoilers for Inside Out follow. An important part of the climax of Pixar’s wonderful new film Inside Out involves the realization that all of our emotions are important, that feeling sad can be just as crucial as feeling happy, no matter what others might tell you. But the movie also reveals that…
National Archives (United Kingdom) The official poverty line, as I wrote yesterday, is a dated and crude statistical concept that in many ways fails to capture America’s historical success at fighting economic need. It was based on the cost of food in 1963, mostly because the Department of Agriculture had some idea of what a basic grocery budget should…
When one writer suggested that guns can be regulated without anyone’s rights being infringed, he lost his job. Dick Metcalf told his story this morning to a skeptical crowd. Lisa Roe/Flickr We noticed that you have an AD BLOCKER ENABLED Please consider disabling it for our site, or supporting our work in one of these…
Years back, a law professor told me that when she teaches a class on the drawing of legislative districts, she leaves the issue of multi-member districts for last because it solves all the problems too well and makes the rest of the material uninteresting. I was reminded of that when I read Kim Soffen’s Upshot…
Social Sharing Toolkit v2.2 Jess Zimmerman’s previous work for The Toast can be found here. I am not a big fan of psychic charlatanry, which often preys on people who are in genuine grief. So when I read about psychic fraud Priscilla Kelly Delmaro, arrested in May for second-degree grand larceny, I should have felt…
Having coined the phrase “Clinton Rules” to explain the national news media’s obsession with phony scandal narratives involving Bill and Hillary Clinton, I should be gratified to see it pass into general circulation. First came New York Times columnist and liberal MVP Paul Krugman, casting doubt upon that newspaper’s virtually incomprehensible 4,400-word treatise, which insinuated that…