Stream of Reading (Prepare to be Forwarded) – An Archive of What I'm Reading
An Evans, Ga., mom faces charges of contributing to the delinquency of a minor after she told her Alcoholics Anonymous sponsor that she threw a drunken, naked Twister party for her teen daughter and her friends. The sponsor responded to the randy mom’s plea for help by narcing her out to the sheriff’s department. Rachel…
If ignorance is bliss, does a high IQ equal misery? Popular opinion would have it so. We tend to think of geniuses as being plagued by existential angst, frustration, and loneliness. Think of Virginia Woolf, Alan Turing, or Lisa Simpson – lone stars, isolated even as they burn their brightest. As Ernest Hemingway wrote: “Happiness…
Once upon a time, circa 1995, Yahoo cofounders Jerry Yang and David Filo were setting up the company’s first office. It was a pretty drab place, so they decided to redo the walls. Filo headed out to pick up some paint. A notoriously thrifty type—his official title is “Chief Yahoo,” but his colleagues have been…
Newspaper reporter is ‘the worst job of 2015′ Newspaper reporter lands on the bottom of CareerCast’s Jobs Rated list for 2015. Last year, it was #199 out of 200 occupations. Today’s press release says: Newspaper reporter, which displaced lumberjack as the worst job of 2015, has a negative growth outlook of -13.33% and an average…
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…