Stream of Reading (Prepare to be Forwarded) – An Archive of What I'm Reading
We like cats too. Online activity is ceaselessly tracked. In publishing, this has become an acute dystopia. Yes, we read what we read for a variety of complex, nuanced reasons, arguably now more than ever, for the cognitive economy forces intimacy on its consumers, with social media asking us daily to consider what our…
This hasn’t been a good week for Snapchat. News that the startup got a 25% markdown from a big investor dominated the first half of the week. And on Friday, Snapchat released a new version of its app that makes people pay to keep using certain “Lenses,” a special type of photo filter. When users…
Every day in June, the most popular wedding month of the year, about 13,000 American couples will say “I do,” committing to a lifelong relationship that will be full of friendship, joy, and love that will carry them forward to their final days on this earth. Except, of course, it doesn’t work out that way…
Like millions of people, I’ve been obsessively following the news from Paris, putting aside other things to focus on the horror. It’s the natural human reaction. But let’s be clear: it’s also the reaction the terrorists want. And that’s something not everyone seems to understand. Take, for example, Jeb Bush’s declaration that “this is an…
This looks like a really awesome television show, recently previewed at DISCOP AFRICA 2015. Jongo is a television series set to premiere in 2016 in South Africa, following a young man who gains supernatural abilities after discovering an alien crystal. Jongo is set in Johannesburg, following Eli King after he finds a crystal left to…
I’ve been watching with first amusement and then frustration as tweeter after tweeter claim the media aren’t covering things going on in the world that they really, really are covering. At the time of writing, this tweet has had nearly 50,000 retweets… But it’s just blatantly untrue. Search Google News and you will find pages and…
Hundreds of members of the Church of Latter Day Saints mailed or handed in letters quitting the Mormon church on Saturday to protest against a new policy barring children of married same-sex couples from being baptized until they are adults. Leaders of the church approved the policy last week. It added same-sex marriage to acts…
Japan is once again in recession. The situation isn’t dire, but weak corporate investment is an important warning sign that investors should heed. Japanese gross domestic product fell by an annualized 0.8% from a year earlier in the September quarter, the second straight decline. This may overstate the extent of weakness, as it was dragged down…
On the night of the Paris attacks, Rurik Bradbury noticed an inevitable and tiresome trend popping up on Twitter. “I think I saw a professional news organization tweet about the lights of the Eiffel Tower being turned off in memory of the victims,” recalled Bradbury, the New York-based CMO of a software company. In the…
LONDON The Anonymous hackers collective is preparing to unleash waves of cyberattacks on Islamic State following the attacks in Paris last week that killed 129 people, it said in a video posted online. A man wearing a Guy Fawkes mask said the Islamic State militants who claimed responsibility for the Paris attacks were “vermin”…