Stream of Reading (Prepare to be Forwarded) – An Archive of What I'm Reading
AddThis Button Begin OAKLAND (KDKA) — Pittsburgh Police, Fire, EMS and Public Works crews worked to free a man who was trapped between two buildings Tuesday morning in Oakland. It all started around 2 a.m. on Forbes Avenue. According to police, a Pitt student became wedged between two buildings, in a gap that ranged from…
Image: Jim Cooke, Photo: Getty EpiPen, the life-saving allergy product, is now a $1 billion a year business for Mylan, a drug company that’s currently enduring a wave of bad publicity over the extraordinary surge in EpiPen pricing. In 2007, an EpiPen cost about $57. Today that price has skyrocketed to over $600—all for about…
The Trumpen proletariat. Photo: Konstantin Sergeyev Donald Trump’s supporters tend to live in economically depressed areas where white residents experience exceptionally high rates of mortality — and exceptionally low rates of social mobility — according to a new study from Gallup. Some might view these findings as evidence that “economic anxiety” among the white working-class has…
(Rachel Orr/The Washington Post) Economic distress and anxiety across working-class white America have become a widely discussed explanation for the success of Donald Trump. It seems to make sense. Trump’s most fervent supporters tend to be white men without college degrees. This same group has suffered economically in our increasingly globalized world, as machines have replaced workers in factories and labor…
For those who want to understand the social dynamics of the Donald Trump revolution — and why it is almost certain to fail — look no further than the ongoing kerfuffle over the Hugos, an annual set of awards for excellence in sci-fi and fantasy, which have been under attack by a bunch of embittered reactionaries….
There were thousands of fans in attendance at last week’s World Science Fiction Convention, but I swear that I kept seeing the same fifty faces. With the exception of a reading that I did with a few writers from Analog, all of my events revolved around the history of science fiction, which an emphasis on…
At its most basic level, “Kate Plays Christine” is a film about an actress who is struggling to develop a character. It’s a documentary, in the sense that for most of the film actress Kate Lyn Sheil appears as herself, trying on wigs and costumes, running lines, gathering fragmentary information about the life of the person…
In Google Search, our goal is to help users quickly find the best answers to their questions, regardless of the device they’re using. Today, we’re announcing two upcoming changes to mobile search results that make finding content easier for users. Simplifying mobile search results Two years ago, we added a mobile-friendly label to help users…
One subject I was interested in discussing with Weiner was “Weiner,” the critically lauded documentary about his disastrous mayoral campaign. Weiner’s campaign melted down following reports of countless instances of the candidate’s tweeting dirty pictures of himself — the fallout from which was captured by the filmmakers in excruciating behind-the-scene detail. Weiner said neither he…
This is a column about Gawker.com’s demise, but it is also a column about a plane ride I took last Friday. The two are related, though it might not seem that way at first. I’ll start with the plane ride, which was from San Francisco to Raleigh-Durham. I sat next to a woman who brought…