Stream of Reading (Prepare to be Forwarded) – An Archive of What I'm Reading
Aerial photos of the Women’s March on Washington, one of many protests that brought out an estimated three million-plus people around the world on Saturday, appear to be a sea of pink. It’s the effect of hundreds of individuals wearing brightly-colored hats topped with cat ears. Knit at home and acquired from strangers on bus…
President Donald Trump is signing a memorandum that freezes hiring for some federal government workers as a way to reduce payrolls and rein in the size of the federal workforce. Trump’s directive is fulfilling one of his campaign promises. He tells reporters that members of the military will be exempted from the hiring freeze. The…
Image via AP. The Hill is reporting that the incoming Trump administration has dramatic plans to reduce federal spending, mostly by cutting the budgets for everything that progressives have ever held dear: civil rights, reducing violence against women, the arts, the humanities, and energy efficiency. The budget proposal is reportedly lifted almost directly from a…
Donald Trump is relying on a blueprint budget from the conservative Heritage Foundation and the guidance of a former Rand Paul staffer to deliver the most extremely right-wing restructuring of the federal government in decades. The Trump transition team has been at work for months with career staffers at the White House and throughout the federal…
BTW The Trump administration plans to cut funding for the arts and privatize NPR and PBS, according to a new report from the Hill. As part of a plan to cut $10.5 trillion from the federal budget over the next 10 years, the new administration wants to slash spending for the departments of Transportation, Justice,…
Someone needs to write a book about how literally insane it made you being constantly lied to about Iraq by sloppy propaganda as a teenager. Right now, I’m slowly working my way through Susan Faludi’s The Terror Dream, a meticulous deconstruction of the media’s response after 9/11. In it, Faludi argues that producers, pundits and executives…
Women march to Roberto Clementi Field in Boston to protest a continuing trend of violence against women and minorities in the city on Aug. 9, 1980. (Photo by Deborah Petto/The Boston Globe via Getty Images) This week, countless American journalists have been weighing the costs of joining the Women’s March in Washington, DC, or one…
NEW YORK—Admitting they badly need to turn their business around, executives at struggling media company Vidmark Interactive confided to sources Tuesday that their situation has become so dire they may have to consider giving a job to someone who is actually qualified to hold it. “We’ve had such a difficult time staying afloat in the…
As an engineer for the U.S. Digital Service, Marianne Bellotti has encountered vintage mainframes that are still being used in production — sometimes even powering web apps. Last month she entertained a San Francisco audience with tales about some of them, in a talk called “7074 says Hello World,” at Joyent’s “Systems We Love” conference. Created under the…
The Expanse, based on the book series by James S A Corey, is an intelligent look at a nearish future when humanity has advanced enough to move into space, but not quite so much that we don’t all still hate each other. The sharpest feelings of anger and envy come from the Belters, the working…