Stream of Reading (Prepare to be Forwarded) – An Archive of What I'm Reading
(Mark Lyons/European Pressphoto Agency) Last night, CNN aired a terrific segment on people from coal country who voted for Donald Trump — but are now worried that his vow to repeal Obamacare will deprive them of crucial protections that enable them to stay afloat financially. This dovetails with other reporting that suggests a lot of Trump…
Watch Dogs 2 surprised me with how it handled the microaggressions that black folks in the tech sector often encounter. Considering the way the first game served up an unlikeable stereotype of a misanthropic hacker, the sequel is a breath of fresh air. The hero of the game is Marcus Holloway, a sympathetic young black hacker,…
On Friday night at around 10pm ET—optimal time to release news—the developers of Unsung Story put out yet another update for their longrunning Kickstarter failure. Backers were… not happy. In case you haven’t followed the ongoing Unsung Story debacle, here’s the short version: In January of 2014, the developer Playdek raised $660,000 for a strategy-RPG…
Credit Adam Maida WASHINGTON — If Donald J. Trump decides as president to throw a whistle-blower in jail for trying to talk to a reporter, or gets the F.B.I. to spy on a journalist, he will have one man to thank for bequeathing him such expansive power: Barack Obama. Mr. Trump made his animus toward…
According to onetime American Idol hopeful Bo Bice, a recent incident with an Atlanta Popeye’s employee left him shocked and hurt after a woman called him what is apparently the worse epithet you could ever hurl at a white man: “white boy.” In a now deleted Facebook post, Bice claims that one of the employees…
WASHINGTON — Black Republicans are figuring out how to respond to an invite-only meeting taking place Wednesday between senior staff of President-elect Donald Trump’s transition and mostly Democratic-leaning civil rights groups and clergy. The meeting, first reported by ABC News, which began late Wednesday morning, sent black Republicans scrambling for answers well into the night…
People often say that online behavior would improve if every comment system forced people to use their real names. It sounds like it should be true – surely nobody would say mean things if they faced consequences for their actions? Yet the balance of experimental evidence over the past thirty years suggests that this is not the case….
Philip Anschutz. Image via AP. This week, the 2017 Coachella line-up was released to a typical flurry of excitement. Along with headliners Kendrick Lamar and Radiohead, the big news was that the popular Indio, California festival was finally able to nab Beyoncé for an official spot—as the first woman headliner in ten years. Coachella is…
After years of trading physical dollars for digital dimes, the music industry is finally seeing a payoff. Subscriptions to streaming music services jumped about 50 percent in 2016, topping 92 million. For the first time since the heyday of CDs, revenue for the largest record labels is consistently rising. But things don’t look as bright…
President-elect Donald J. Trump and his wife, Melania, at a party on Saturday at his Mar-a-Lago resort in Palm Beach, Fla. During the New Year’s Eve party, he praised a business partner from Dubai, calling his family “the most beautiful people.” Credit Hilary Swift for The New York Times WASHINGTON — President-elect Donald J. Trump…