Stream of Reading (Prepare to be Forwarded) – An Archive of What I'm Reading
THIS YEAR, over 100 anti-transgender bills have been introduced in more than 25 state legislatures, the vast majority of them banning trans kids, especially girls, from participating in organized sports in school, as well as prohibiting or even criminalizing the delivery of gender-affirming healthcare. One of these bills was North Dakota’s HB 1476, which sought,…
Yahoo Answers is not what most people would call a good source of information. On Monday morning, the top questions on its homepage, as decided by its users, included whether the Democratic Party would eventually initiate some kind of genocide, whether Prince Harry and Meghan Markle were really in love, why small dogs were “the…
The chilling spectacle of watching the political class redeem a criminal, again. Photo: Gary Hershorn/REUTERS Photo: Gary Hershorn/REUTERS Photo: Gary Hershorn/REUTERS I am not an art critic, but I don’t think George W. Bush’s new portraits are very good. They inspire nothing but malaise and communicate a dilettante energy. Painting is to Bush what politics…
A marker that was moved seven feet into French territory by a farmer in Belgium might have changed the countries’ border forever if not for a sharp-eyed group of friends. A stone, carved with the year 1819, marks the border between France and Belgium. It was recently moved by a farmer, local officials said.Credit…Jean-Pierre Chopin…
This article is part of the Digiday Privacy Preview, a digital issue of stories examining what the coming changes to Chrome and iOS will do to the worlds of media and marketing. Read the rest of that coverage here. More than $10 billion worth of digital ad revenue rides on the media industry’s ability to figure…
If you’re fed up with apps and websites using shitty psychological tactics—aka dark patterns—to coerce you into clicking, then good news: there’s finally a way to put them on blast. Consumer Reports teamed up with a cavalcade of researchers and policy wonks to roll out the Dark Patterns Tip Line on Tuesday, a project that…
It’s a harrowing time. First, we were hit with the COVID pandemic, and in recent weeks, protests and discussions about racial inequities in America have taken the main stage. Businesses are questioning their operating practices (or sometimes being called out for them and canceled) and uncovering how unconscious biases might play a role in everything…
Over the past year, we’ve seen schools shift to digital services at an unprecedented rate as a way to educate kids safely during the covid-19 pandemic. We’ve also seen these digital tools slurp up these kid’s data at a similarly unprecedented rate, suffer massive breaches, and generally handle student’s personal information with a lot less…
A series of Instagram ads run by the privacy-positive platform Signal got the messaging app booted from the former’s ad platform, according to a blog post Signal published on Tuesday. The ads were meant to show users the bevy of data that Instagram and its parent company Facebook collects on users, by… targeting those users…