Stream of Reading (Prepare to be Forwarded) – An Archive of What I'm Reading
Left: Migrant children at a Kansas City detention center in 2014. Photo by AP/Eric Gay, File. Right: Donald Trump. Photo by Chip Somodevilla/Getty When the Trump administration announced this month it would criminally prosecute everyone who crossed the border illegally, which meant jailing immigrant parents and separating them from their children, it effectively manufactured a whole new…
Can we stop pretending that the right cares about civility? Whether it’s the faux outrage over the television host Samantha Bee calling Ivanka Trump a “cunt” or the yammering over Robert DeNiro’s “fuck Trump” battle cry at the Tony awards, I’m tired of those on the right feigning shock. After all, they voted in the…
(Trigger warning: If abuse, sexual assault, or anorexia makes you uncomfortable, you might want to avoid this one.) Over the years, I’ve attempted to write this, quite literally, 17 times. I’ve spoken to friends, therapists, lawyers, publicists. The drafts have ranged from cathartic, angry letters to litigious, hardened accounts of inexcusable treatment. Until I got…
Iam at the San Francisco International Airport some barely recent morning, registering for a travel program called Clear when the automated kiosk assisting me makes a strange request: “Stand still while we scan your irises.” I’ve barely digested this first ask when another takes its place: this time, the kiosk wants my fingerprints. I find…
Does anybody else feel as though Kanye West has been taking daily strides toward being more like Donald Trump? The rapper, producer, designer, and issuer of crazy and disturbing contributions to social discourse recently announced his intention to get into architecture (via Twitter, the preferred platform for people who hate facts). This new venture is…
It started with money, as it so often does in New York. A crisp $100 bill slipped across the smooth surface of the mid-century-inspired concierge desk at 11 Howard, the sleek new boutique hotel in Soho. Looking up, Neffatari Davis, the 25-year-old concierge, who goes by “Neff,” was surprised to see the cash had come…
When Michelle Wolf says she didn’t pay that much attention to all the hoopla that followed her White House Correspondents’ Dinner speech, in which she called Sarah Huckabee Sanders an Uncle Tom for white women, she is probably being at least a little bit disingenuous. That she has been very busy, though, is true: The week after, she flew…
Some very aggressive Battlefield fans are upset that the game includes women, or has a woman on the cover. Some of them are convinced that women didn’t exist during the past, so putting them in a game set in the past is wrong. It’s all kinda muddled. The general situation is that some gamers are…
It’s almost a like competition. Time after time, manga and anime creators have one-upped each other, escalating the arms race that will one day destroy us all. The weapons here aren’t of the ballistic variety — they’re girls. Or rather, things that are not girls that also happen to look just like girls. “Moe anthropomorphism”…
Photo: Daniel Zuchnik/Getty Kate Spade’s death by suicide at 55 is as shocking as any sudden celebrity death—the designer, mother, and fashion industry innovator is gone abruptly, unexpectedly, and entirely too soon. But the context and circumstances underscore its tragedy: For over two decades, the fashion designer’s commercial and personal brand cast a sunny, optimistic…