Stream of Reading (Prepare to be Forwarded) – An Archive of What I'm Reading
On the morning of March 31, 2016, I put on a pair of Gap jeans (the ones without holes); a beige silky top I’d bought at the Gap outlet in Sedona, Ariz., where I had briefly lived; and a short-waisted gray zip-up jacket. I parted my hair on the right, as I always do, and…
New York City is retiring many of its Cold War-era signs designating certain indoor spaces as “nuclear fallout shelters.” prevent margin collapsing There are thousands of the signs around the five boroughs, but officials say they’re misleading, and no longer denoate active shelters. That’s because it’s been decades since anyone has taken care of the…
Court documents filed in the US have revealed the editorial concerns of the publisher Simon & Schuster about the manuscript of the “alt-right” controversialist Milo Yiannopoulos’s autobiography Dangerous. Having reportedly secured the book for an advance of $255,000 (£200,000), Simon & Schuster cancelled the deal in February after a recording emerged that appeared to show…
“We’re making the world a better place.” The phrase is thrown around so often in the tech world that it became a punch line on the HBO satire Silicon Valley. Executives controlling the largest tech titans—Google, Amazon, Facebook, Apple, and Microsoft—might even believe it. But in a searing presentation at Business Insider’s IGNITION conference in…
In September, I met with a prominent entrepreneur looking for positive press on his new project. Meetings like these are a common, usually formulaic, part of my job—except in this one, the conversation drifted to the tech industry’s year of bad headlines. As we discussed the latest sexual harassment scandal, he posed a question: Will…
A teenage duchess who hid her cigarette from her parents. A dancer getting ready to go on stage. A mother entertaining her children in her home. Sisters dancing at a Halloween party. Two women near a stove. All of these women lived differently — from actual royalty to anonymous nobodies. But they all died the…
(Photo: Dimitrios Kambouris/Getty Images) While doing the promotional rounds for her latest film, Wonder Wheel, Kate Winslet’s been giving the public lessons on separating art from the artist. In a September interview with The New York Times, Winslet defended her choice to work with Allen, who’s been accused by his adopted daughter Dylan Farrow of…
(Oliver Contreras for The Washington Post) I remember Jeff Sessions as the polite senator from Alabama who thanked me when I held the door open for him. I was a Senate page from Tennessee, one of the 30 high school juniors who sit on the rostrum (the big round thing at the center of the…
Young Jean Lee/Facebook A play called Straight White Men is about to make history, becoming the first play written by an Asian American woman to appear on Broadway. The show, written by experimental Korean-American playwright (and David Byrne and Kathleen Hanna collaborator) Young Jean Lee, revolves around three brothers (the aforementioned straight white men) visiting…
I tweeted what was intended as satire of a festering right-wing panic over Antifa allegedly planning violence on November 4. It got weird from there. What is it like to attend your own funeral? In my mind, it has to be something like waking up on a Monday morning, logging onto Twitter, and finding out…