Stream of Reading (Prepare to be Forwarded) – An Archive of What I'm Reading
One day in March of this year, a Google engineer named Justine Tunney created a strange and ultimately doomed petition at the White House website. The petition proposed a three-point national referendum, as follows: 1. Retire all government employees with full pensions. 2. Transfer administrative authority to the tech industry. 3. Appoint [Google executive chairman]…
When theologian Martin Luther debuted his Ninety-five Theses in 16th-century Germany, he triggered a religious Reformation — and also a media revolution. 1630 map of the Maluku Archipelago (Moluccas, or Spice Islands) The printing press, invented approximately 50 years before the 95 Theses, extended Luther’s reach from the door of the cathedral to the entirety…
We’re in the midst of an all-out panic over vaping, spurred by real concerns after hundreds of people have fallen ill after vaping and several people have died. While the exact causes are unknown, it’s become fairly clear that the main culprit, if not the only one, is the addition of Vitamin E oil to…
“It’s so hard to see the future right now,” says Maddy, a teenager from New Jersey. “I worry that the world is going to end. I worry because of climate change. I worry about my family’s safety.” Nancy, 17, is from Boise, Idaho. She rates how excited she is for the future a solid 1…
You can’t really blame journalist and activist Lauren Duca for being a little nervous about agreeing to an interview. When I first asked to profile her in advance of her new book, How to Start a Revolution: Young People and the Future of American Politics, I did it over Twitter DM. She agreed, but seemed…
Here is the best news I have personally read today: notorious far-right grifter and overall racist, misogynist, and general white supremacist Milo Yiannopoulos is trying to pivot to being a furry—but the furries don’t want him. Jared Holt over at Right Wing Watch has the scoop from monitoring Milo’s Telegram messaging channel, the small corner…
The empire begins with a brothel. It stands, sturdy and square, at the heart of a gold-rush boomtown in northwest British Columbia, a monument to careful branding. The windows of the Arctic Restaurant have no signs offering access to prostitutes—even in a lawless Yukon outpost in 1899, decorum rules out such truth in advertising—but Friedrich…
In a memo he sent before leaving the company, a former Google employee criticized the internet giant and its employees, noting that he regularly encountered racism during his experience as a Black worker at the company. The memo, obtained by Motherboard, is titled “The Weight of Silence,” and argues that Google is lacking in diversity,…
When I got home from my tomato expedition, I read a tweet from the comedian Sarah Lazarus that made me feel like someone had put a camera inside my apartment. “Every day we have to wake up, confront the most upsetting shit we’ve ever seen, and then walk around obeying laws and saying ‘it’s tomato…
The California painter and critic Manny Farber extolled “termite art” as occurring “where the spotlight of culture is nowhere in evidence, so that the craftsman can be ornery, wasteful, stubbornly self-involved, doing go-for-broke art and not caring what comes of it.” That need for art to be ugly, to go where it is not wanted,…