Stream of Reading (Prepare to be Forwarded) – An Archive of What I'm Reading
Joshua Goldberg posed as an Islamic radical and allegedly encouraged a terrorist to attack on September 11. That’s just one of his online personas though. When Joshua Goldberg wasn’t posing as an Islamic radical, he was pretending to be a white supremacist—and is accused of impersonating a Jewish lawyer. Goldberg had several online personas: an…
Yesterday, Vox published a first-person essay detailing the anachronistic existence of two insufferably twee hipsters who live as if they were insufferably twee 19th-century urban gentry. Fuck these people. Please read the article first, but in summary: Two assholes decided to live like extras in The Knick, and defend themselves against their haters by espousing…
My husband and I study history, specifically the late Victorian era of the 1880s and ’90s. Our methods are quite different from those of academics. Everything in our daily life is connected to our period of study, from the technologies we use to the ways we interact with the world. Five years ago we bought…
START “AMERICAN DREAMS BUG” BOX v. 1 END “AMERICAN DREAMS BUG” BOX v. 1 Three years ago, my wife, Anne-Marie Slaughter, wrote in these pages about how difficult it remains for women to “have it all”—a family and a career. She’d recently left a high-powered job in Washington, D.C., to return to our home in…
The entrance of Banksy’s “Dismaland” in Weston-super-Mare, England. Credit Matthew Horwood/Getty Images The day Banksy unveiled “Dismaland” — a sprawling exhibition of conceptual art that is itself a concept, with mock security guards and mouse-eared employees instructed to frown instead of smile — its ticketing website was so overwhelmed it crashed. Hours before the opening…
Since the dawn of time, man has pondered: Is my penis big enough? Now the world is finally getting some answers, with study after study attempting to calibrate exactly what size and shape heterosexual women find ideal. #science The latest penis comparison study, just published in the peer-reviewed journal PLOS ONE, is hoping to solve…
Asexuality pride signs at a 2012 Pride Parade in Stockholm. Photo by Mikusagi, Creative Commons. The asexual visibility movement has grown over the past few years—many asexuals are starting to come out of the closet and demand respect. Unfortunately, asexuality remains a relatively invisible orientation in our pop culture. That leaves many asexuals still…
Here’s one way to get the world’s attention: Live to become Europe’s oldest person and attribute your longevity to staying single. Well, staying single and eating raw eggs. Over the past week, the delightful story of Emma Morano, now 115 years and three months old, has gone viral. As The New York Times reported, Morano…
I woke up at 4am the morning after Thanksgiving in 2014. I had been staying the night at my friends Liz and Rob’s house after imbibing what can only be called a festive amount of alcohol. The couch, comfortable as it was when I settled in to sleep, was a nightmare to wake up in…
(Facebook) In late August, Shannon Neuman and her husband Chris went to the municipal court in Calgary, Alberta, to get a divorce. They had already filled out the forms and taken the requisite seminars. They navigated the 24-story Courts Centre and dropped their papers off. Then, on their way out, Chris and Shannon — no…