Stream of Reading (Prepare to be Forwarded) – An Archive of What I'm Reading
Death and taxes may be inevitable, but the business of death is changing.Funeral homes that have been around for decades have been closing around San Francisco as sons and daughters of owners pursue other careers. Morticians are cashing out in the hot real estate market by selling their building sites for bigger housing developments. Duggan’s…
In this newsletter and column, we talk about power a lot: how to get it, how to share it, how to do good with it. And if you’ve been to any journalism conference or workshop lately, they’ve almost certainly touched on diversity. OpenNews is an organization dedicated to supporting newsroom developers, designers, journalists and editors…
I have been entirely agnostic about Brett Kavanaugh’s Supreme Court nomination. Republican presidents nominate conservative judges, and Democratic presidents nominate liberal judges. This guy sounded like he was entirely qualified for the job. When Dianne Feinstein made her announcement about the super-secret mystery letter by the anonymous woman that she had sent to the FBI,…
As soon as Christine Blasey Ford went public with her accusation that the Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh sexually assaulted her when the two were teens, a chorus of conservative political commentators came to his defense. Some of them aimed primarily to sow doubt about Ford’s story, but others weighed the accusations, only to conclude that the…
If you were going to draw up a short list of places on the internet that should be excited about the first good Star Wars movie in more than three decades, you would have to include 4chan and 8chan. The infamous, anonymous image boards are nerd culture sanctum sanctorum, places with dauntingly high cultural literacy…
From: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@linux-foundation.org> To: Linux Kernel Mailing List <linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org> Subject: Linux 4.19-rc4 released, an apology, and a maintainership note Date: Sun, 16 Sep 2018 12:22:43 -0700 Message-ID: <CA+55aFy+Hv9O5citAawS+mVZO+ywCKd9NQ2wxUmGsz9ZJzqgJQ@mail.gmail.com> (raw) [ So this email got a lot longer than I initially thought it would get, but let’s start out with the “regular Sunday release”…
.entry-meta .entry-header This blog is mainly reserved for cryptography, and I try to avoid filling it with random “someone is wrong on the Internet” posts. After all, that’s what Twitter is for! But from time to time something bothers me enough that I have to make an exception. Today I wanted to write specifically about…
In a 1997 review, David Foster Wallace referred to John Updike as “a penis with a thesaurus.” Unfortunately, this is my type. I have a propensity to sleep with boys who keep copies of Infinite Jeston display somewhere in their bedrooms. It’s not that this is a prerequisite — I’ve never denied myself a sexual experience purely because my partner didn’t…
With the rise of AI personalities like Lil Miquela, who can be anyplace at any time, the future landscape of fame is here. So where do humans fit into it? Lil Miquela herself weighs in. Michael Jackson and Lil Miquela. Miquela wears hat and vest by PRADA. Photograph from Getty Images from the Getty Images Entertainment collection,…
“You can’t say anything anymore! You can’t even make jokes!” There’s a constant complaint from people in positions of power, mostly men, who keep making the ridiculous assertion that they’re not able to speak in public. What they actually mean is they no longer understand the basis of the criticisms they face. And it’s a…