Stream of Reading (Prepare to be Forwarded) – An Archive of What I'm Reading
If you live near a Civil War-era cemetery, rotting corpses may be on the attack. While there’s no need to fear the walking dead, homeowners should watch out for toxins leaking out of old graves that could be contaminating drinking water and causing serious health problems. When someone died at the turn of the century,…
You’ve seen a painting of Norbert Grupe. A heavy, creased brow and shoulder-length hair framing a frightening scowl, the massive work hung in the fictional Manhattan Museum of Art in Ghostbusters II. When the medieval sorcerer pictured within the painting begins to physically manifest, it is on the Ghostbusters to rally the city’s positive emotions…
gallery js Next Tuesday evening at Cooper Union, some of the titans of New York City subway map design will convene alongside map aficionados to talk shop. The setting is auspicious, as back in 1978 Cooper Union hosted the Great Subway Map Debate, a showdown between backers of Massimo Vignelli’s sleek-but-disorienting subway diagram and supporters,…
AIDS was a terrifying mystery, and then we solved it. When researchers identified the human immunodeficiency virus as the reason why young, previously healthy people were developing rare cancers and wasting away, it was a triumph of medical science. But even as the medical community reached a consensus that HIV caused AIDS, a counter-movement was…
Meet Maggie Goldenberger, who helplessly watched an Internet meme spawn from her awkward adolescent photo. Except, maybe the “Gershberms” girl never existed the way we thought she did? In March 2012, 23-year-old Maggie Goldenberger was in the middle of a six-month trip to India and the Philippines with her then-girlfriend. They were travelling from India’s…
Today, October 12, is Columbus Day. Every year it’s officially the second Monday in October; this year it falls on the exact anniversary of the Niña, Pinta and Santa María’s arrival in the Bahamas 523 years ago. So to mark today, I’ve made a list. I’m sure to almost all Americans it would seem like…
(bigstockphoto) Over 100 years ago in America — before Social Security, before IRAs, corporate pensions and 401(k)s — there was a ludicrously popular (and somewhat sleazy) retirement scheme called the tontine. At their peak, around the turn of the century, tontines represented nearly two-thirds of the American insurance market, holding about 7.5 percent of national…
In the sleek, cold lobby of the Langham Place hotel in Midtown Manhattan, one of those thoroughly designed spaces in which one cannot find a right angle, much less a comfortable chair, the 68-year-old, 7-foot-2 former basketball star Kareem Abdul-Jabbar was sitting on a leather bench with his arms draped around his protruding knees. It was…
Yesterday marked the 44th anniversary of the release of John Lennon’s goody-goody solo album Imagine, on which he softly bleats for world peace and borderless harmony. Described by Rolling Stone as Lennon’s “greatest musical gift to the world,” the song of the same name fantasizes about a mankind without qualities of evil and suffering,…
Even great industrialists have heroes. Such was the case of Henry Ford and his idol Thomas Edison. Ford grew up on a rural un-electrified farm, and as a young man he followed Edison’s meteoric career as the inventor rose to become a national icon. Edison was Ford’s role model, and as a young man Ford…