Stream of Reading (Prepare to be Forwarded) – An Archive of What I'm Reading
We are living in a cultural moment in which people with the normiest of normative identities — those jealously guarding an armful of poker chips in the game of social capital — are, in some quarters, behaving as if they’re under siege. In January, Jonathan Chait took on the scourge of “political correctness” for New…
Jonathan Touboul is a mathematician and a neuroscientist. He holds a PhD in math from France’s prestigious École Polytechnique, where he won a prize for his thesis on how to simulate neurons in the brain. He publishes papers with titles like “Pulsatile localized dynamics in delayed neural-field equations in arbitrary dimension” and “The propagation of…
Entry Text It’s 2015, and on average, women still make 78 cents to a man’s dollar. A new report goes beyond that oft-quoted statistic, and examines this discrepancy along racial, geographical and educational lines.The American Association of University Women’s (AAUW) “The Simple Truth about the Gender Pay Gap” report breaks down the wage gap in…
The Turing test detects if a machine can truly think like a human. The Bechdel Test detects gender bias in fiction. If you were to mash the two together to create a particularly messy Venn diagram, the overlap shall henceforth be known as the Ex Machina Zone. In writer/director Alex Garland’s thought-provoking new film—out Friday—we…
It’s 2050 and feminism has finally won. Women make up more than 80% of serial killers and serial killer-related entertainment shows. Everyone agrees that Harper Lee wrote In Cold Blood under Truman Capote’s name as a favor before beating Ernest Hemingway in Greco-Roman-style wrestling. Sex is just when two or more women take the mathematics…
Here’s what all the single ladies really want from the government — and it isn’t for a President to put a ring on it. Any questions? – Ilana Zucker-Scharff.
In March, ComiXology had a buy one, get one free sale on Marvel titles, where you could literally buy any of the Marvel issues in their store. This morning they announced that, during that sale, seven out of the top ten comics sold were books with female heroes. Titles that did well include Thor, Silk, and Ms. Marvel….
Eric Gaillard/Reuters Garry Trudeau, the Pulitzer Prize-winning satirical cartoonist behind Doonesbury, says his fellow satirists at Charlie Hebdo “wandered into the realm of hate speech.” Trudeau made the remark during his acceptance speech of the George Polk Awards in Journalism, according to Peter Bale, the head of the Center for Public Integrity. “Free speech… becomes its…
By Madeline Messer March 4Madeline Messer is a student in the 6th grade. iStock For a 12-year-old girl, playing games on an iPhone is pretty regular behavior. Almost all of my friends have game apps on their phones, and we’ll spend sleepovers playing side by side. One day I noticed that my friend was playing…
You have to pay to play as Scarlett Fox, a character in the mobile game Temple Run. Imangi Studios hide caption itoggle caption Imangi Studios You have to pay to play as Scarlett Fox, a character in the mobile game Temple Run. Imangi Studios Maddie Messer is 12 years old. She loves science, her dog,…