Stream of Reading (Prepare to be Forwarded) – An Archive of What I'm Reading
On Monday, teachers at the Irving Independent School District in Irving, Texas, had police arrest a 14-year-old student named Ahmed Mohamed for building a simple electronic clock as an engineering project. Police escorted Mohamed of out of school in handcuffs — photos of the arrest show him wearing a NASA T-shirt — and accused him of…
On Monday night, the Atlantic published Ta-Nehisi Coates’s “The Black Family in the Age of Mass Incarceration.” The article, the longest the magazine has run in a decade, limns America’s long history of believing African Americans are predisposed to lawlessness and using that assumption to justify a racist police state that locks up African Americans in huge…
IRVING — Ahmed Mohamed — who makes his own radios and repairs his own go-kart — hoped to impress his teachers when he brought a homemade clock to MacArthur High on Monday. Instead, the school phoned police about Ahmed’s circuit-stuffed pencil case. So the 14-year-old missed the student council meeting and took a trip in…
Social Sharing Toolkit v2.2 There’s no running from worldbuilding anymore. A tidbit of information about The Hunger Games films or “Game of Thrones” leaks, provoking fans and news outlets alike into a frenzy. Entire wikis are meticulously curated for each series, every line and scene analyzed for maximum informative potential. The ability to craft an expansive…
Evans Bank on Thursday settled a lawsuit in which the state of New York accused the bank of racist practices, including denying loans to residents of predominantly black neighborhoods in Buffalo. The suit, filed in 2014 by New York Attorney General Eric Schneiderman, accused the Buffalo-based bank of intentionally not making loans in eastern parts…
It’s not often you hear of a poetry scandal on the Internet, but a poem from unknown writer Yi-Fen Chou—“The Bees, the Flowers, Jesus, Ancient Tigers, Poseidon, Adam and Eve” caused controversy after making this year’s anthology of Best American Poetry. After being notified the poem was accepted in the volume, poet Michael Derrick Hudson…
“Let me just say up front: I hope that this conversation can be as much about humanity and dignity as it is about politics and polling, because I want to try to better understand to the extent that I can…the motivation behind your rhetoric and that of Donald Trump and some others,” is how Tavis…
Scott Walker has told the world that the shooting deaths of police in the United States are a major problem and implied there is really only one cure: to return to the bygone era of his youth, when life was safer and more idyllic. His language was vague, incorrect, and most importantly stokes a fear…
Photo Credit Alex Nabaum The Republican Party and its acolytes in the news media are trying to demonize the protest movement that has sprung up in response to the all-too-common police killings of unarmed African-Americans across the country. The intent of the campaign — evident in comments by politicians like Gov. Nikki Haley of South…
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…