Stream of Reading (Prepare to be Forwarded) – An Archive of What I'm Reading
“Luckily, I drank blood. If not, I’d be crazy, calling to prayer from the trees,” says Inong, a thin, old man in a knitted skull cap. “If you drink blood, you can do anything! Salty and sweet. Human blood.” The seventy-two-year-old is the former leader of a village death squad in The Look of Silence,…
Melissa Harris-Perry will not be back on MSNBC. On Sunday morning, two days after the host’s private fight with management went public, an MSNBC spokesman confirmed that the channel is “parting ways” with her. Earlier in the morning, Harris-Perry posted a photo on Twitter and said “Farewell #Nerdland,” a nickname for her weekend show, “Melissa…
Some articles should be short. Some articles should be long. No articles, as Vox and its SB Nation demonstrated, should be longform. Greg Howard’s postmortem of SB Nation’s “Who Is Daniel Holtzclaw?” debacle offers lots of insights into how a story can go wrong, but the most concise may be his reporting that a freelancer…
15 ‘Real’ Headlines The Media’s Too Afraid To Write (2/26) Finding the truth in the news is like following a map to buried treasure, if the “buried treasure” was actually two moldy cookies and one non-moldy one that’s half-eaten. But luckily for you, our readers have taken this week’s popular headlines and stripped them of…
If you build it, will they come? That’s what AOL is hoping, anyway. “Build” is an afternoon talk show, and so far people are coming: It did 80 million views last year. But the company wants more — and the revenue that comes with it — so it is expanding the show’s distribution footprint to make it happen. For…
Last night I posted a tweet: “Next time you want to post an essay to Medium, do the open web a favor and post it elsewhere. Anywhere. Tumblr. WordPress.com.” If I had more space I would have added Pastebin or Blogger. Really anywhere but Medium. I didn’t have room to explain, but people asked, so…
“Too slow,” where have we heard that one before? Getty Images cache miss 1613:single/related:1a31501ece0b7141312fc72c09a6000e empty There’s a story going around today that the Web is too slow, especially over mobile networks. It’s a pretty good story—and it’s a perpetual story. The Web, while certainly improved from the days of 14.4k modems, has never been as…
cache miss 76:single/related:84d703cc5bc68ed69388e6fe91d800d5 empty Google has a plan to speed up mobile Web browsing. The recently unveiled AMP—Accelerated Mobile Pages—project is an open source initiative that restricts certain elements of HTML, CSS, and JavaScript to produce leaner Web pages “that are optimised to load instantly on mobile devices.” How much quicker is “instantly”? According to…
In October 2015, Wil Wheaton, well-known for his brief turn as Wesley Crusher on Star Trek: The Next Generation and as a celebrity blogger, created a stir when he declared that he had turned down an offer to write for the Huffington Post. He refused, according to him, because they had declined to pay for…
Melissa Harris-Perry’s Email to Her #nerdland Staff On Friday afternoon, media reports emerged about my friend Melissa Harris-Perry’s refusal to host her eponymous weekend program on MSNBC on Saturday. I was one of the original producers on the show when it launched in 2012, leaving for another job in 2015. Dr. Harris-Perry asked me today…