Stream of Reading (Prepare to be Forwarded) – An Archive of What I'm Reading
On Friday, November 27, a 57-year-old white man named Robert Louis Dear allegedly injured nine people and killed three in a shooting spree at a Planned Parenthood clinic in Colorado Springs. Among those shot were four police officers, one of whom died. As several media outlets and many on social media noted, Dear was given the opportunity to…
For the second time this year, the Las Vegas Review-Journal and its sister publications in Nevada are under new ownership. The publications were acquired by News + Media Capital Group LLC, a newly formed Delaware-domiciled company backed by “undisclosed financial backers with expertise in the media industry,” Michael Schroeder, who was identified as the manager…
The issue that the most Americans regard as the most important one facing our country right now is terrorism. Fear is more powerful than reason. Not that there has ever been a reason to doubt that. The American public’s priorities are a bizarro version of Short Attention Span Theater, with issues constantly flickering in and…
In his well-known essay On Bullshit, Harry Frankfurt defines bullshit as speech that is designed to impress but lacks a direct concern for the truth. Under such a definition, a large portion of what we read online today is likely to be bullshit. Some types of bullshit are political in nature, such as the misleading…
An article published by The Guardian in 2011 on the topic Cybercrime: is it out of control? received a nasty response from a hacker who inserted a malicious URL inside one of the syndicated link embedments in the article. The article published by the website was headlined “Cybercrime: Is it out of Control?” and the hacker…
Fame and fortune except the fortune part. Oh hi, do you know me? I am one of your Wonkettes, and I am the most famous person in the universe. I am taking a break from having brunch with Taylor Swift, saying “Oh no she di’int” about our ongoing feud with Katy Perry as we drink…
The publisher of the Las Vegas Review-Journal removed quotes from a Thursday night article about the newspaper’s sale that questioned its new owner’s decision to remain anonymous, according to a newsroom source. Around midnight Thursday, publisher Jason Taylor had editors remove a quote from Michael Schroeder, manager for News + Media Capital Group LLC, the undisclosed…
HOW do you follow up on a phenomenon? At the end of its first series “Serial”, presented by Sarah Koenig and affiliated to “This American Life”, had become the most popular podcast in the world. It was the first to reach 5m downloads from iTunes, and each episode reached about 2.2m pairs of ears. The…
Fox News has suspended two contributors, Ralph Peters and Stacey Dash, who described President Obama as a “p**sy” who doesn’t “give a s**t” on air today, reports CNN. Peters’ and Dash’s comments “were completely inappropriate and unacceptable for our air,” Fox News senior executive vice president Bill Shine said in a statement announcing the suspensions this…
Over at the ‘Meet the Press’ site, where NBC’s Chuck Todd holds forth, this question was recently asked: Why the selective political outrage? “It says something about our current polarized politics, as well as the sheer number of violent killings in this country, when the left and right are picking which mass shootings to exploit…