Stream of Reading (Prepare to be Forwarded) – An Archive of What I'm Reading
Dublin, Ireland and London, United Kingdom, Wednesday, 12 September 2018 — Simultaneous complaints have been filed with European data protection authorities against Google and other ad tech firms. The complainants are being made by Dr Johnny Ryan of Brave, the private web browser, Jim Killock, Executive Director of the Open Rights Group, and Michael Veale…
The other week, Dave Portnoy, the founder and chief of content of the sports blog Barstool Sports, did what he and fans of his site always do: ratcheted up an online spat to a fever pitch, transforming their collective rage at a perceived enemy into content. Even if it meant leaning into the type of…
Ian Buruma at the Edinburgh International Book Festival in 2016. The New York Review of Books editor’s decision to publish a Jian Ghomeshi essay was questionable. His defense of it was far worse. (Awakening/Getty Images) As I read Isaac Chotiner’s perfectly fair, quietly relentless interrogation of the editor of the New York Review of Books…
The last time I saw Les Moonves was a decade ago at the television upfronts. He was lordly and tiresome. As the president and chief executive of CBS, Moonves boasted monotonously about “Everybody Loves Raymond” to the journalists there to publicize his stupid sitcoms. The show might be a comedic wasteland, he said, but “you…
With the rise of AI personalities like Lil Miquela, who can be anyplace at any time, the future landscape of fame is here. So where do humans fit into it? Lil Miquela herself weighs in. Michael Jackson and Lil Miquela. Miquela wears hat and vest by PRADA. Photograph from Getty Images from the Getty Images Entertainment collection,…
Business Time Magazine sold to tech billionaire Marc Benioff Marc Benioff (David Paul Morris/Bloomberg) By Thomas Heath September 16 Time Magazine, the storied publication whose cover images for decades helped shape the national conversation, has been sold to a Silicon Valley billionaire. Salesforce.com owner Marc Benioff and his wife, Lynne, are buying the magazine from Meredith Corp….
Woman with Red Zinnia 1891, by Mary Cassatt (Courtesy National Gallery of Art, Washington) When the Jian Ghomeshi story first broke back in 2014, I knew with unwavering certainty exactly how the story would play out. “Just wait,” I would tell friends. “He’ll disappear for a few years, and then he’ll come back with some…
In late June, one of the more surreal moments of any Donald Trump rally happened onstage in South Carolina. And it was all because the president was handed a printout of an article on the conservative website Breitbart. “Veteran filmmaker David Lynch believes President Donald Trump could be remembered as one of the greatest presidents…
The now finally former CBS CEO Les Moonves is a crawling smear of slime. He’s like the dog poop that Wadsworth the butler steps in at the start of Clue. But we’ve known that since Ronan Farrow’s expose in the August 6 issue of The New Yorker, which revealed how Moonves assaulted women, including the…
storytext Twitter banned far-right conspiracy theorist Alex Jones and his website InfoWars from its platform Thursday afternoon, a month after several of its Silicon Valley counterparts did so. Jones was suspended from Twitter for one week last month after he posted a video in which he said, “Now is time to act on the enemy…