Stream of Reading (Prepare to be Forwarded) – An Archive of What I'm Reading
White men making laws about bathrooms. On Wednesday evening, the North Carolina legislature passed a bill overturning every local LGBT anti-discrimination measure in the state and requiring that individuals use the restroom of the biological sex on their birth certificate. The bill, which was written in response to an anti-discrimination measure in Charlotte, was introduced…
Download a PDF of this report. Why investigate ‘trigger warnings’? Waves of media attention tell us that college students are demanding that professors provide so-called ‘trigger warnings’ to flag material that might cause distress or discomfort, or possibly trigger a panic attack in students with post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD). As a cover story in The…
Among critics looking for examples of coddling on campus, no action has been ridiculed more than the “trigger warning,” in which college professors caution their students that the class will discuss a subject that could produce a painful emotional response. But the criticism may have outpaced the pro-trigger-warning activists. A new report says that almost…
Donald Trump’s campaign events have apparently become such a minefield for reporters that one major news organization has taken the extraordinary step of offering its correspondents a version of training for dealing with real minefields. NPR has sent its political reporters to 90-minute hostile-environment awareness training, which in its typical form lasts a few days…
When it comes to her voice, Democratic presidential hopeful Hillary Clinton can’t win. Fox News host Heather Nauert and guest Monica Crowley criticized the former secretary of state Wednesday for being “a little too calm” while delivering a foreign policy speech at Stanford University. “Did you notice that calm and collected tone of voice right…
Clinton’s own ideological roots lie in that movement. When the president of Wellesley College yielded to the demand of protesting students that one of their number be added to the graduation program in 1969 to counterbalance the establishmentarian commencement speaker, Senator Edward Brooke, Hillary Rodham was their choice. She delivered an address in which the…
The latest installment of “The Internet Explodes with Hatred for Hillary Clinton” happened earlier this month. The Democratic presidential candidate, whose own record on AIDS research and funding is better than any other candidate, mistakenly said that former US first lady Nancy Reagan was a key supporter of AIDS research. Reagan was, in reality, horrible…
Dan Baum, writing in support of drug legalization at Harper’s, has unleashed a frank 1994 quote from former Nixon policy advisor John Ehrlichman, and as inadvertently salient an argument for legalizing drugs as any I’ve ever seen: At the time, I was writing a book about the politics of drug prohibition. I started to ask…
Listening to candidates address an AIPAC convention in an election year is bound to give anyone a case of vertigo. Republican or Democrat, the candidates haul out the same clichés to prove their devotion to the state of Israel. It’s a stage built for pandering and hyperbole, and that’s okay. That’s part of the show,…
Welcome back. Now, there’s beenan odd phenomena happening in the Trump campaign, and I’m not talking aboutthe Trump campaign. Uh, it’s aboutsome of his followers. And you have a lot ofblack people supporting Trump. Um, black peoplesupporting Trump? (exclaiming) So, where arethese black people? Well, I had some of themin my studio the other day,…