Stream of Reading (Prepare to be Forwarded) – An Archive of What I'm Reading
President Trump on Friday lashed out at former FBI director James B. Comey on Twitter, calling him a “weak and untruthful slime ball” who deserved to be fired “for the terrible job he did.” “It was my great honor to fire James Comey!” Trump wrote in his first remarks since advance copies surfaced of Comey’s…
Over ten thousand people watched the second day of Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg testifying in front of Congress today on The Washington Post’s Twitch channel. Following the Cambridge Analytica scandal, where it was discovered that the political data firm hired by President Trump gained access to private information of 50 million Facebook users, Mark Zuckerberg testified…
We’ve known for some time now that Americans are increasingly dying younger, but the scale and nature of the problem has been a little bit murky. There was speculation that the downturn in American life expectancy was all thanks to “deaths of despair,” but some experts have said that might not be the full story,…
“Why don’t you just fire [Robert] Mueller?” a reporter called out to President Trump in the Cabinet Room at the White House Monday afternoon, according to a transcript of the event. From the video, one can see that the president—flanked by his military advisers—selected this inquiry from a number of other indistinct questions that were being…
A state lawmaker in Oklahoma refused to meet with Muslim constituents unless they replied to a questionnaire asking if they beat their wives. A Nebraska state senator suggested that any Muslim wanting to enter the United States be forced to eat pork first. And a Rhode Island legislator advocated herding Syrian refugees into a camp,…
Our nation’s present uproar over the deleterious effects of social media on society and fretting about the decline of trusted news outlets is nothing new. What’s new is the fact that the straightforward ways to prop up the Real Journalism industry have never been more obvious. For two decades, professional thinkers—most of them employed in…
Here’s what we don’t know: We don’t know specifically what the FBI was looking for when it raided the office of Michael Cohen, high-profile attorney for the Trump Organization. We don’t know what they found; we don’t know what investigations might be bolstered or curtailed by the evidence they seized. What we do know, though,…
Photo: Getty Donald Trump is not the only person in the administration who is obsessed with leaks. According to an internal report first flagged by the Washington Post, Education Secretary Betsy DeVos asked her department’s inspector general if she had grounds to prosecute employees who leaked information to the press. Apparently, DeVos was furious that…
Photo: Getty Donald Trump has revealed time and again—from his “both sides” remarks defending white supremacists in Charlottesville to his rescinding DACA protections for hundreds of thousands of immigrants—that he has a disdain for human lives. But a Washington Post story published on Thursday contained a tidbit that succinctly captured the fact that there are…
Photo: AP For days, the press has watched with bated breath while trying to figure out whether or not Donald Trump will fire his embattled Environmental Protection Agency administrator Scott Pruitt. The latest report from The Wall Street Journal on Friday revealed that last week, John Kelly—Trump’s chief of staff—told the president that Pruitt needs…