Stream of Reading (Prepare to be Forwarded) – An Archive of What I'm Reading
Late last week, Gawker posted an item about a “C-suite executive” at Condé Nast, a married father of three (a married-to-a-woman father of three [I’m old enough to remember when we didn’t have to clarify those things]), who made arrangements to spend a weekend with a gay male escort/porn star/conspiracy theorist. The porn star figured…
I was driving 70 mph on the edge of downtown St. Louis when the exploit began to take hold. Though I hadn’t touched the dashboard, the vents in the Jeep Cherokee started blasting cold air at the maximum setting, chilling the sweat on my back through the in-seat climate control system. Next the radio switched…
Google could launch an effort to keep trolls and bad information at bay, with a program that would rank websites according to veracity, and sort results according to those rankings. Currently, the search engine ranks pages according to popularity, which means that pages containing unsubstantiated celebrity gossip or conspiracy theories, for example, show up very…
Happy moon landing day! July 20, 2015 marks the 46th anniversary of Apollo 11’s arrival on the moon. The lunar lander holding Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin touched down at 4:18 PM eastern, and Armstrong became the first human in history to walk on the lunar surface at 10:56 PM. Huge amounts of aeronautical and hardware…
New Google Chief Financial Officer Ruth Porat, who joined the company from Morgan Stanley in May, had a good first earnings call today. The company beat its projected revenues during its most recent quarter. More importantly, Porat was able to point to increased revenue in an area that has been a bugbear for Google in…
The red flags and marching songs of Syriza during the Greek crisis, plus the expectation that the banks would be nationalised, revived briefly a 20th-century dream: the forced destruction of the market from above. For much of the 20th century this was how the left conceived the first stage of an economy beyond capitalism. The…
Selfies are, by name, if not in practice, a relatively new phenomenon. In the few short years since selfies became “a thing,” they’ve gone on to spawn (and facilitate) countless memes, jokes, and even a lucrative peripherals industry. They are a bona-fide sensation, albeit one that’s been derisively linked to narcissism and even psychopathy. But now, as selfies settle into part of the…
Anybody who spends time in a car or bus in Manhattan knows that traffic congestion isn’t getting better and, indeed, may be getting worse. The average daytime speed of cars in Manhattan’s business districts has fallen to just under 8 miles per hour this year, from about 9.15 miles per hour in 2009. City officials…
THE scene in Disney’s “Inside Out” might not have meant much to the kids in the movie audience, but for me, it was priceless: While riding on the Train of Thought, a character, Joy, tips over two cargo boxes, one labeled “facts,” the other “opinion.” The spilled pieces mingle, and she suggests that trying to…
Spotify quietly changed the tone of its green last month and it drove people insane, wondering if they were imagining it or if something was wrong with their phones. The company’s lead designer, Tobias van Schneider, wrote in his personal email newsletter today what happened when the company changed the color and how it didn’t realize…