Stream of Reading (Prepare to be Forwarded) – An Archive of What I'm Reading
A woman opened fire at YouTube headquarters in San Bruno, Calif., shooting three people with a handgun before taking her own life and causing widespread panic in the technology hub south of San Francisco. A law enforcement source identified the alleged shooter as Nasim Aghdam. Investigators initially believed the shooting was a domestic incident, with…
On Twitter, New Yorker food writer Helen Rosner shared a secret for making roast chicken — a hair dryer. Stuck inside on a snow day, Rosner shared a photo of the process she uses to remove moisture from a chicken before roasting it: a bit of time under her hair dryer. It might seem unconventional,…
Tesla CEO Elon Musk, a billionaire, just received an unprecedented incentive-laden pay package that could earn him tens of billions of dollars. But his employees also get something: Exhortations to work faster! Tesla, you see, has made Elon Musk staggeringly wealth(ier), because it is the fabulous and wonderful future of cars, but it has a…
On March 21st, New Yorker food correspondent Helen Rosner tweeted a photo of her pointing a Dyson Supersonic Hair Dryer at a raw chicken. She was trying to remove moisture and maximize the crispiness of the chicken skin before roasting it, and she wanted to share her snow day plans with her followers. But this…
Slot 1 In February, a week before Campbell Brown said onstage at Recode’s Code Media that Facebook would carve out a section within its Watch video hub for news publishers, the company’s head of news partnerships threw out the idea in a meeting in New York with several publishers, including traditional media companies like CNN…
The tactics of carefully targeted, data-driven manipulation—though innovative and destabilizing—are not entirely new. They predate the existence of Cambridge Analytica, and Facebook, and the contemporary notion of “fake news” itself. For decades, digital marketers—working in both commercial and political domains—have been perfecting models for using consumer data to identify and manipulate decision-making vulnerabilities. Blame the…
Popular live trivia app HQ Trivia usually pays out a cash prize after 12 questions, but last night, for the second time, they’ve tried a “winner takes all” approach. After 27 minutes of trivia, with $25,000 on the line, two players remained—then the game abruptly ended as one of them reportedly got kicked from the…
Why we must end anonymity for online political ads. “We just put information into the bloodstream of the internet, and then … give it a little push every now and again … like a remote control. It has to happen without anyone thinking, ‘that’s propaganda,’ because the moment you think ‘that’s propaganda,’ the next question…
In 2012, I wrote a piece for this website breaking down the payments my first band, Galaxie 500, was receiving from streaming services, which were just starting to become a dominant force in the music industry. Spotify had sent songwriting royalties of $1.05 for the 5,960 times our single “Tugboat” was played that quarter—split between the group’s three…
German researchers have discovered unknown persons are using bitcoin’s blockchain to store and link to child abuse imagery, potentially putting the cryptocurrency in jeopardy. The blockchain is the open-source, distributed ledger that records every bitcoin transaction, but can also store small bits of non-financial data. This data is typically notes about the trade of bitcoin,…