Stream of Reading (Prepare to be Forwarded) – An Archive of What I'm Reading
Google has scrambled to remove third-party apps that led users to child porn sharing groups on WhatsApp in the wake of TechCrunch’s report about the problem last week. We contacted Google with the name of one these apps and evidence that it and others offered links to WhatsApp groups for sharing child exploitation imagery. Following publication of our…
Photo: AP With the government shutdown, Donald Trump has been looking for ways to distract the public from his failure to BUILD THE WALL, and a trip to Iraq seemed like a publicity slam dunk for his image at a critical time. Surely he couldn’t fuck this up, right? Unfortunately for the administration, any goodwill…
Tapping through Palak Joshi’s Instagram Stories recently, you might have come across a photo that looked like standard sponsored content: a shiny white box emblazoned with the red logo for the Chinese phone manufacturer OnePlus and the number six, shot from above on a concrete background. It featured the branded hashtag tied to the phone’s…
The news industry these past few years has been a middle schooler with low self-esteem, trailing around after the popular kids at Facebook, letting them copy our homework and take our lunch money in hopes that we might have some of that success rub off on us. As in every teen movie ever made, this…
This week, protesters scaled the Arc de Triomphe, burned cars, and clashed with police in the third consecutive weekend of riots in France. More than 300 people were arrested in Paris last weekend alone, and 37,000 law enforcement officers have been deployed around the country to restore order. The “Gilets Jaunes” or “Yellow Jackets” protests…
To Rudolph W. Giuliani, the former New York mayor who is one of President Trump’s lawyers, it was an example of how low Twitter would stoop to carry out its anti-Trump agenda. It was, decidedly, no such thing. It was just a typo, followed by an opportunistic prank by an improv actor in Atlanta. In…
I had an excellent time talking about social media with Kara Swisher and her precocious 16-year-old s December 3 · Issue #257 · View online I had an excellent time talking about social media with Kara Swisher and her precocious 16-year-old son, Louie, on the 300th episode of the Recode Decode podcast. To the…
Photo: Getty If you’ve been online today (God help you) perhaps you’re aware that a piece masquerading as critical discourse—while really just being a coming together of two oversized egos—ran in the newspaper of record. In other news, it’s a day ending in y. Lord alive, online has been bad: media types justifying their friendships…
CreditCreditJooHee Yoon BARI WEISS: Everything sucks. That’s the overwhelming feeling I get when I spend too much time on Twitter. It makes me feel anxious and angry and amped up. And that’s on a day when I’m not even trending as a Very Bad Person. This fall I read Jaron Lanier’s book “Ten Arguments for…
Mitchell Grafton, Updating Vermeer. 2012 We are at the end of an era characterized by the self-portrait. This claim is not provocative—we’ve lived as characters for some time and have all felt it coming. So let me rephrase, we live at the end of an era characterized by relentless anxiety around the self as…