Stream of Reading (Prepare to be Forwarded) – An Archive of What I'm Reading
Everybody’s always talking about “millennials this” and “millennials that” and “millennials sure do bitch a lot” and “millennials are so bad because of their helicopter parents,” but it turns out they’re good at something, and that something is racism! Now, now, boomers, sit down and STFU because they’re no more racist than you are. In…
Isabel Laxamana, a 13-year-old girl in Tacoma, Washington died by suicide after jumping off a highway overpass on Friday, May 29. Days before, Laxamana’s father Jeff had reportedly punished her for an unspecified transgression by cutting off her hair and uploading a video to YouTube. There’s now a controversy brewing online and among the girl’s…
Photo Madhulika Sikka is by far the most prominent hire for Mic since its founding in 2011. Credit Jemal Countess/Getty Images for Peabody Awards Madhulika Sikka, the executive editor at NPR News, is leaving the organization for Mic, a news site aimed at the so-called millennial generation, the companies announced on Tuesday. Ms. Sikka will…
The choices were stark: sack a third of our workforce or cut their wages by a third. After a short board meeting we cut their wages, assured they would survive and that, with a bit of cajoling, they would return to our sweatshop in Shenzhen after their two-week break. But that was only the start….
There is a chicken in my shower. It’s 8:30 a.m., I’ve just sat down on the toilet to pee. I casually glance around and there it is, drinking some of the residual water puddled on my shower floor. This is not the first creature to make an appearance in my bathroom. Since I moved to…
It turns out that one of the Grand Old Party’s biggest—and least discussed—challenges going into 2016 is lying in plain sight, written right into the party’s own nickname. The Republican Party voter is old—and getting older, and as the adage goes, there are two certainties in life: Death and taxes. Right now, both are enemies…
In 1998, Carnegie Mellon researchers warned that the internet could make us into hermits. They released a study monitoring the social behavior of 169 people making their first forays online. The web-surfers started talking less with family and friends, and grew more isolated and depressed. “We were surprised to find that what is a social…
View this image › A student at McGuffey High School with the words “anti-gay” drawn on his hand. Supplied Students at a Pennsylvania high school held an “Anti-Gay Day” protest on Thursday, wearing coordinated flannel shirts, writing “anti-gay” on their hands, and sticking Bible verses on LGBT students’ lockers. “We came in to school on…
I’m fucked, Andy remembered thinking. The agents told him they had photos, and videos too. He wasn’t sure how this could’ve happened. He’d grown up in Oxford, Mississippi, and only bought weed from friends. Yet the agents were telling him they’d caught him making three purchases for a total of 12.3 grams, enough to send…
Jonathan Touboul is a mathematician and a neuroscientist. He holds a PhD in math from France’s prestigious École Polytechnique, where he won a prize for his thesis on how to simulate neurons in the brain. He publishes papers with titles like “Pulsatile localized dynamics in delayed neural-field equations in arbitrary dimension” and “The propagation of…