Stream of Reading (Prepare to be Forwarded) – An Archive of What I'm Reading
Facebook is a big and maddening place. Antiviral wants to make it better. To that end, we’re putting together a comprehensive guide to the new, bad, weird, and bullshit “news sites” that are appearing on your feed. Here’s part one: “Satire.” Ever since Facebook completed its evolution from a Friendster ripoff to an internet-transforming Elder…
Photo David H. Petraeus, left, in Denver in September. A plea deal would spare Mr. Petraeus a high-profile trial where embarrassing details about his affair would have been presented to the jury and made public. Credit Aaron Ontiveroz/The Denver Post, via Associated Press WASHINGTON — David H. Petraeus, the best-known military commander of his generation, has…
Even the most well-defended castle wall can be surmounted if you manage to fool the guards into lowering the gate. Such is the case with HIV and the T-cell. But now we might have a way to hoist the AIDS virus on its own petard. How HIV and the New Would-Be Vaccine Work HIV first…
Last year, Unreal Engine 4 switched to a $19/month subscription plan. It was the first in a couple of attempts to coax indie developers away from Unity—and CryEngine announced their own low cost subscription soon after. This year, Epic is going a step further. The studio has just announced that Unreal Engine 4 is available for free, along…
Sir Ridley Scott has made some of the greatest genre movies of all time, but in the last several years, he’s also made some horrible mistakes. But his misfires and missed opportunities pale before the grievous error he’s about to make: creating a sequel to Blade Runner. The original Blade Runner is a science fiction…
HUNTINGTON BEACH, Calif. — An Orange County, Calif., attorney has filed a proposed ballot measure with the California Attorney General’s office asking voters to criminalize homosexuality in the state and impose a death penalty sentence. The filing, submitted along with the required fee of $200, will allow attorney Matthew G. McLaughlin to begin the process…
Like a great many such things, some of journalism’s most precious ideals were the happy result of geography and economics. That is, in any given geography, the dominant newspaper tended towards a natural monopoly for two reasons: When it came to costs, the ownership of expensive printing presses and distribution channels made entrance difficult for…
“Robots will take over the world.” It’s a familiar refrain from movie scientists, conspiracy theorists, or your paranoid friend after he saw a TV special on autonomous cars. As artificial intelligence research accelerates in sophistication, it has also set off alarm bells and calls for caution from some of the brightest minds in the world,…
In November 2013, Tanzina Vega, a young reporter for The New York Times, pitched Jill Abramson, the paper’s then-executive editor, the idea of devoting a reporting beat on the national desk to coverage of race and ethnicity. Abramson liked the idea, and Vega became the beat’s sole reporter, publishing over the course of the next year an…
While the Hillary Clinton campaign seems unperturbed by recent problematic disclosures by Politico into the Hillary Clinton Foundation, the former first lady and current democrat presidential hopeful will have a field day explaining why, as the NYT reported overnight, Hillary – in her role as Secretary of State – “exclusively used a personal email account…