Stream of Reading (Prepare to be Forwarded) – An Archive of What I'm Reading
For his 50th birthday, Jim Tananbaum, chief executive officer of Foresite Capital, threw himself an extravagant party at Burning Man, the annual sybaritic arts festival and all-hours rave that attracts 60,000-plus to the Black Rock Desert in Nevada over the week before Labor Day. Tananbaum’s bash went so well, he decided to host an even…
When you have an issue on Steam, you typically send in a report, which Steam Support has to deal with. But one Steam user decided to take their problem to the man in charge of Steam itself, Gabe Newell. And amazingly, Gabe actually took time out of his day to fix the problem. In an…
Marvel has released a prequel comic to the Avengers: Age of Ultron movie, and it reveals a bit about the origins of the Maximoff twins. Specifically, it explains where they got their superpowers, since mutants aren’t allowed to exist in the Marvel Cinematic Universe. Spoilers ahead! Although Quicksilver and Scarlet Witch are Magneto’s children, the…
I was talking to someone who works at one of those half-dozen or so apps that we tend to associate with teenagers: the ones that were built around some novel concept that distracted everyone for a few years while they settled into their roles as slightly different ways to text. He mentioned something, offhand, while…
WASHINGTON, Feb 5 (Reuters) – – The U.S. trade deficit in December widened sharply to its highest level since 2012 as imports rose despite a lower energy bill, which could see the fourth-quarter growth estimate revised down. The Commerce Department said on Thursday the trade deficit jumped 17.1 percent to $46.6 billion, the largest since…
According to its publisher, at the spike of its popularity, two copies of E.L. James’ 50 Shades of Grey trilogy were being sold every second. In accessible terms, that works out to more than one hundred million copies sold, to date. Let’s undertake a thought experiment. Imagine that—rather than paper and ink—each of those books…
The internet has made everybody audible. And, as a result, anybody can become a victim of a pitchfork-wielding mob, if you happen to say something online that the mob wants silenced. Nowhere has this reality been clearer than in the backlash against nascent feminism on Twitter. Simply sharing an anecdote or observation has become an…
And so after that epic 5.0% Q3 GDP print, driven largely by Obamacare, the payback begins, and the annualized Q4 GDP print, which came in at nearly half the previous quarter run rate, or 2.6%, is about to tumble by another ~0.5% following the just released trade data for December which saw a 17.1% surge…
Photo Outside the Anthem headquarters in Indianapolis. Anthem said it detected a data breach on Jan. 29, and that it was working with the Federal Bureau of Investigation. Credit Darron Cummings/Associated Press close shareTools Anthem, one of the nation’s largest health insurers, said late Wednesday that the personal information of tens of millions of its…
It all makes perfect sense. Challenger announced this morning that layoffs in January soard 17.6% year-over-year with planned job cuts at the highest level in almost 2 years… Jobless claims in Shale states continues to trend higher as oil prices collapse… but initial jobless claims beat expectations – hovering near cycle lows – though did…