Stream of Reading (Prepare to be Forwarded) – An Archive of What I'm Reading
“What Cheese Are You?” was a quiz that appeared online in February 2014. BuzzFeed, the digital media company that published the quiz, returned to the same theme in December 2016 (“What Delicious Cheese Are You Based on Your Zodiac Sign?”), February 2018 (“Everyone Has a Cheese That Matches Their Personality—Here’s Yours”), August 2019 (“This…
A photographer is refusing a prestigious award after admitting to being a “cheeky monkey” and generating the prize-winning image using artificial intelligence. The German artist Boris Eldagsen revealed on his website that he was not accepting the prize for the creative open category, which he won at the Sony world photography awards. The winning photograph…
A series of Instagram ads run by the privacy-positive platform Signal got the messaging app booted from the former’s ad platform, according to a blog post Signal published on Tuesday. The ads were meant to show users the bevy of data that Instagram and its parent company Facebook collects on users, by… targeting those users…
The empire begins with a brothel. It stands, sturdy and square, at the heart of a gold-rush boomtown in northwest British Columbia, a monument to careful branding. The windows of the Arctic Restaurant have no signs offering access to prostitutes—even in a lawless Yukon outpost in 1899, decorum rules out such truth in advertising—but Friedrich…
In a memo he sent before leaving the company, a former Google employee criticized the internet giant and its employees, noting that he regularly encountered racism during his experience as a Black worker at the company. The memo, obtained by Motherboard, is titled “The Weight of Silence,” and argues that Google is lacking in diversity,…
Editor’s Note: This piece was originally published on July 19, 2018. On Wednesday, two representatives of the United States government held press briefings, both of them touching on one of the most astonishing news stories of the Trump presidency—a series of events that had begun two days earlier, when Donald Trump traveled to Helsinki to…
A harrowing scenario analysis of how human civilization might collapse in coming decades due to climate change has been endorsed by a former Australian defense chief and senior royal navy commander. The analysis, published by the Breakthrough National Centre for Climate Restoration, a think-tank in Melbourne, Australia, describes climate change as “a near- to mid-term…
AirPods are a product of the past. They’re plastic, made of some combination of carbon, hydrogen, oxygen, nitrogen, chlorine, and sulfur. They’re tungsten, tin, tantalum, lithium, and cobalt. The particles that make up these elements were created 13.8 billion years ago, during the Big Bang. Humans extract these elements from the earth, heat them, refine…
Liam Neeson is sitting in an armchair with a flask of tea at his side. We are in the sprawling suite of a Manhattan hotel to talk about his latest film, Cold Pursuit. Just as he has in a number of roles since he became an action hero in his fifties, Neeson plays an everyman hell-bent…
“What does it take for a Donald Trump voter to renounce their decision?” is a question worth exploring as 2020 approaches, especially considering the fervency of his followers, who often seem less interested in policy, and more fixated on the bogus immigration threat and alleged conspiracies against their beloved leader. On Monday, the Washington Post…