Stream of Reading (Prepare to be Forwarded) – An Archive of What I'm Reading
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This was, for most news organizations, a boon. The flood of visitors aligned with two core goals of most media companies: to reach people and to make money. But as Facebook’s growth continued, its influence was intensified by broader trends in internet use, primarily the use of smartphones, on which Facebook became more deeply enmeshed…
There’s nothing wrong with being a bureaucrat. So you’re a tiny cog in a machine made of abstract rules, paperwork, and the broken dreams of those who do not understand either. So what? You’re just misunderstood. Without you, nobody would know where to file their TPS reports. Nobody would even know what a TPS report…
Today’s catch: A 154.5-lb Thresher shark off the south shore of Long Island. #IFISHNY pic.twitter.com/AsCgEEBxtk — Andrew Cuomo (@NYGovCuomo) August 28, 2016 Over the weekend, Governor Andrew Cuomo signaled to the world that, whatever questions may exist about investigations into possible self-dealing by his administration, the effectiveness of his signature big-ticket projects, or his…
A bike lane, where — if you’re lucky — a car won’t try to hit you. Probably. (Matt McClain for The Washington Post) About 100 years ago, the auto industry pulled off a neat trick: It stole the public roadways from us. See, in the early days of the motor vehicle, there used to be…
Since the publication of the first issue of Bitch Planet by Kelly Sue DeConnick and Valentine De Landro in December of 2014, many people, inside and outside of academia, have pointed to the comic, the related backmatter and essays, and even the community that has formed around it–as embodied by the many tattoos of the…
Moderator Megyn Kelly waits for the start of the Republican presidential primary debate in Des Moines. (Chris Carlson/AP) Facebook announced Friday that humans would no longer write descriptions for its Trending topics list, handing over even more responsibility to the already-powerful algorithm. But just days after the policy change, Facebook’s algorithm chose a very bad, factually incorrect…
Photo Anythony Weiner at the Democratic National Convention in Philadelphia in July. Credit Damon Winter/The New York Times Huma Abedin, the wife of the former Representative Anthony D. Weiner, announced on Monday that the couple were separating in the wake of a report that Mr. Weiner had been involved in another sexting scandal. Mr. Weiner,…
Warning: this comic occasionally contains strong language (which may be unsuitable for children), unusual humor (which may be unsuitable for adults), and advanced mathematics (which may be unsuitable for liberal-arts majors). This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 2.5 License. This means you’re free to copy and share these comics (but not to…
In 1969, American soul band The Winstons’ created the Amen break, a brief drum composition from the band’s song “Amen brother.” Since then, the song has become the world’s second most sampled track of all time. But though the famous four-bar sample turned into a dance-music goldmine, The Winstons never received any compensation for…
Buzzfeed’s Chris Hamby is out today with the first installment of a promised four-part investigative report into the system of investor-state dispute settlement (ISDS). Like all such reports, it needs a spectacular headline and summary to draw clicks, and this one’s a doozy: The Court That Rules the World A parallel legal universe, open only…