Stream of Reading (Prepare to be Forwarded) – An Archive of What I'm Reading
The workers at eBay-owned TCGplayer, a marketplace for trading card games such as Magic: The Gathering, have voted in favor of joining a union. eBay purchased the company in 2022 for a deal valued up to $295 million, but the website continues to operate independently. Now that all 272 non-supervisory workers at the company’s authentication…
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,…
When I got home from my tomato expedition, I read a tweet from the comedian Sarah Lazarus that made me feel like someone had put a camera inside my apartment. “Every day we have to wake up, confront the most upsetting shit we’ve ever seen, and then walk around obeying laws and saying ‘it’s tomato…
As the suspect was being held at gunpoint by police, he was allegedly updating his Instagram Story with photos of the victim. A low-level Instagram influencer killed his girlfriend and posted photos of her body on social media sites, police said. Brandan Andrew Clark, 21, allegedly killed fellow influencer Bianca Devins, a 17-year-old from Utica,…
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…
Photo: Waring Abbott (Getty Images) The writers, director, producers, and publicists behind Captain Marvel have done a lot of work to position their new movie as the story of a superpowered human being. Despite their best efforts, though, the internet understands that, really, everything in the film unrelated to its most notable character, an alien…
Business Insider has posted an insanely interesting article about the lengths Facebook’s internal security teams go to protect Mark Zuckerberg. The social media giant has previously reported that it spends upwards of $10 million a year on Zuck’s personal security, and, thanks to some loose-lipped current and former workers at Facebook’s Global Security organization, now…