Stream of Reading (Prepare to be Forwarded) – An Archive of What I'm Reading
The best headline templates for maximizing readership can quickly become ubiquitous, over-familiar, and cloying to their own writers. The Atlantic It is my job to read the Internet, and that makes me weird. Most people are not paid to follow, study, and theorize about web journalism like an anthropologist studying gorilla polygyny, but I am….
We’re not far into tax season, but numerous US states are already reporting a big increase in suspicious return filings, another reminder of the escalating problem that tax return fraud has become. Alabama, Utah, and Minnesota have all issued warnings in recent days, with most states directing blame for the sudden uptick at third-party tax…
You know Keurig’s machines. The company’s squat black coffee brewers have become fixtures in offices, hotels, and homes around the country, as have garbage cans heaped with the spent plastic pods they use. Purely on the strength of those machines — or more accurately, the relatively expensive pods they use — Keurig transformed its parent…
The first official promo image for Star Trek Into Darkness shows Benedict Cumberbatch’s mysterious villain John Harrison locked in a plexiglass brig. Which means that John Harrison is joining a long and proud tradition: villains who get caught in the middle of the story — often on purpose. From The Dark Knight to The Avengers,…
Truth time: Without the highly skilled tech and strategic teams he has behind him, James Bond would be just an overdressed field agent with an unnecessarily picky drink order. But, does that fictional string of geniuses reveal an important truth about how talent works? In response to this post on villains who wanted to get…
How much sympathy you have for this woman probably depends on whether you feel the universe is a just place. Photograph: Alamy If you’ve been following the news recently, you know that human beings are terrible and everything is appalling. Yet the sheer range of ways we find to sabotage our efforts to make the…
The Facebook Page That Posts the Same Picture Every Day A Facebook page that posts the same picture of an Italian singer every day has become the central part of a research project to understand how we use social media. /.story-img On the Italian language version of Facebook, a curious page came into existence in…
In the days after Rolling Stone’s University of Virginia rape story blew up in its face, both liberal and conservative finger-waggers agreed that Sabrina Rubin Erdely’s journalistic transgression would almost certainly make things more difficult for the “real” victims. They were right. After months of widespread coverage of sexual assault allegations at Columbia, this week…
The original Star Trek was a revolutionary television show… that came to an ignominous end. The classic space opera saw a huge drop in quality in its final season, and then was cancelled. Legend has it the ratings were terrible, and the new producer, Fred Freiberger, ruined it. But the truth is a bit more…
Aram Zucker-Scharff, a content strategist with CFO Publishing, has a new piece about the results of a casual independent experiment he conducted on Facebook’s News Feed. His experiment — which he himself calls “not-so-scientific” — only lasted two weeks, and, as he notes, the analytics data he’s working with is less than perfectly accurate. But it might still…