Stream of Reading (Prepare to be Forwarded) – An Archive of What I'm Reading
In an effort to rebuild its media team after recent buyouts and the death of columnist David Carr, The New York Times has announced several new appointments on its Media desk, including the promotion of Bill Brink to media editor. Brink, who has served as deputy media editor since 2011, will now oversee all media…
The US Department of Justice found many, many things wrong in its investigation into the Ferguson Police Department, including a pattern of racial bias. But perhaps the most disturbing findings were the racist email exchanges between police and court officials, which show outright hostility and prejudice toward the St. Louis suburb’s black residents. Here are…
Wilson’s supporters accused Eric Holder of burying news on the same day his officials accused Ferguson police of a pattern of racial bias. Photograph: Handout/Getty Images Darren Wilson, the white police officer whose fatal shooting of an unarmed black 18-year-old in Ferguson, Missouri, led to months of unrest and revived a debate on race and…
William Dudley, president of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, delivered a speech on Wednesday morning that drove home just how dangerous an investment student loans are for American taxpayers. Speaking at a conference on student loan data, Dudley outlined the consequences of the unique way the U.S. government lends money to people for college. Government student loans…
Sweet Briar College, in Sweet Briar, Va., in an undated photograph. The all-women’s school plans to close in August. (Photo by Meridith De Avila Khan/Sweet Briar College) This story has been updated. For more than a century, Sweet Briar College has offered women a liberal arts education in a pastoral setting near Virginia’s Blue Ridge…
Watching Gotham continue its complete and utter lunacy in “Everyone Has a Cobblepot” last night, I was struck with a single, amazing thought. What if Gotham is an origin story not for regular Batman, but for the old Batman TV show from the ’60s? Because the ridiculousness is reaching that level. In fact, there are…
The challenge of being a futurist pioneer is being Patient Zero for the future’s headaches. In 2009, Raul Rojas, a computer science professor at the Free University of Berlin (and a robot soccer team coach), built one of Germany’s first “smart homes.” Everything in the house was connected to the Internet so that lights, music,…
In 1997, a writer and web developer named Paul Ford walked into a sushi restaurant in midtown Manhattan to meet a group of strangers. These were bloggers—a term not yet widely in use—who, along with Ford, formed a tight-knit vanguard of individuals publishing personal writing online. Ford had been building experimental personal websites since 1993, and had…
Start Article Post Content Women and minority writers have seen minimal progress in television, the Writers Guild of America West has reported.The guild’s television staff brief found that female writers accounted for 29% of TV staff employment during the 2013-14 season, down from 30.5%. Minorities accounted for 13.7% during the 2013-14 season, down from 15.6%….
Razing Williamsburg Who pulled the plug on America’s hippest music scene? “Peak Brooklyn” is what they’re calling it: the ubiquitous saturation of Kings County-related prose blanketing the internet. Brooklyn has become a touchstone for comparison with places the world over, based on superficial qualities like the presence of busking musicians or so-called “artisanal” retailers. And…