Stream of Reading (Prepare to be Forwarded) – An Archive of What I'm Reading
It’s our least favorite time of year: media layoff season. And thanks to El Niño, the cyclical contraction of capital in publishing every few years, it’s going to especially brutal this year at newspapers and magazines. Bloomberg layoffs began last month, which aimed to slice off a hundred or so employees. No one would be…
paging_filter “Traffic is flat,” Gawker Media’s acting executive editor John Cook wrote in a memo to staff on Wednesday. “In prior iterations of this organization, that fact would have served as evidence of an abject editorial failure.” But web traffic is no longer Gawker’s primary metric for judging editorial success. In January, CEO Nick Denton…
Sarah* was 16 when she was raped by a stranger at a festival. She’d tried MDMA with her friends, but wasn’t feeling the effects and decided to head back to her tent. On the way, she bumped into a guy she’d been talking to in the arena. They flirted and headed to his campsite before…
Gay rights drama Stonewall has failed to make any significant impact at the US box office, amid a sustained boycott. The Roland Emmerich film is based on the 1969 Stonewall riots, which are often considered the birthplace of the gay rights movement. Prior to release, the film came under fire amid claims of whitewashing and trans-erasure,…
It’s a Monday night, and there’s a line down Hollywood Boulevard, a hundred or so millennials, most of whom are white, many of whom are wearing sports jerseys, all eagerly waiting to see Lil Dicky headline at the Fonda Theatre. Which for many passersby, and now many readers, probably raised the question: Who is Lil…
An Idaho school was placed on lockdown after a student threatened to “kill all the girls” because none of them would send him nude photos. A 15-year-old boy was charged with one count each of threatening violence at a school and telephone harassment in connection with the threats — which spread quickly across social media…
Share on Facebook (3,888) Tweet (414) Share (6) Pin A group of Destiny players and video makers that goes by Husky Raid produced a Backstreet Boys music video inside the online first-person shooter. The video grows on you, as the players create increasingly complex visuals with the limited video capabilities Destiny offers,. I began playing Destiny around The Taken King in large part so I could better…
The Alpha Tau Omega chapter at Indiana University is suspended tonight, after a video depicting what looks like a horrific hazing ceremony surfaced on Twitter. In it, a student appears to be forced to perform oral sex on a woman—it’s unclear if either is consenting. It’s unclear who leaked the 29-second clip, now circulating on…
Last month, The Atlantic published an 18,000-word article by Ta-Nehisi Coates called “The Black Family in the Age of Mass Incarceration.” It was the second epic piece in what appears to be a series in which Coates examines the toll of white supremacy as American policy on black life in the United States. The article…
Google’s Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP) initiative has gotten the stamp of approval from major publishers, including The Washington Post, Vox Media and The New York Times. But lingering questions about the initiative’s inner workings, and some latent paranoia about Google’s real motivations, have others feeling skeptical. AMP’s stated mission is to speed up the mobile Web, which…