Stream of Reading (Prepare to be Forwarded) – An Archive of What I'm Reading
BlackBerry CEO John Chen wants net neutrality to extend to content and applications, so that developers of apps for Android and iOS will be mandated to develop on the BlackBerry platform as well. Not all content and app providers have embraced openness and neutrality, Chen wrote in a blog post that the company said was…
Nobody who lives in Boston actually wants the city to win its bid for the 2024 Olympic games. And yet, in a joinder agreement between the city and the United States Olympic Committee, mayor Marty Walsh has signed a contract that forbids city employees from speaking negatively about the big, the IOC, or the Olympic…
The British singer-songwriter Emma-Lee Moss, self-dubbed Emmy the Great, established herself as a master of the breakup song on her first two albums, First Love and Virtue. The lyrics were devastating in one line, and comforting in the next. Emmy’s latest EP, S (out January 27 on Bella Union), is a little different. Despite changes…
Photo For subway and bus riders, the bonus for pay-per-ride MetroCards will increase to 11 percent, from 5 percent, for anyone who puts at least $5.50 on a card. Credit Andrew Gombert/European Pressphoto Agency close shareTools The Metropolitan Transportation Authority voted on Thursday to raise the base fare on subways and buses by a quarter,…
Even as campaigns to promote strong young women get national headlines, and toys designed to get girls interested in science and math receive popular acclaim, an alarming trend happens to many girls when they hit adolescence. It’s a phenomenon called “losing their voice,” where even the most audacious girls are likely to become more cautious…
On Tuesday night, Michelle Obama was joined by a handful of people to watch the President’s State of the Union address in person. From astronaut Scott Kelly to Alan Gross, the foreign aid worker who was recently released after five years of imprisonment in Cuba, each of the White House’s guests personifies a story the…
Bill and Melinda Gates have taken on some of the world’s messiest problems, funding projects to improve the design of toilets and condoms and even create urine-powered fuel cells. Now, in their annual letter published today, they’re outlining ambitions to tackle another messy sector: banking. The central thesis of the letter, which lays out goals for the 15-year-old Gates Foundation’s next 15 years,…
How big a hole is the U.S. daily newspaper industry in? We know the toll in newsroom jobs — about 20,000 lost in a little under a decade — and the fact that the industry as a whole took in about $26 billion less in 2014 than it did a decade earlier. We’re used to,…
It’s a measure of how much the economic and cultural landscape has changed in eight years that Apple’s app developers earned as much last year as Hollywood took in from U.S. box offices — $10 billion. There’s more to Hollywood’s revenue stream than the U.S. box office, of course. But as Horace Dediu wrote Thursday,…
Stewart Butterfield had one objective when he set out to raise money for his startup last fall: a billion dollars or nothing. If he couldn’t reach a $1 billion valuation for Slack, his San Francisco business software company, he wouldn’t bother. Slack was hardly starving for cash. It was a rocket ship, with thousands of…