Stream of Reading (Prepare to be Forwarded) – An Archive of What I'm Reading
There have been hundreds of thousands of words written on ESPN closing Grantland, but most of them have missed the largest issue — the site was losing money. With a staff somewhere between 42 and 54 people Grantland produced, according to James Miller’s Vanity Fair piece, somewhere in the neighborhood of $6 million a year…
Pants or skirt, this room is available to whoever needs it. Photo by James Knopf/Thinkstock Houston voters repealed an anti-discrimination ordinance on Tuesday, Nov. 3, in part because, as the New York Times observed, “Opponents said the measure would allow men claiming to be women to enter women’s bathrooms and inflict harm, and that…
People in other industries don’t provide their would-be clients with “spec work” for free. That would be asinine. So, why do advertising agencies continue to do it? break It’s not a new question. (This Adweek story from August was just the latest assessment of a practice that goes back decades.) But Toronto agency Zulu Alpha…
The “Tonight Show with Jimmy Fallon” has certainly gotten more political lately and Wednesday had comedian Aziz Ansari on playing Republican presidential candidate Bobby Jindal. The hair was spot on. The shiny brown locks perfectly combed to the side captured the perfect Jindal in front of a bank of bookcases. And fake Bobby was excited….
Stephen Colbert has Donald Trump’s new book, and he’s not afraid to use it. Wednesday evening on the “Late Show” the comedian was eager to talk about the way that Trump puts the country in such high regard with his new book Crippled America: How to Make America Great Again. “Crippled America is just a…
Track #3 from Faded Paper Figures “The Matter” (to be released Oct. 2012): Lyrics “Information Runs On” Traffic lights fall to the street, chandeliers start to swing, crashing lights at our feet. We drive through our lives like a dream, how we long for release from these nights of caffeine. Isolate the neurons the information…
Are memorials to racists of yore a present-day crisis? That was the gist of Lincoln Caplan’s recent essay in The Atlantic. Caplan wrote about the white-supremacist lineage of Calhoun College, one of 12 residential colleges that make up Yale University’s undergraduate community. Named for the alumnus John C. Calhoun, the building is a legacy to…
Paid advertisement? A soldier holds an American flag before the first half of a 2013 NFL football game between the Atlanta Falcons and the New England Patriots in Atlanta. David Goldman/AP hide caption itoggle caption David Goldman/AP Paid advertisement? A soldier holds an American flag before the first half of a 2013 NFL…
Ta-Nehisi Coates is appearing this Thursday, October 29, at Town Hall Seattle, as part of Seattle Arts & Lectures. From the opening sentence of Ta-Nehisi Coates’s acclaimed memoir, Between the World and Me, we know his chief concern is the destruction of the black body. Citing a television news interview he was called to do, he…
One of the most charming and irritating things about the “Star Trek” franchise, ever since its inception in 1966, is that it has always been oddly aware of itself. Unlike “Star Wars,” that other big space franchise, which purposefully places its narrative “a long time ago in a galaxy far, far away” to make it…