Stream of Reading (Prepare to be Forwarded) – An Archive of What I'm Reading
Two weekends ago, after Beyoncé released a mythologically forceful visual album that attached the most significant art of her career to the narrative of her husband Jay Z cheating on her with a woman she called “Becky with the good hair,” the fashion designer Rachel Roy—presumably operating of her own volition—inserted herself in that narrative…
Illustration by Jim Cooke Depending on whom you ask, Facebook is either the savior or destroyer of journalism in our time. An estimated 600 million people see a news story on Facebook every week, and the social network’s founder Mark Zuckerberg has been transparent about his goal to monopolize digital news distribution. “When news is…
As taboos about online porn break down and new generations of singles see dating sites and apps as their first stop in the search for love, marketers have spotted an opportunity. These digital venues have become the next logical place for advertising to grow and reach an expanding audience. In the process, they have changed…
A couple weekends ago I built a very basic ‘personal chatbot’, which I’ve coined my ‘mebot’. It’s called SandiMacBot — and now I’m obsessed. I can’t stop thinking about how my mebot can and will become integrated into my life, and how bots are positioned to replace portions of many of the social networks and platforms that…
A couple weekends ago I built a very basic ‘personal chatbot’, which I’ve coined my ‘mebot’. It’s called SandiMacBot — and now I’m obsessed. I can’t stop thinking about how my mebot can and will become integrated into my life, and how bots are positioned to replace portions of many of the social networks and platforms that…
Last Friday, the head of Bloomberg Media told The Guardian that publishers are “feeding on the scraps” of Facebook’s ad business. Justin Smith said that Facebook makes a lot more from ads in its News Feed than publishers do from linking content on the social network: It’s a problematic situation. On its current trajectory this…
After a year or so of reporting on matters of diversity, Complex Media website NTRSCTN (read as “Intersection”) is calling it a standalone day. From editor in chief Shanté Cosme’s farewell note: In order to appreciate each other’s differences, we need to understand the ways in which we’re all the same. We need a place…
If you’ve ever felt like financial stress was bringing you down—in a big way—you might be interested in the findings of a new study from Payoff, a financial wellness company. In an analysis of data from 2,011 survey respondents, researchers at Payoff discovered that 23% of respondents were experiencing symptoms commonly associated with post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD)…
Illustration by Tony O. Champagne For years now, media analysts have said technology will save print—and maybe it will, just not in the way they predicted. The news industry is going through an overload of information particularly in the digital sphere. We can point our fingers at the 24-hour news cycle. We can blame social…
If ever there was an election cycle that called for the sharp satirical analysis that Mr. Stewart and Mr. Colbert once provided on a nightly basis, it is this one. Their successors, Trevor Noah (“The Daily Show”) and Larry Wilmore (“The Nightly Show”) provide their share of edgy satire, but they are relatively new and…