Stream of Reading (Prepare to be Forwarded) – An Archive of What I'm Reading
For more than any other American, it is Newt Gingrich who broke Congress. It was he who gave us the current version of that hopelessly dysfunctional institution — an institution which, according to a Gallup Poll, now has the confidence of 9% of the American people. That monster is his baby, and no one should…
The Huffington Post gathered names, causes of death, dates of arrest and death, and other data for more than 800 people who died in jails and police lockups in the year following Sandra Bland’s death on July 13, 2015. Because it is so difficult to obtain details of fatalities that occur in jails, many of…
Natalie Portman is on the cover of T Magazine‘s new summer entertainment issue promoting her directorial debut, A Tale of Love and Darkness, an adaptation of Israeli author Amos Oz’s best-selling memoir about his childhood in Jerusalem in the last years of the British mandate. The pictures are gorgeous, but we’re equally intrigued the accompanying feature: a…
As an unmarried woman approaching 30, I’m increasingly aware of the looming biological deadline that might make it difficult to have both a career and a family. Or at least what I thought was the biological deadline. In fact, as this video shows, the belief that you’re taking a lot of risk with your fertility…
Over the past year, there have been so many stories of violence and injustice in America, and even the most well-known deserve to be revisited. This is one: Last July, Sandra Bland was pulled over by a Texas state trooper for, he said, failing to signal when she changed lanes. After the 28-year-old questioned his…
If an anti-Ghostbusters revolution is fomented on Reddit and no one upvotes it, are women actually funny? That’s more of a hypothetical sort of question, but the first part, at least, is based in reality. Yesterday, Reddit user Better_Butter321 proposed this bit of social-media subterfuge: No one upvoted it, though, suggesting that maybe, like the…
Pour scorn elsewhere. / Joanna Slodownik Late capitalism is like your love life: it looks a lot less bleak through an Instagram filter. The slow collapse of the social contract is the backdrop for a modern mania for clean eating, healthy living, personal productivity, and “radical self-love”—the insistence that, in spite of all evidence to the…
All images: Alex Cranz/Gizmodo Samsung’s gone and done it guys. It’s made a perfectly wonderful laptop that retails for under a grand, is of exceptional quality, and is neither under-powered nor teeming with crappy finishes. This is the college-bound laptop everyone, including Apple, has failed to make for the last couple of years. We’ve been…
We, the undersigned, are in the uncomfortable position of reporting on a problem that we are told does not exist. We ask you to consider a few incidents. In 1968, the leftist Shulamith Firestone gives a speech at a conference. She is giving voice to one side of a debate that has arisen within radical…
Four men in Detroit were arrested over the past week for posts on social media that the police chief called threatening. One tweet that led to an arrest said that Micah Johnson, the man who shot police officers in Dallas last week, was a hero. None of the men have been named, nor have they been…