Stream of Reading (Prepare to be Forwarded) – An Archive of What I'm Reading
On the Friday after the US presidential election, Andrew Torba, CEO of Gab.ai, a social network favored by conservatives, was kicked out of Y Combinator, the influential Silicon Valley startup accelerator, for violating its harassment policy. Torba, a fervent Trump supporter, called members of the Y Combinator community “cucks” and told them to “fuck off”…
In a humongous publication fail, Blackhair magazine mistakenly featured a white model on its December/January cover. Fam. The model in question, Emily Bador, who’s white, pointed the error out in an Instagram post, in which she apologized for the shoot and said she had no idea the photo—which she believes was taken three or four…
Slavic SFF is a fascinating corner of our beloved genre. Often times it gets unfairly overlooked, or lumped in with Western European SFF and dismissed as just another faux medieval fantasy vaguely inspired by (Western) historical events. But the reality is a completely different matter. Eastern European genre fiction doesn’t just differ substantially from that…
Photo via AP, helpful indicator by Jezebel. Here’s Kansas Secretary of State Kris Kobach, who wants to run the Department of Homeland Security, just carrying around sensitive internal documents where everyone can see, like a huge goober. There’s some speculation that Kobach did it on purpose, but that gives him a lot of credit, I…
I’m guessing Tucker Carlson has heard worse, but it’s alway nail-bitingly good to watch a brilliant woman demolish the turgid arguments of a smug Republican male. Even if his sense of moral and intellectual superiority inevitably remains unshaken. This is what happened when Teen Vogue writer Lauren Duca, whose essay about Donald Trump “gaslighting” America…
Thanks to sustained, legitimate outrage from people on the Internet and a major ethical violation, there will be one fewer outlet for white supremacists to plead their case to the American people. On Friday, A&E briefly changed the name of its eight-episode series from Generation KKK to Escaping the KKK: A Documentary Series Exposing Hate…
Fred Turner is a Stanford-based historian of 20th century media, who chronicled the emergence of what became the Internet from the ideals of 1960s Bay Area countercultural movements in his book “From Counterculture to Cyberculture.” He also happened to write a book called, “The Democratic Surround: Multimedia and American Liberalism from World War II to the Psychedelic…
When Chris Christie aligned himself with Donald Trump, he signed up for a series of humiliations. Like being publicly admonished for eating cookies, or losing leadership of Trump’s transition team to the same man who likely stole his VP nomination. It’s no less than he deserves, but the reason is a bit unexpected. Since Christie…
One of the lesser-known casualties of Newt Gingrich’s ghoulish Contract with America was the Office of Technology Assessment (OTA), a small government agency charged with producing impartial reports for Congress and other officials about issues of scientific and technological concern. From 1972 until 1995, the OTA produced studies, often with the help of academic experts,…
Houseman’s French fries have a thin, delicate crust on the outside and are pure cream on the inside.Photo: Melissa Hom When it comes to French fries, the best always tend to be the ones that come through at clutch moments: long golden numbers at Tibbett Diner after a long shift, or stubby crinkle cuts from…