Stream of Reading (Prepare to be Forwarded) – An Archive of What I'm Reading
Sara D. Davis/Getty Images We in the media are sometimes told not to write stories about Donald Trump’s latest Twitter tantrum, and that’s often good advice. But the latest one shows something incredibly troubling, and which is likely to be an ongoing feature of his presidency. We’ve long known that Trump is so petty and…
In his post introducing the Niskanen Center’s project to revitalize liberalism, Will Wilkinson called for both restating old liberal truths and for updating them for our own era, in light of what we have learned, echoing F.A. Hayek’s articulating of his own task in his era. My first essay was a restatement of the “old truth”…
D.C. police detained a gunman on Dec. 4, who had walked into Comet Ping Pong, a popular Northwest Washington restaurant and music venue. Police said no injuries were reported. (Faiz Siddiqui,Bastien Inzaurralde/The Washington Post) A feedback loop of half-baked rumors and willful misinformation whips a corner of the Internet into such a frenzy that someone…
“They’re a rotten crowd,” I shouted across the lawn. “You’re worth the whole damn bunch put together.” — F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby I. “Love Will Make You Do Wrong” In the waning days of President Barack Obama’s administration, he and his wife, Michelle, hosted a farewell party, the full import of which no…
Around the late 2000s a movement began, rooted in a renaissance of black pride and fostered by chat rooms, film, YouTube, and eventually social media. This movement encouraged women of color to transition from processed to natural hair. It was about embracing the texture and curl of what organically grew out of one’s scalp. It…
Despite beating Facebook in the early PR battle against fake news, Google is still indirectly helping fund publishers that intentionally spread misleading information. Google’s digital infrastructure touches nearly everything on the internet, including fake-news websites. So unlike tech companies with less reach, Google requires much more than mere blacklists to block fake news publishers from…
In one of his few post-election appearances, president-elect Donald Trump admitted that he receives an intelligence briefing only once per week, compared to the six times per week president Barack Obama does currently. Why? That’s a whole different story. Over the weekend, Trump told Fox News Sunday’s Chris Wallace that he didn’t need daily intelligence…
Image: CBS CBS All Access’ show has added three new castmembers—all reportedly playing Klingons—to Star Trek: Discovery. This tells us that instead of the traditional rotating cast of Klingons, we’re going to have an ongoing focus on specific members of the Klingon Empire. Deadline reports that Shazad Latif (Penny Dreadful) will be playing Kol, a…
The proposed merger of AT&T and Time Warner has drawn censure from both sides of the political aisle, as well as a Senate hearing that looked into the potential for the combined company to become a monopoly. But if we are going to examine media monopolies, we should look first at Silicon Valley, not the…
Magby from Pokemon Pokémon Go’s latest update isn’t what players were expecting. For weeks, fans hoped for a whole batch of 2nd generation Pokémon—bright, adorable Chikoritas or Espeons, and over 90 more little monsters. Or, at least, a few new Pokémon that players could encounter in the wild. Nope. No. Nope. Yesterday, Pokémon Go released…