Stream of Reading (Prepare to be Forwarded) – An Archive of What I'm Reading
In a bid to curb on-duty sexual assault between servicemen and women, the naval warfare branch of the US armed forces is placing its bets on a smartphone app. The US Navy is investing $150,000 into a six-month pilot project to test an app called LiveSafe, which was initially created to prevent on-campus gun violence….
It’s early November in Portland, Oregon, and Dan Savage—probably America’s best-known sex-advice columnist—is standing on the stage of a former high-school auditorium, engaging the audience in a bit of call-and-response. “Turn your smartphone…” he calls out. “OFF!” roars the crowd. “We will take it…” “AWAY!” “You will never get it…” “BACK!” It’s the finale of…
Rudolph W. Giuliani, a fiercely loyal Trump ally, is out of the race for secretary of state. Rex W. Tillerson, the head of Exxon Mobil, appears to be the leading contender. ■ President-elect Donald J. Trump’s transition team is asking a lot of questions at the Energy Department. ■ Mr. Trump will name Gary D. Cohn,…
The Israel-based firm Cellebrite, which specializes in software that breaches cellphones, enjoys a reputation as a silver bullet in 21st-century policing whose products are used only to beat terrorists and find abducted kids. Like any good, vaguely sinister corporate spy outfitter, the company has never publicly confirmed which governments are among its customers, and deflects questions about whether it would sell…
Add them to the annals of No Good Deed Goes Unpunished: works of art calling attention to racism in America’s past — and its persistence in America’s present — targeted by educational censorship campaigns for being too racist. Four such works were challenged in the past month, in fact. This fall, Salem State University put…
Through years of weak economic growth, up-and-down stock markets and miserable returns on cash savings, the housing market has delivered for Canadians by making them wealthier. House prices used to more or less track the inflation rate, which was a feeble 1.5 per cent between 2008 and 2015 because of stunted economic growth. But in cities…
The tail of a 99-million-year-old dinosaur, including bones, soft tissue, and even feathers, has been found preserved in amber, according to a report published today in the journal Current Biology. While individual dinosaur-era feathers have been found in amber, and evidence for feathered dinosaurs is captured in fossil impressions, this is the first time that…
In President Obama’s final national security speech on Tuesday, he spoke about the importance of staying true to our values, of not returning to torture, and of transparency. Now, in his remaining time in office, he has an opportunity to take action to advance these goals and to do something of great importance for the…
It was January 1975, and the Watergate Babies had arrived in Washington looking for blood. The Watergate Babies—as the recently elected Democratic congressmen were known—were young, idealistic liberals who had been swept into office on a promise to clean up government, end the war in Vietnam, and rid the nation’s capital of the kind of…
Silicon Valley’s push into the physical world “is going to be a much longer, slower process, especially in the next couple of chapters,” said Andrew McAfee, a Massachusetts Institute of Technology professor who studies technology’s impact on society. That timeline isn’t typical for Google. Larry Page and Sergey Brin launched the search engine—then called BackRub—in…