Stream of Reading (Prepare to be Forwarded) – An Archive of What I'm Reading
School integration at the Barnard School in Washington, D.C. in 1955. O’Halloran, Thomas J., photographer, the Library of Congress The schools around Charlotte were once admired nationwide. They offered a model for successful racial integration — proof that a diverse community could raise its children with shared values and shared opportunity. That dream crumbled in the early 2000s,…
Facebook is opening up its Instant Articles program to all publishers starting on April 12, less than a year after launching the experiment with a handful of large media outlets. Now anyone with a website and a Facebook page anywhere in the world will be able to take advantage of the program, which lets publishers…
When Pizza reached 100,000 followers on Tumblr, she posted a picture of a pizza box, takeout chicken wings, and an orange soda spread out on her bed: “pizza and chicken wings 2 celebrate.” One fan replied, “CONGRATULATIONS GIRL! YOU DESERVE IT!” Another: “MOTHER OF GOD 100K?!?!” An anonymous user was unimpressed: “you only have 100k…
America Is Obsessed With Identity. Thanks, Obama? Annette Elizabeth Allen/NPR Annette Elizabeth Allen/NPR When Barack Obama won the presidency in 2008, there was a lot of talk about “The Obama Effect”: how the nation’s first black president signaled a new era of racial harmony and understanding. That didn’t happen. But what…
In early February, there was a minor controversy surrounding the critically acclaimed strategy sim, XCOM 2. It turned out that the game, which most people play with a mouse and keyboard, would only be supporting one type of joypad: Valve’s idiosyncratic Steam Controller. Launched in November alongside the new range of Steam Machine PCs, this…
Most people agree the internet is not consciously alive (though my two-year old daughter, who’s addicted to internet games, disagrees). Currently, the internet accepts inputs and is pretty good at producing outputs, depending on browser, apps, hardware, search engines, coding factors, and, of course, the people using it. The scary fact, though, is that on…
Federal Reserve policy makers are beginning to worry that a corporate-credit squeeze will constrict the economic expansion. With banks tightening standards on business loans and investors demanding higher yields on some corporate debt, companies may find it harder and more expensive to raise the money they need to grow. The concern is that could prompt…
Photo Mary Lou Marzian, a Kentucky representative. Credit Ed Reinke/Associated Press A Kentucky state representative believed that a new law requiring women to have a medical consultation 24 hours before having an abortion smacked of sexism. So the lawmaker, Mary Lou Marzian, proposed a bill in the male-dominated House to drive home the point. Under…
All our plugins, including our Yoast SEO plugin, are open source. In the true meaning of open source, we don’t just open the source code, other people actively contribute to its betterment. We actively work on getting other people’s patches in and reserve time on every release to make sure we can handle community patches. We love doing…
An F/A-18 Hornet over the Pacific Ocean, in July 1999. (Photo: Ensign John Gay/US Navy) Ensign John Gay of the U.S. Navy had just returned home from several months aboard the U.S.S. Constellation in the South Pacific when his phone rang. A reporter for a photography magazine was on the line, hoping to discuss the 2000 World…