Stream of Reading (Prepare to be Forwarded) – An Archive of What I'm Reading
It seems everyone’s on a detox for the new year, and don’t we all need one? Our bodies are full of toxic chemicals. It would be great if we could just purify ourselves with a few smoothies, right? Tough luck. Detoxes are bullshit. It’s easy to get drawn into the marketing of detoxes or cleanses…
The night before a big meeting with a Swiss drug company in 2008, Theranos Inc. founder Elizabeth Holmes and a colleague sat in a Zurich hotel, sticking their fingers with a lancet. They drew drops of their own blood to try the company’s testing machine, but the devices wouldn’t work, says someone familiar with the…
Your book, Citizen: An American Lyric, has won the National Book Critics’ Circle poetry award in the US, the Forward in the UK and is shortlisted for the TS Eliot prize. It exposes racism in the US at its most violent and at its most nuanced. Why the title? I called it Citizen because I…
Hasbro has recently come under fire for excluding Daisy Ridley’s Star Wars: The Force Awakens character, Rey, from its movie version of Monopoly. The game, which allows players to choose between four characters from the Star Wars universe, is just another piece of The Force Awakens merchandise that has riled up fans after Rey was excluded….
Illustration by Marissa Maciel /end .figure The night after Christmas finds me seated with relatives and friends at my in-laws’ crowded dinner table, enjoying a delicious meal and happily chatting about television — one of few topics that’s nearly always safe to discuss in mixed company. Of the fourteen people laughing and passing laden platters around, only one is new to me. Someone mentions…
Lumosity, which created a brain game powerhouse by telling people it could make them smarter, is paying for its lies. Lumos Labs will pay the Federal Trade Commission $2 million for deceptive trade practices. “Lumosity preyed on consumers’ fears about age-related cognitive decline, suggesting their games could stave off memory loss, dementia, and even Alzheimer’s…
Trump raises questions about Cruz’s ‘precarious’ Canadian birth. Source: Trump raises questions about Cruz’s ‘precarious’ Canadian birth
Snapchat’s valuation is based on a single flawed assumption I recently was reading a leaked email written by Twitter’s current CFO, at the time representing Snapchat’s investors, to Snapchat’s CEO which dissected Facebook’s recent earnings announcements. It’s clear from the mail that Snapchat’s investors view Facebook as the benchmark when it comes to the size…
Longer tweets are coming soon to Twitter. Twitter is building a new feature that will allow users to tweet things longer than the traditional 140-character limit, and the company is targeting a launch date toward the end of Q1, according to multiple sources familiar with the company’s plans. Twitter is currently considering a 10,000 character…
ta-da!! It’s been a minute since we checked in on the good people over at the Becket Fund for Religious Liberty. You might remember them from their previous hits like Hobby Lobby and their more recent tracks like “We Little Sisters of the Poor Are Too Little And Too Poor To Sign This ACA Accommodation Form So We Sued The Government Instead.” We…