Stream of Reading (Prepare to be Forwarded) – An Archive of What I'm Reading
President Donald Trump with the First Lady at the Freedom Ball, Friday, January 20, 2017, in Washington (AP Photo/Evan Vucci) It’s 2.5 minutes to midnight. We’re all fucked. Since 1947, the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists has been using a clock to symbolize how close we are to a catastrophic event. The closer to “midnight”…
Image: Twitter White House Press Secretary and shouting ball of wax Sean Spicer has tweeted plenty of dumb things. (And who among us hasn’t?) This morning, though, he may have accidentally compromised the security of his Twitter account. At 8:42am Spicer sent a string of nonsense out to the world: “n9y25ah7.” It’s not long enough…
For the last two years, the minute hand of the Doomsday Clock stayed set at three minutes before the hour, the closest it had been to midnight since the early 1980s. In its two most recent annual announcements on the Clock, the Science and Security Board warned: “The probability of global catastrophe is very high,…
Credit Damon Winter/The New York Times It is now two and one-half minutes to midnight. Our organization, the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, is marking the 70th anniversary of its Doomsday Clock on Thursday by moving it 30 seconds closer to midnight. In 2016, the global security landscape darkened as the international community failed to…
Rex Tillerson, President-elect Trump’s nominee for secretary of state, had a rocky first day facing members of the Senate during his confirmation hearing on Jan. 11 at the Capitol. (Peter Stevenson/The Washington Post) Secretary of State Rex Tillerson’s job running the State Department just got considerably more difficult. The entire senior level of management officials…
A Manhattan judge on Wednesday declined to delay criminal trials for two defendants given summonses last year for low-level offenses who are challenging the appointment of New York City Police Department legal staffers to prosecute their cases. Trials for Arminta Jeffryes, 23, and Cristina Winsor, 39, who were given summonses last year while they were…
The US Department of Agriculture rescinded an order stopping scientists and other employees at its main research division from publishing documents meant to explain science to the public. In an email sent to scientists on Tuesday evening and obtained by BuzzFeed News, Chavonda Jacobs-Young, administrator of the department’s science arm, the Agricultural Research Service (ARS),…
close story-meta Should we journalists use the word “lie” to describe President Trump’s most manifest falsehoods? That debate has roiled the news world. The Times this week used the word “lie” in a front-page headline, and I agreed with that decision, but there’s a counterargument that lying requires an intention to deceive — and that…
Maybe you haven’t come such a long way, baby. Nearly two decades into the 21st century, young, professional women feel compelled to minimize their accomplishments and ambitions—but only if they are single, according to a new study of M.B.A. candidates. Young, single women are simultaneously operating in the labor market and the marriage market—and those spheres…
According to a new index, America’s democracy score deteriorated in 2016 react-empty: 350 react-text: 413 AMERICA, which has long defined itself as a standard-bearer of democracy for the world, has become a “flawed democracy” according to the taxonomy used in the annual Democracy Index from the Economist Intelligence Unit, our sister company. Although its score…