Stream of Reading (Prepare to be Forwarded) – An Archive of What I'm Reading
Many U.S. charities are worried the tax overhaul bill signed by President Trump on Friday could spur a landmark shift in philanthropy, speeding along the decline of middle-class donors and transforming charitable gift-giving into a pursuit largely left to the wealthy. The source of concern is how the tax bill is expected to sharply reduce…
The US government has announced significant cuts in its United Nations budget obligations for 2018-2019 in what will be interpreted as a further ratcheting up of pressure from the Trump administration looking to bend decision-making at the international body to its will. In a statement released over the holiday, the US Mission to the United…
To protect net neutrality, we need internet infrastructure that isn’t owned by big telecom. The net neutrality battle has been exhausting. It has come at enormous cost in time, energy, attention, and money. Fundamentally, the net neutrality fight is one where the best possible outcome is preserving the status quo: an internet landscape and connection…
The Israeli intelligence service asked the great psychologist Daniel Kahneman for help in the 1970s, and Kahneman came back with a suggestion: Get rid of the classic intelligence report. It allows leaders to justify any conclusion they want, Kahneman said. In its place, he suggested giving the leaders estimated probabilities of events. The intelligence service…
In 2016 I noticed something odd on Twitter — without context or explanation, Andrea Shepard, a Tor developer, had posted a string of random letters and numbers. Some days later, news broke that the Tor Project had cut ties with Jake Appelbaum, a lauded activist and the most high-profile of their developers, in response to allegations of…
Buckley Kuhn-Fricker was so disturbed by what she discovered about her teenage daughter’s boyfriend that she spent a tumultuous week pushing for a breakup. By Thursday, she texted a friend saying the “outspoken Neo Nazi” was out of their lives. But just hours later, the family said that the 17-year-old boyfriend had shot and killed…
via Getty Last week, BuzzFeed CEO Jonah Peretti held an off-the-record company meeting, parts of which were tweeted by the company’s media reporter, Steven Perlberg. Responding to a question about unions, Peretti reiterated to his Stateside staff that while he is not “personally anti-union,” he does not believe unionization is right for his particular shop….
Credit Nicolas Ortega To hear the Christian right tell it, President Trump should be a candidate for sainthood — that is, if evangelicals believed in saints. “Never in my lifetime have we had a Potus willing to take such a strong outspoken stand for the Christian faith like Donald Trump,” tweeted Franklin Graham, the son…
Tesla’s Elon Musk: Not a mass transit fan. Richard Drew/AP The Tesla CEO’s recent comments about public transportation triggered a firestorm of criticism. Here’s why. Like many tech entrepreneurs, Elon Musk is trying to reinvent public transit. But his comments at an event last month, as reported by Aarian Marshall in Wired, made many…
In the last year ProPublica has uncovered a number of different flaws in our advertising systems. Several of them were serious failures on our part. It’s why we apologized and took immediate action to prevent them in the future. Today ProPublica has raised new concerns about companies, including our own marketing team, using Facebook…