Stream of Reading (Prepare to be Forwarded) – An Archive of What I'm Reading
Every Tuesday at 6 p.m., three dozen Coloradans from every corner of the state assemble in the windowless back room of a small Fort Collins coffee shop. They have met 16 times since March, most nights talking through the ins and outs of their shared faith until the owners kick them out at closing. They…
No one knows how Weeping Mary, Texas, got its name. Local folklore has it that there was a freedwoman named Mary who lived there and didn’t want to sell her land to a wealthy white man. So, the man in question persuaded a black man to purchase the land for him instead. Mary was tricked into…
The challenges of getting a portable digital television to actually show a working signal stand in strong contrast to the analog days. When it comes to technology, I have a lot of love for edge cases—situations where the march of innovation actually makes things a little bit worse. Which means that I’ve become a pretty…
The US Department of Defense’s 1033 program sends “surplus” military equipment to US police forces (“surplus” in quotes because military contractors lobby for the US military to buy more weapons than they need in order to feed materiel to the program), which has created a situation in which cops show up in their communities literally…
It’s the quintessential story of a New Jersey summer: Man and family relax “down the shore” on Fourth of July weekend, enjoying sun, sand and no crowds to speak of because said man banned the public from the beach as part of a statewide government shutdown. On Sunday, embattled New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie was…
The Guardian needed a new US headquarters. It was the morning of February 23, and staffers gathered at the company’s office in lower Manhattan, an immense space that the British newspaper once hoped would be home to a 300-person-strong US digital arm. Now the company — years ago a burgeoning news outlet with a shiny…
Start Article Post Content This is Distractify. You’ve probably seen its viral posts in your Facebook feed, like this: Makes you think, doesn’t it? Distractify is one of many companies that competes for your online attention with posts like this one: The posts often take the form of curated listicles, which combine written text with…
react-text: 137 There may be no more direct metric of social influence than one’s ability to change language. Getting your friends to talk like you, after all, is a hallmark of adolescent power (“Gretchen, stop trying to make ‘fetch’ happen! It’s not going to happen!” barks Regina George, blond queen bee of the 2004 teen…
close dealbook-branding close story-meta Photo Unable to recover the balance of loans by repossessing and reselling the cars of owners who default, some subprime lenders are aggressively suing the borrowers to collect what remains. Credit Spencer Platt/Getty Images More than a decade after Yvette Harris’s 1997 Mitsubishi was repossessed, she is still paying off her…
Peter Thiel at TechCrunch Disrupt in San Francisco, 2011. Photo credit: Getty Images. When Inc. magazine’s Jeff Bercovici reported last August that billionaire Trump-supporter Peter Thiel had repeatedly expressed interest in the idea of harvesting the blood of young people to maintain his own youth, it left an indelible mark on Thiel’s public persona, as…