Stream of Reading (Prepare to be Forwarded) – An Archive of What I'm Reading
President Trump and congressional Republicans have spent much of the past year trying to connect a giddy stock market rally with their economic agenda, but stocks’ precipitous plunge in the past five days has delivered a sobering reality: What goes up can come back down — quickly and with little warning. With Monday’s steep fall,…
Thanks to the breakneck pace of social media and a journalistic climate that favors insta-takes over measured analysis, the process of provocation, backlash, and counter-backlash can now be completed in record time. Let’s take a stroll down memory lane to last February, when Donald Trump’s steak preferences caused a national furor. A pointless International Journalism…
Photo by Sean O’Kane / The Verge The most remarkable thing about Waymo v. Uber is that so many of the people following the case are essentially rooting for Google to crush a smaller firm with a lawsuit. It’s a tale as old as time: a maverick upstart galls a bigger, more established competitor, and the bigger…
PepsiCo’s CEO suggested in a podcast, that the company may be manufacturing a new line of Doritos designed for women. Here are some other “female” products that seemed ridiculous to many. (The Washington Post) The American woman, if you go by commercials, is a bizarre creature. To write, she wants pink pens; to choose a…
My dream of dancing at the Super Bowl came true. And then I became Left Shark. A few moments of improvisation became an instant meme. By Bryan Gaw January 31, 2018 at 2:39 PM That’s me, on the left. (Christopher Polk/Getty Images) It was the 2015 Super Bowl halftime show. We had been rehearsing for…
When it starts in May, the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) requires consent for use of personal data from visitors to websites and apps. For this function, Janrain, Evidon and others are coming out with user-facing solutions. But brands also need to be concerned about what happens behind the scenes, in their site/app code —…
The giant porn site puts deepfakes in the same category as revenge porn. In its search of a platform that will host fake porn videos of celebrities created with a machine learning algorithm, the deepfakes community briefly turned to Pornhub, a porn site that gets over 75 million visitors a day. Tuesday, Pornhub told Motherboard…
“Cheat codes. Find them. Use them,” said Travis Kalanick in April 2016, according to meeting notes dredged up during discovery in Waymo v. Uber. It’s just one of countless embarrassing quotes paraded out today during opening statements. It’s been almost a year since Waymo first filed suit here in San Francisco. The intervening months have been…
Audience members wander through dozens of elaborately decorated rooms as dancers perform a blood-and-sex filled adaptation of Macbeth at the immersive theater production Sleep No More. The lighting ranges from dim to very dark; guests are intentionally separated from the people they arrived with. Before the performance, an actor usually declares that “fortune favors the…
Along with the usual things that come with winning the lottery — a new car, a vacation — Donald Savastano was excited about finally being able to see a doctor after winning a $1 million prize in December. The self-employed carpenter in New York told local media he hadn’t been able to afford to do…