Stream of Reading (Prepare to be Forwarded) – An Archive of What I'm Reading
Leading Democrats are proposing a labor law overhaul that could extend collective bargaining rights to huge swaths of the gig economy, the latest sign of gathering blowback for companies committed to maximizing profits by denying workers rights and benefits often associated with regular employment. On Wednesday, Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders, an independent who caucuses with…
Irony can be a difficult concept to grasp, but some hypothetical examples can illustrate it clearly. It would be ironic, for instance, if people who claimed their free speech was being trampled on were actually being heard more than anybody else. It would be ironic if television hosts and podcasters who believe in “engaging in…
Illustration: Jim Cooke This is the story of how corporate raiding, complacency, excess, and incompetence are gutting a media company that matters to tens of millions of people. It’s not a novel story, and perhaps not even scandalous by the standards of corporate opulence: A shark-obsessed boss, millions wasted on consultants, and an executive who…
“Defendant is a cheater,” said Epic Games in its October 2017 lawsuit against a 14-year-old boy. “Nobody likes a cheater. And nobody likes playing with cheaters.” Epic isn’t the first games studio that’s sued over cheating. There was a lawsuit over a PlayStation “game enhancer” — a console hardware hack — as early as 1999….
There’s an episode in Season Four of the show Parks and Recreation called “The End of the World,” in which we meet a cult known as “The Reasonabilists.” Members of this cult believe that an alien god named “Zorp” will destroy the world. Every few years, the Reasonabilists predict that Zorp is about to come…
Every so often we must take a break from the real news, because something comes across Twitter that makes us scream at clouds about HOW THE FUCK did Chris Cillizza win the Failing Upward lottery to the point that he’s paid what must be multiple hundreds of thousands of dollars a year, when you combine…
]Last month, suit-and-tie white supremacist Jared Taylor, founder of the race-realism rag American Renaissance, was scheduled to appear at the University of Alabama. For the talk—”Diversity: Is It Good for America?”—his sponsors, Students for America First, promoted it with a tweet including the hashtag “Defendthe1st.” As it so happened, no free-speech showdown took place. The…
Photo: AP On Monday, reports emerged in Page Six, the tabloid New York Post’s gossip page, that Tesla and SpaceX CEO Elon Musk is dating none other than musician Grimes. At first, I didn’t know what to make of this, because—confession: I had absolutely no idea who Grimes is. But reader, after roughly 20 minutes…
A journalism professor at a public university in Philadelphia has admitted to making some of the posts attributed to an anonymous account that spread baseless conspiracy theories and maligned Muslims on far-right sites, according to the school. Francesca Viola, who teaches journalism at Temple University, was identified on Twitter by Joshua Benton, the director of Harvard’s…
googleon: all A Temple University journalism professor has been publicly outed as the user behind an anonymous account linked to conspiracy-theory comments on news websites, and is criticizing the site that identified her. line 459 Francesca Viola, a former reporter for WPHL (Channel 17) and WTXF (Fox 29), was named on Twitter over a comment made on the…