Stream of Reading (Prepare to be Forwarded) – An Archive of What I'm Reading
A political event hosted by “Broad City” star Ilana Glazer at a historic Brooklyn synagogue was canceled Thursday when a vandal scrawled “Kill all Jews” inside. The NYPD said “anti-Semitic messages” were discovered on the stairwell of Union Temple in Brooklyn Heights around 8 p.m. Thursday. At about 8:30, Glazer came out of the venue…
Birthright citizenship just might be, former slaves believed, the safeguard they needed. In the decades before the Civil War, in an era when a remedy like the Fourteenth Amendment was hard to imagine, free black Americans embraced the view that they were citizens by virtue of having been born on U.S. soil. It was a…
At Google offices worldwide Thursday, employees walked off the job to protest what organizers called “a culture of complicity, dismissiveness and support for perpetrators” accused of sexual harassment and abuse. The walkout comes a week after the New York Times revealed that Google had suppressed allegations of sexual misconduct against several of its executives, including Andy Rubin,…
A Facebook ad in October urged political conservatives to support the Trump administration’s rollback of fuel emission standards, which it hailed as “our president’s car freedom agenda” and “plan for safer, cheaper cars that WE get to choose.” The ad came from a Facebook page called Energy4US, and it included a disclaimer, required by Facebook,…
“We as black women, I guess, have gone through so much that we think it’s so much more important that we get involved and start some things,” said Clarke. Clarke’s reflex to get involved dates back decades before she won office (which she did at age 45, three years after learning she had multiple sclerosis)….
The history of the world’s favorite Halloween carol, Bobby “Boris” Pickett’s “The Monster Mash.” Here’s how a song about dead creatures came to life. Hey all, Ernie here with a fresh piece from David Buck, who last hit us with some chatter on scale models. This time, he dives into one of the most iconic…
Often top referrers to articles in our network include a mix of the usual suspects: Google search, Google News, Facebook, Twitter, Flipboard, Drudge Report. But one day at the beginning of October I was looking at a story in Currents and noticed another referrer in the mix: SmartNews. SmartNews is an app that aggregates and…
Anyone who isn’t an expert on the internet would be hard-pressed to explain how tracking on the internet actually works. Some of the negative effects of unchecked tracking are easy to notice, namely eerily-specific targeted advertising and a loss of performance on the web. However, many of the harms of unchecked data collection are completely…
Mozilla’s user research, and research conducted by universities and independent experts, consistently shows that most people who use the web do not approve of many of the ways in which their personal data is collected and shared for targeted advertising. In fact, people consider some practices to be invasive, creepy, and even scary. User tracking…
The Skimm co-founders Carly Zakin (left) and Danielle Weisberg (right). Photo: Dina Litovsky In early September, the whole staff of the Skimm, a current-events newsletter aimed at millennial women, gathered on gray couches for an all-hands meeting. Carly Zakin and Danielle Weisberg, the Skimm’s CEOs and founders, were dressed in the TV-ready sheaths they’d put…