Stream of Reading (Prepare to be Forwarded) – An Archive of What I'm Reading
Mercedes-Benz unveiled its dream of a fully autonomous multipurpose vehicle this week. The announcement was full of buzzwords—the modular Vision Urbanetic “enables on-demand, sustainable and efficient movement of people and goods” and “reduces traffic flows, relieves inner-city infrastructures and contributes to an improved quality of urban life.” Hardly a week goes by without fresh signposts that…
Paul Manafort, formerly President Donald Trump’s campaign chairman, is expected to plead guilty to two counts, a federal conspiracy charge that accused him of money laundering, tax fraud, and lying to investigators, as well as a count of conspiracy to obstruct justice, according to a document filed in federal court. A charging document filed Friday…
President Trump’s former campaign chairman, Paul Manafort, has agreed to plead guilty to federal crimes at a hearing Friday morning, ending his long losing battle with special counsel Robert S. Mueller III. The planned plea, if accepted by a judge, would short-circuit his second trial scheduled to begin later this month in the District on…
Ever since its announcement last week, Rebel Galaxy Outlaw has been one of my most wanted games, dead or alive. Prequel to the grungy space-trucker sim Rebel Galaxy, Outlaw is more about fighter-scale dogfights, piracy and cockpits full of glowing lights and buttons. After watching an hour of it played and explained by Double…
Twenty-seven US states specifically target clinics that provide abortions with laws called “Targeted Regulation of Abortion Providers,” also known as TRAP laws. They exist to regulate the operation of clinics beyond what is necessary for patients’ safety. There are a wide range of regulations imposed by TRAP laws that require drastic, expensive, or impractical changes…
Once a year or so, the economist Diane Swonk ventures into the basement of her 1891 Victorian house outside Chicago and opens a plastic box containing the items that mean the most to her: awards, wedding pictures, the clothes she was wearing at the World Trade Center on the day it was attacked. But what…
If it feels as though Amazon’s site is increasingly stuffed with ads, that’s because it is. And it looks like that’s working — at least for brands that are willing to fork over ad dollars as part of their strategy to sell on Amazon. Amazon-sponsored product ads have been around since 2012. But lately, as…
Brian Lesser sits in the shadow of Comcast. It’s an unusually cool New York City summer morning, and as Lesser, the CEO of AT&T’s advertising and analytics unit, details his grandiose plans to upend the TV ad industry from the roof-deck of AT&T’s offices in Rockefeller Center, the peacock logo of Comcast’s NBC division…
The now finally former CBS CEO Les Moonves is a crawling smear of slime. He’s like the dog poop that Wadsworth the butler steps in at the start of Clue. But we’ve known that since Ronan Farrow’s expose in the August 6 issue of The New Yorker, which revealed how Moonves assaulted women, including the…
This week, like every week before it, quickly set a new high bar for asinine political takes. As always, the trash piled up from a number of sources, for a few different reasons — Nike’s ad campaign with Colin Kaepernick, confirmation hearings for Trump Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh and the New Yorker dropping Steve Bannon from its annual pretension festival. The rhetoric was hardly…