Stream of Reading (Prepare to be Forwarded) – An Archive of What I'm Reading
It seems the phenomenon of Milo Yiannopoulos – the brief, bright arc of his invention – is over. I do not want him to fall without being understood so I will tell you the strange tale of our encounters last year. Monsters should be understood, and pitied, for our own sakes. It is midsummer and…
Lately I have been thinking about one of the first things that I ever wrote for the Internet: a series of interviews with adult virgins, published by the Hairpin. I knew my first subject personally, and, after I interviewed her, I put out an open call. To my surprise, messages came rolling in. Some of…
David Letterman has hosted over 6,000 hours of a talk show, which means he should be good at talking. So I was surprised when he raised the issue of women in comedy with Tina Fey on his Netflix series My Next Guest Needs No Introduction, and triggered an awkward conversation. Letterman’s history with “women in…
Donald Glover Photo: Rich Fury (Getty Images) Over the weekend, Donald Glover, aka Childish Gambino, dropped a video for a new song called “This Is America.” You are reading this, which means there’s a better than 90 percent chance that you’ve both seen the video and had a discussion about it already. Probably several. I…
Craft beer’s bro-code is still enforcing outdated typecasts on what we define as good beer, bad beer and who drinks which. end .article-header Bethany Baker doesn’t remember the exact beer she had in hand the first time someone accused her of drinking “bitch beer.” “I’m pretty sure back then it was a fruited beer like…
Photo: Paras Griffin (Getty Images) I spent Saturday evening in a room full of black people, celebrating the birthday of a friend and the genius possessed by two people who were not in that room: LeBron James and Donald Glover. The first part of our night was devoted to the second half of the Cleveland…
Horseshoe crabs are sometimes called “living fossils” because they have been around in some form for more than 450 million years. In this time, the Earth has gone through multiple major ice ages, a Great Dying, the formation and subsequent breaking up of Pangaea, and an asteroid impact that killed the dinosaurs and most of…
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…