Stream of Reading (Prepare to be Forwarded) – An Archive of What I'm Reading
I could only have seen it there, on the waxed hardwood floor of my elementary-school auditorium, because I was young then, barely 7 years old, and cable had not yet come to the city, and if it had, my father would not have believed in it. Yes, it had to have happened like this, like…
It has become something of a commonplace to say that Mike Pence belongs to another era. He is a politician whom the New York Times has called a “throwback,” a “conservative proudly out of sync with his times,” and a “dangerous anachronism,” a man whose social policies and outspoken Christian faith are so redolent of…
I happened to listen to “This Is America,” the new single by Childish Gambino, a.k.a. Donald Glover, before I saw the eloquent, ultra-violent accompanying video concocted by Glover and the director Hiro Murai. One of the song’s three strands is set to a benign Afrobeat rhythm, with Glover and a backing choir echoing old, edifying…
If I get addicted to vaping, I thought, in March, I will always remember this Texas strip mall. I was walking out of a store called Smoke-N-Chill Novelties, in Southwest Austin, holding a receipt for $62.95 and two crisp, white shrink-wrapped boxes. I got into the driver’s seat of a rental car and began to…
LONDON — If anyone had any hope that President Trump would adopt a more conciliatory tone toward Britain before his visit in July, it was dashed on Friday, when he appeared before a National Rifle Association conference in Dallas and took a jab at London’s crime rate. “Knives, knives, knives, knives,” he said, mimicking a…
A plume of ash rises from Kilauea on Thursday. (USGS/Reuters) On Monday, a lava lake vanished from the top of Kilauea volcano on the island of Hawaii. The flow of liquid rock that normally fills Puu Oo crater, on the volcano’s eastern flank, had been abruptly turned off. Days later, a crack opened in the ground at a subdivision more than 10 miles…
Less than a week ago, Leilani Estates was the picture of serenity on Hawaii’s Big Island, a subdivision in the island’s eastern Puna district filled with wooden homes nestled in tropical plant-filled lots. The latest eruption of the island’s most active volcano changed everything. Shortly after Kilauea erupted Thursday, the ground split open on the east…
Earlier today, Jezebel published a look at the people behind Lil Tay, a 9-year-old girl and controversial Instagram personality, whose fame is the result of participating in some extremely adult beefs. Shortly after the story was published, Alex Goller Gelbard, who works with Tay in some kind of management capacity, answered a few questions we…
Photo: Screenshots via YouTube Social media stardom is a brutal Darwinistic competition, a craven and utterly shameless battle for space on our screens and in our brains carried out by a phalanx of influencers, thinkfluencers, beauty vloggers, charlatans, health quacks, spiritual phonies, and unhinged vegans. Recently, Lil Tay entered into this fray. Tay is—as far…
Image: Getty Welcome to the unholy union that is Donald Trump and Rudy Giuliani. On Wednesday, Giuliani opened his little mouth and screamed to Sean Hannity that Donald Trump had reimbursed Michael Cohen for the $130,000 hush money payout to Stormy Daniels. The world reeled for thirty seconds and then returned to its regularly scheduled…