Stream of Reading (Prepare to be Forwarded) – An Archive of What I'm Reading
I could smell blood before I even went into the room Thank you for reading. If you’d like to receive every issue of Hell World including pieces like this one from the other day about a bartender in Texas who was arrested for serving alcohol to a man that then went on a shooting massacre…
Angry Birds is so 2009, you might say. “I haven’t played Angry Birds since 2012, at the latest,” you might insist. It doesn’t matter. Angry Birds is still part of your life. As the first wildly successful mobile game, it’s an avatar for the way our understanding of what’s private and what’s personal has…
AirPods are a product of the past. They’re plastic, made of some combination of carbon, hydrogen, oxygen, nitrogen, chlorine, and sulfur. They’re tungsten, tin, tantalum, lithium, and cobalt. The particles that make up these elements were created 13.8 billion years ago, during the Big Bang. Humans extract these elements from the earth, heat them, refine…
xA specter is haunting the straight white liberal sixtysomething American dad—the specter of his damn socialist kids. A generation that grew up eating Cold War propaganda with their cornflakes confronts one in which socialism regularly outpolls capitalism, and it’s happening across the breakfast table. New Yorker writer Adam Gopnik’s new book, A Thousand Small Sanities:…
One jaw-dropping moment during the Senate’s hearing on Tuesday came when Sen. Ted Cruz asked Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg, “Does Facebook consider itself a neutral public forum?” Unsatisfied by Zuckerberg’s response that Facebook is a “platform for all ideas,” Sen. Cruz continued, “Are you a First Amendment speaker expressing your views, or are you a…
Let’s start with the good: For most of its 82 minutes, Game of Thrones’ “The Long Night” was a tense, well-modulated, and gorgeously scored poem to apocalyptic terror. Unlike “Battle of the Bastards,” which repeatedly offered stunning bird’s-eye perspectives of military formations before zooming in to the chaos as it was experienced on the ground, director Miguel Sapochnik…
A few weeks ago, I went on one of my favorite podcasts — The Ezra Klein Show — to talk about burnout, workism, and our relationship to labor. In our conversation, I invoke the idea of “LARPing” your job, a phrase my partner uses to describe the way we try and show evidence that LOOK, OVER HERE,…
Ever since “people-based marketing” was introduced at Advertising Week in 2014, it has become a strategic imperative for almost every brand. Fortune 500 companies are investing in and adopting the tech, agency media buyers are mandating it in insertion orders, and DSPs, DMPs and measurement providers are strategizing around how they can implement this into…
We had a town house, but we weren’t allowed to touch it. I had to be lifted up by the armpits to peer inside. The brick façade appeared to be cut from a single sheet, but, if you looked closely, you could see how my father had smeared cement onto miniature bricks with a butter…
meta: bylines, bios, shares, tip The New York Daily News reports that next week, Mayor Bill de Blasio intends to announce he’s going to stuff his incredibly tall and awkward frame into the already-far-beyond-overloaded clown car of the 2020 Democratic presidential primary. When I was a tiny child and there were no safety rules in…