Stream of Reading (Prepare to be Forwarded) – An Archive of What I'm Reading
Photo Richard Zawisny is a co-owner of Eagle Provisions, in South Park Slope, Brooklyn. Credit Nicole Bengiveno/The New York Times To hear some mourners of New York’s late, great nostalgia-filled haunts tell it, the soul of the city is crumbling. With every upward tick in property values, the eternal lament goes, another rapacious landlord muscles…
Updated Oct. 20, 2009 12:01 a.m. ET This week, game players and enthusiasts from 40 countries will descend upon Las Vegas to compete in the Monopoly World Championship, held roughly every four years. The winner of the Hasbro Inc. HAS 0.48 % -sponsored tournament will take home $20,580 — the precise sum stashed in the…
The choices were stark: sack a third of our workforce or cut their wages by a third. After a short board meeting we cut their wages, assured they would survive and that, with a bit of cajoling, they would return to our sweatshop in Shenzhen after their two-week break. But that was only the start….
Charter Communications is buying Time Warner Cable for $55.1 billion and Bright House Networks for $10.4 billion, in a major consolidation of the US cable industry. Here are the details: If the deals are approved by regulators, they would combine the second- (TWC), fourth- (Charter), and tenth-largest (Bright House) cable companies in the US, with a combined 23 million customers….
Apple Watch pre-orders started with a bang and Apple’s initial inventory quickly sold out. Then US orders immediately fell, and have remained mostly flat since, according to analysis from Slice Intelligence, a company that tracks US consumer spending through e-commerce email receipts. Apple has taken orders for almost 2.5 million watches in the US through Monday, May 18, according to Slice’s projections,…
In a story so shocking it’s not shocking at all, news comes today that six of the too-biggest-to-failiest banks in the entire world worked together in secret to control currency prices, for SIX YEARS, and thus enriched themselves in the process. And now they have to pay $5.8 billion in fines, because they are guilty…
Fast-growing millennial publisher Mic has the luxury of starting from scratch with its six-month-old video strategy. That means betting heavily on Facebook. On Tuesday, Mic released the eighth episode of its debut video series, “Flip the Script.” Hosted by Mic senior editor Elizabeth Plank, the show tackles problematic cultural trends and stereotypes in snappy, three-to-seven-minute episodes….
In a television commercial from a few years ago for Abilify — one of the world’s top selling drugs — a sad cartoon woman looks down at the ground and sees an expanding black hole with bulging eyes. “Here’s my depression,” she says. Regular antidepressants weren’t working to keep her depression in check, she explains….
In my experience, kids are pretty dumb, so it seems like getting them to buy something should be simple: Make it a bright color, attach a speaker that plays loud noises, and all the kids in the store will fall over themselves in an attempt to swallow it. Then they’ll demand a 3 a.m. trip…
ITT Educational Services, one of the country’s largest for-profit college operators, has fallen into a financial and regulatory spiral that many observers say it is unlikely to emerge from. The company, which had 51,000 students as of March, is slowly running out of options to stay afloat. Except, of course, for one: enroll more students….