Stream of Reading (Prepare to be Forwarded) – An Archive of What I'm Reading
It was Halloween in Orlando, and we had piled into a car to make a short trip from the Hilton to an after-party down the road, to wind up the first night of the latest edition of a gathering called the National Conservatism Conference. For at least many of the young people, the actual business…
Last week, Walmart made headlines with a claim that new weight loss drugs might be making people buy less food. Walmart US CEO John Furner told Bloomberg that people taking Wegovy, Ozempic, and similar drugs showed a “slight change” in their purchasing habits: “just less units, slightly less calories.” How does Walmart know this? Because,…
I’m no maestra of the avant-garde, and consequently, my interest here is in offering neither definitions nor death knells. To mourn the loss of the avant-garde — or to seek the shock of transgressive aesthetics in increasingly arcane crannies — is an evergreen endeavor. As Roland Barthes wrote, “être d’avant-garde, c’est savoir ce qui est…
Movie studios favoring familiarity and profitability over artistry is nothing new or particularly innovative. At the moment, the Writers Guild of America (WGA) and the Screen Actors Guild–American Federation of Television and Radio Artists (SAG-AFTRA) are on strike against Hollywood’s profit-driven and margin-squeezing madness, throwing the craven greed of the executive class into even sharper…
Yikes, y’all. I don’t even smoke and I feel like I need a cigarette before I get this thing started. We’re here to talk about Hogwarts Legacy, and to do that we need to discuss the whole mess. Pull up a chair, pour yourself some tea, wrap yourself in a blanket, scream into a pillow…
Credit…Desiree Rios for The New York Times If you want a sense of what separates much of the leadership of the Democratic Party from many of its supporters — of what illustrates their profound disconnect from younger cohorts of liberal and progressive voters — you could do much worse than to read this recent statement…
Increasingly, I’ve found myself enraged by the White Man With A Newsletter pundit set using to tell the world that because I am doing everything in my power to protect my 17-month-old from being that could kill him, I am a paranoid ideologue who rejects science and reason. These Davids, Jonathans, and Alecs fundamentally predicate…
The chilling spectacle of watching the political class redeem a criminal, again. Photo: Gary Hershorn/REUTERS Photo: Gary Hershorn/REUTERS Photo: Gary Hershorn/REUTERS I am not an art critic, but I don’t think George W. Bush’s new portraits are very good. They inspire nothing but malaise and communicate a dilettante energy. Painting is to Bush what politics…
About a year and a half ago, Google began the chance to be one of the search engines that European users as their default on Android devices. And for the past year and a half, we’ve seen some familiar ad-targeting giants continue to take those expensive slots. This auction was the result of a spearheaded…
On journalism, ideas, “ideas”, free speech, and tech. A while ago, I did a Q&A with a venture capitalist who had formerly worked in media. The conversation took place on Clubhouse, the explosively growing audio-driven social network. The topic was the tech industry and journalism, and the discussion had been precipitated by a few weeks…