Stream of Reading (Prepare to be Forwarded) – An Archive of What I'm Reading
Well, at least they’re trying Today is the day of the Twitter tantrum known as #TheTriggering, a contrived hashtag in which the Internet’s biggest jerks have decided to post crap that is slightly more jerky than the crap they usually post. I’ve been poking around in the hashtag for a couple of hours and I have to say it’s…
Last week, the New York Times reported on a modern day, technological art heist. According to the Times, two artists snuck a camera and a Microsoft Kinect 3D scanner into the Neues Museum in Berlin and did a surreptitious scan of the 3,300 year old bust of Nefertiti. The artists put the purported results of…
On San Francisco’s Quantified Self-Delusion Sociology is a frustrating subject to have mastery in. Few people will ever read a book by an actual Sociologist on any subject, so cocksure is everyone that they have Society all mapped out. Then there are people like me who after reading literally thousands of books have come to…
There’s winning. And then there’s supporting a bigot. If the GOP lines up behind Trump, it doesn’t deserve to be taken seriously anymore. Political consulting and morality go together about as well as that famous fish and bicycle. Lawyers have constructed a neat paradigm obligating them to handle any and all clients, a very convenient…
Credit Illustration by Tom Bachtell Barrier Status: ‘none’ Antonin Scalia, who died this month, after nearly three decades on the Supreme Court, devoted his professional life to making the United States a less fair, less tolerant, and less admirable democracy. Fortunately, he mostly failed. Belligerent with his colleagues, dismissive of his critics, nostalgic for a…
The only way you can describe how you feel is that you feel minimized. You feel crushed and smothered. You’re constantly second-guessing yourself; your feelings, your perceptions, your memories, and a small, suffocated part inside of you wonders whether you are actually going crazy. You feel neurotic, you feel hyper-sensitive and you feel an overwhelming…
Apple CEO Tim Cook’s refusal to help the FBI access an encrypted phone is an important and unprecedented event in the long, strained relationship between Silicon Valley and the government. But there is one particular line, near the end of his letter, that sticks out: “We are challenging the FBI’s demands with the deepest respect…
For a long time now, Kanye West has existed simultaneously as a rap musician, an outspoken social critic (“George Bush doesn’t care about black people”) and a frequent and much-followed Tweeter. He veers from the mild (his love of fonts, praise for his wife, frequent photographs of fashion fittings) to the boastful (his new album is not the…
This morning I went on Democracy Now to discuss my critique of “class-first” policy as a way of ameliorating the effects of racism. In the midst of that discussion I made the point that one can maintain a critique of a candidate—in this case Bernie Sanders—and still feel that that candidate is deserving of your…
Last week I critiqued Bernie Sanders for dismissing reparations specifically, and for offering up a series of moderate anti-racist solutions, in general. Some felt it was unfair to single out Sanders given that, on reparations, Sanders’s chief opponent Hillary Clinton holds the same position. This argument proposes that we abandon the convention of judging our…