Stream of Reading (Prepare to be Forwarded) – An Archive of What I'm Reading
The “reductive seduction” is not malicious, but it can be reckless. For two reasons. First, it’s dangerous for the people whose problems you’ve mistakenly diagnosed as easily solvable. There is real fallout when well-intentioned people attempt to solve problems without acknowledging the underlying complexity. There are so many examples. As David Bornstein wrote in The…
Who among us has not felt the affront? Macadamia nuts arrive in a bag, not on a dish, and something shrivels in the soul. Are we animals? Did we execute the challenging task of being born insanely wealthy only to eat in-flight snacks from a bag? We did not. And that is why, when Korean…
Warning: Major spoilers ahead. Don’t read if you don’t want any details on the plot points of “Star Wars: The Force Awakens.” “Star Wars” is shallow and silly and campy and fun, and a dozen other synonyms that suggest we shouldn’t think about it too hard. I don’t usually—I watch “Star Wars” with an impressionist eye, the way I…
“What do you do when you have the attention of millions of people? It seemed to me like it would be fun to experiment with.” Photo: Louis Lanzano/Bloomberg via Getty Images Martin Shkreli has had a busy month. First, the “pharma bro” said he wished he raised the prices of the…
Photo Credit Illustration by Kyle Hilton Philip writes: When I am driving and I receive a text, instead of replying myself, my wife will text for me. But if I say: ‘‘Should we meet you at your house?’’ she will send ‘‘should wee meet u at ur house.’’ I find texting impersonal, but if I…
Photo Students cheered as the statue of Cecil Rhodes was removed from the University of Cape Town. Credit Charlie Shoemaker/Getty Images Johannesburg — NOT long after I moved from the United States to South Africa six years ago, I took a walk in a city called Bloemfontein. The scale of the downtown is huge, reflecting…
Despite the media scare stories, trigger warnings are not widely used by college professors across the country, according to a survey released in full on Tuesday. They’re not even widely demanded by students. And when they are used, the warnings address both liberal and conservative concerns. The nonscientific survey, conducted by the National Coalition Against Censorship,…
The freelance life. (Photo by flickr user @eekim, used under a Creative Commons Attribution License) Rachel Northrop shouldn’t have to use her credit card to buy groceries. She’s a successful young professional, after all, freelancing for several trade journals about tea and coffee production after having published a book on the subject in 2013. But…
The word for debt in German also means guilt. A friend who used to live in Munich mentioned this to me recently. I took note because I’m newly in debt, quite a lot of it, from buying a house. So far, my debt is surprisingly comfortable, and that’s one quality of debt that I’ve been…
*** CONTENT STARTS HERE *** START END LEDE W/TEXT UNDER FULL-WIDTH IMG The CEO Paying Everyone $70,000 Salaries Has Something to Hide Inside the viral story of Gravity CEO Dan Price. By Karen Weise | December 1, 2015 Photographs by Nathanael Turner From BODY COPY CENTERED It seemed too good to be true. On April 13,…