Stream of Reading (Prepare to be Forwarded) – An Archive of What I'm Reading
There had been so many arguments that week, it was just easier to hide in the spare room and close the door behind me. That way there’d be nothing to get angry or shout about, nothing to make me storm out of the house to get away from it all. I had started feeling terribly…
Lately I have been thinking about one of the first things that I ever wrote for the Internet: a series of interviews with adult virgins, published by the Hairpin. I knew my first subject personally, and, after I interviewed her, I put out an open call. To my surprise, messages came rolling in. Some of…
There’s an episode in Season Four of the show Parks and Recreation called “The End of the World,” in which we meet a cult known as “The Reasonabilists.” Members of this cult believe that an alien god named “Zorp” will destroy the world. Every few years, the Reasonabilists predict that Zorp is about to come…
I could only have seen it there, on the waxed hardwood floor of my elementary-school auditorium, because I was young then, barely 7 years old, and cable had not yet come to the city, and if it had, my father would not have believed in it. Yes, it had to have happened like this, like…
Every morning I wake up to the same routine. I log into the Tinder account of a 45-year-old man from Texas—a client. I flirt with every woman in his queue for 10 minutes, sending their photos and locations to a central database of potential “Opportunities.” For every phone number I get, I make $1.75. I’m…
Photo: iStock I recently went on the world’s longest first date. It was in Vegas, it lasted 48 hours and it was magnificent. He treated me like a queen and never said no to anything I asked. I’ll tell you about the date in a separate column, because it warrants its own space, but the…
We’ve known for some time now that Americans are increasingly dying younger, but the scale and nature of the problem has been a little bit murky. There was speculation that the downturn in American life expectancy was all thanks to “deaths of despair,” but some experts have said that might not be the full story,…
Since I started working on Discourse, I spend a lot of time thinking about how software can encourage and nudge people to be more empathetic online. That’s why it’s troubling to read articles like this one: My brother’s 32nd birthday is today. It’s an especially emotional day for his family because he’s not alive for…
When the news broke in October 2017 about Harvey Weinstein and his long history of sexual assault and harassment, I wanted to understand the full scope of the problem: How many people were involved in the incidents? Who was complicit in hiding his behavior? Did his actions have repercussions outside of Hollywood? Since I am…
To a certain extent, we expected it from the men who wear lobster-printed pants, the men from Connecticut, the Young Republicans of America with their gelled and parted hair, their summers in Nantucket, their LL Bean slippers worn on the porches of fraternities, 2pm on a Monday. But when my friend pulls me aside in…