Stream of Reading (Prepare to be Forwarded) – An Archive of What I'm Reading
Around the late 2000s a movement began, rooted in a renaissance of black pride and fostered by chat rooms, film, YouTube, and eventually social media. This movement encouraged women of color to transition from processed to natural hair. It was about embracing the texture and curl of what organically grew out of one’s scalp. It…
When shown an animation generated by artificial intelligence, famed animator Hayao Miyazaki was not impressed. “I strongly feel that this is an insult to life itself,” said the man behind movies like Spirited Away and My Neighbor Totoro, who was shown an AI-generated animation of a human-like being “walking on his head” using creepy movements…
This week, Amazon announced that it’s launching a new type of grocery store. You walk in, pick up the boxes of food you want, and you walk out. Thanks to a combination of modern tracking technology, artificial intelligence, and a mobile app that has your payment information, you don’t need to interact with a single…
Google Microdata Mobile only ad Article “Cover” To many white Trump voters, the problem wasn’t her economic stance, but the larger vision—a multi-ethnic social democracy—that it was a part of. Google Metadata Mitch Dumke / Reuters Perhaps the clearest takeaway from the November election for many liberals is that Hillary Clinton lost because she ignored…
It’s early November in Portland, Oregon, and Dan Savage—probably America’s best-known sex-advice columnist—is standing on the stage of a former high-school auditorium, engaging the audience in a bit of call-and-response. “Turn your smartphone…” he calls out. “OFF!” roars the crowd. “We will take it…” “AWAY!” “You will never get it…” “BACK!” It’s the finale of…
It was January 1975, and the Watergate Babies had arrived in Washington looking for blood. The Watergate Babies—as the recently elected Democratic congressmen were known—were young, idealistic liberals who had been swept into office on a promise to clean up government, end the war in Vietnam, and rid the nation’s capital of the kind of…
.entry-header .entry-meta I was in graduate school when I first heard the term “millennial.” It was at a conference. The session was about how to serve millennial students, because they have different characteristics than the Generation X students that went before them. It was here that I first started hearing things like “millennials need to…
When I was in my 20s, I remember my therapist patiently listening to me complain about how out-of-my-depth I often felt around other gay men. I was asking her why they always seemed so effortlessly aloof and cool, whereas I was – and to some extent, still am – a slobbering golden retriever of a…
Why are so many robots designed to resemble women? The question is becoming inescapable as more and more AIs, which do not need to have a gender, appear on the market with female voices and female faces, including Microsoft’s Cortana, Amazon’s Alexa and a new wave of uncannily lifelike sexbots marketed almost exclusively to men….
A wall of white and black hats. Terrifying darkness. A woman staggering through a medical facility with her guts ripped open. And always, in the background: the player piano ticking along according to its programming, playing modern-day ballads to the denizens of a future world. Welcome to Westworld, a slick new HBO production that promises…