Stream of Reading (Prepare to be Forwarded) – An Archive of What I'm Reading
In a memo he sent before leaving the company, a former Google employee criticized the internet giant and its employees, noting that he regularly encountered racism during his experience as a Black worker at the company. The memo, obtained by Motherboard, is titled “The Weight of Silence,” and argues that Google is lacking in diversity,…
When I got home from my tomato expedition, I read a tweet from the comedian Sarah Lazarus that made me feel like someone had put a camera inside my apartment. “Every day we have to wake up, confront the most upsetting shit we’ve ever seen, and then walk around obeying laws and saying ‘it’s tomato…
The California painter and critic Manny Farber extolled “termite art” as occurring “where the spotlight of culture is nowhere in evidence, so that the craftsman can be ornery, wasteful, stubbornly self-involved, doing go-for-broke art and not caring what comes of it.” That need for art to be ugly, to go where it is not wanted,…
Illustration: Jim Cooke (G/O Media) For former Jezebel staffer Ellie Shechet, it is nearly always time to freak out. Doom—personal, professional, planetary—awaits, beckoning at the wings. No one has exactly asked for her advice, but we gave her a column anyway. Advice for the End of the World is a limited edition advice column for…
Editor’s Note: This piece was originally published on July 19, 2018. On Wednesday, two representatives of the United States government held press briefings, both of them touching on one of the most astonishing news stories of the Trump presidency—a series of events that had begun two days earlier, when Donald Trump traveled to Helsinki to…
Hey, Can here. Today, we talk about Twitter’s endless trepidations. There are certain things reasonable people can disagree on. Should you douse your fries in ketchup or mayo? Which is better, Star Trek or Star Wars? Does god exist, and if so could we tell? There was a time, back when I had more a…
A harrowing scenario analysis of how human civilization might collapse in coming decades due to climate change has been endorsed by a former Australian defense chief and senior royal navy commander. The analysis, published by the Breakthrough National Centre for Climate Restoration, a think-tank in Melbourne, Australia, describes climate change as “a near- to mid-term…
AirPods are a product of the past. They’re plastic, made of some combination of carbon, hydrogen, oxygen, nitrogen, chlorine, and sulfur. They’re tungsten, tin, tantalum, lithium, and cobalt. The particles that make up these elements were created 13.8 billion years ago, during the Big Bang. Humans extract these elements from the earth, heat them, refine…
A few weeks ago, I went on one of my favorite podcasts — The Ezra Klein Show — to talk about burnout, workism, and our relationship to labor. In our conversation, I invoke the idea of “LARPing” your job, a phrase my partner uses to describe the way we try and show evidence that LOOK, OVER HERE,…
Transformational change cannot occur suddenly — and sudden changes rarely turn out to be transformational. It’s clear that common practices at many of our largest tech platforms must change, but hoping for a shouting-at-the-barricades revolution is unrealistic and possibly unhelpful. While we — representing doctors, health tech professionals, and elements of the policymaking community — recognize and share public dissatisfaction with…