Stream of Reading (Prepare to be Forwarded) – An Archive of What I'm Reading
As we increasingly outsource our memories to devices, we may be forgetting the pleasures of imperfect recall. What if Marcel Proust had kept an Instagram account? What if he’d used a smartphone to snap a photo of every evocative morsel he’d ever eaten? Would he still have written “In Search of Lost Time,” his multivolume…
When the Japanese computer scientist Yukihiro Matsumoto decided to create Ruby, a programming language that has helped build Twitter, Hulu, and much of the modern Web, he was chasing an idea from a 1966 science fiction novel called Babel-17 by Samuel R. Delany. At the book’s heart is an invented language of the same name…
wpautop disabled Wired Logo iPhone Killer: The Secret History of the Apple Watch In early 2013, Kevin Lynch accepted a job offer from Apple. Funny thing about the offer: It didn’t say what he would be doing. So intense is Apple’s secrecy that all Lynch knew was his vague title, vice president of technology, and…
Previously in this series: Two Monks invent dinner parties. MONK #1: do birds have meetings MONK #2: absolutely they have a Meeting Hat and everything MONK #1: what do they have meetings about MONK #2: mostly who gets to wear the meeting hat MONK #1: do human women sleep in beds or– MONK #2: no…
Our Kids: The American Dream in Crisis. By Robert Putnam. Simon & Schuster; 386 pages; $28 and £18.99. THE most important divide in America today is class, not race, and the place where it matters most is in the home. Conservatives have been banging on about family breakdown for decades. Now one of the nation’s…
Earlier this week, Lena Dunham contributed a humor piece to the “Shouts and Murmurs” column of the New Yorker, called “Dog or Jewish Boyfriend? A Quiz” which lists scenarios and rhetorically asks readers to guess which applies to her dog and which applies to her boyfriend (examples: “He doesn’t tip. And he never brings his…
On shirts, they’re on the left for the ladies and on the right for the gents. That’s because of horses, babies, and Napoleon. Mars and Venus, in shirts (J. Crew/The Atlantic) “Are you wearing lady clothes?” Darryl Philbin asked Michael Scott. INSERT IN_ARTICLE AD No, the regional manager of the fictional Dunder Mifflin insisted: His…
Gillian Anderson has spoken publicly before about her unwillingness to settle, and it seems that determination has paid off: in a recent interview with The Telegraph, the once and future X-Files star explained “I’m so lucky to have such great work. I’ve got a fantastic life, I have a wonderful relationship with my kids, and…
Photo A mural by Max Spivak at the base of the 5 Bryant Park office tower in Manhattan includes shapes that appear abstract at first, but closer inspection reveals them to be textile makers’ tools, like a T-square, above the entrance. Credit Michael Appleton for The New York Times The shadows of West 40th Street…
KABUL — In life, Farkhunda would have been an unlikely role model for empowering Afghanistan’s women. Every day, she wore the head-to-toe black garment favored by conservative Muslim women. She studied at an Islamic religious school. She believed, her father said, that women should be educated in order to raise their children in a good…