Stream of Reading (Prepare to be Forwarded) – An Archive of What I'm Reading
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…
Their romance began on a server at a San Francisco startup. Anna Wood had submitted a profile to the League, a dating app aimed at young professionals. She was the perfect prospect: Degree from a top university? Check. Management-track job at a marquee company? Check. Carefully selected profile pictures and a winning smile? Check and check….
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…
A pair of women ride a LimeBike scooter. Photo by the author The Bay Area serves as America’s sandbox. The tech world’s most far-fetched ideas are often sketched and tested here, and if they’re successful, they’ll spread throughout the country. The latest trend to materialize here is motorized scooters you can rent through an app….
North Carolina is the one state where the law explicitly says you cannot revoke consent once it’s given. A bill that would remove this “unacceptable loophole” has little traction. Photo by Simone Becchetti via Stocksy One May evening in 1977, Beverly Hester was sexually assaulted. According to the summary included in the North Carolina Supreme…
Oh hai, Batman. Last month, Variety reported that Hangover director Todd Phillips was in talks with Joaquin Phoenix to star in the stand-alone Joker origin film—a compelling choice to play the Batman villain who could probably give the character a depth we haven’t seen since Heath Ledger. But following Variety‘s announcement, another actor unexpectedly threw…
One officer involved in the city’s massive corruption scandal said officers kept the replicas “in case we accidentally hit somebody or got into a shootout, so we could plant them.” Last week, the beginning of an explosive corruption trial involving eight members of Baltimore’s elite Gun Trace Task Force revealed that a handful of Baltimore…
The world is disturbingly comfortable with the fact that women sometimes leave a sexual encounter in tears. When Babe.net published a pseudonymous woman’s account of a difficult encounter with Aziz Ansari that made her cry, the internet exploded with “takes” arguing that the #MeToo movement had finally gone too far. “Grace,” the 23-year-old woman, was…
I tweeted what was intended as satire of a festering right-wing panic over Antifa allegedly planning violence on November 4. It got weird from there. What is it like to attend your own funeral? In my mind, it has to be something like waking up on a Monday morning, logging onto Twitter, and finding out…
As Besty DeVos prepares to meet with sexual assault advocacy groups — an approach criticized for its planned meetings with those accused of rape — a top official at the Department of Education suggested “90 percent” of sexual assault allegations on college campuses, “fall into the category of ‘we were both drunk,’” in an interview. Candice E. Jackson,…