Stream of Reading (Prepare to be Forwarded) – An Archive of What I'm Reading
The worst of Silicon Valley is the same, just flipped over and dipped into darkness. Listen, can you hear it? It is the sound of some other company as it hockey-sticks across graphs. It is a rags-to-riches story of a group of hardworking dreamers. It is one elite list after another, ranking everything from creativity…
New Google Chief Financial Officer Ruth Porat, who joined the company from Morgan Stanley in May, had a good first earnings call today. The company beat its projected revenues during its most recent quarter. More importantly, Porat was able to point to increased revenue in an area that has been a bugbear for Google in…
The red flags and marching songs of Syriza during the Greek crisis, plus the expectation that the banks would be nationalised, revived briefly a 20th-century dream: the forced destruction of the market from above. For much of the 20th century this was how the left conceived the first stage of an economy beyond capitalism. The…
Michael Wolff, USA TODAY 2:04 p.m. EDT July 13, 2015 The news media, like most businesses built on craft and culture, have largely worked as an apprentice system. Younger people learned skills and language from older people. A good media job would have been judged on the basis of the caliber of the more senior…
National Archives (United Kingdom) The official poverty line, as I wrote yesterday, is a dated and crude statistical concept that in many ways fails to capture America’s historical success at fighting economic need. It was based on the cost of food in 1963, mostly because the Department of Agriculture had some idea of what a basic grocery budget should…
Social Sharing Toolkit v2.2 Jess Zimmerman’s previous work for The Toast can be found here. I am not a big fan of psychic charlatanry, which often preys on people who are in genuine grief. So when I read about psychic fraud Priscilla Kelly Delmaro, arrested in May for second-degree grand larceny, I should have felt…
A lot of Pixar films come packaged with a quasi-humanist narrative hook that enables the public digestion of their work. Viewers nodded thoughtfully over WALL-E’s depiction of a future earth choked by the refuse of big-box retail, and of a human race infantilized and rendered obese by mindless consumption, while Brave was the first Pixar…
Statement by AFL-CIO President Richard Trumka in response to Wisconsin Governor Scott Walkerâs upcoming announcement to run for President of the United States: Scott Walker is a national disgrace. Contact: Josh Goldstein (202) 637-5018 AFL-CIO Statement on Scott Walker Announcement.
Charity worker Maria Karra talks to an elderly man who lives on the streets of Athens. Maria Karra can’t believe her eyes. The founder of an Athens charity for the homeless says the hardship she sees daily on the city’s streets reminds her of crises in much poorer countries. “I used to do this in…
It’s 5 a.m. on a Wednesday in San Francisco’s Outer Richmond district, and Kyra Joseph is wide awake, making breakfast for her roommates — a feast, they call it. Chris Ledet, another resident of the little yellow house on a hill, likes to be awakened with a cup of coffee brought to him in bed,…