Stream of Reading (Prepare to be Forwarded) – An Archive of What I'm Reading
Credit Rebekka Dunlap Among video game developers, it’s called “crunch”: a sudden spike in work hours, as many as 20 a day, that can last for days or weeks on end. During this time, they sleep at work, limit bathroom breaks and cut out anything that pulls their attention away from their screens, including family…
About 8 percent of U.S. adults earn money by doing contract work through so-called “gig economy” employers like Uber, Favor, or Amazon Mechanical Turk, according to the Pew Research Center; if the trend continues, one-third of Americans will support themselves this way by 2027. The gig economy is growing rapidly, but it’s also changing how…
In its zeal to deport unauthorized immigrants, the U.S. risks turning itself into a quasi-police state — all for little or no benefit to the native-born. First of all, net illegal immigration to the U.S. ended a decade ago: But there are still about 11 million to 12 million unauthorized immigrants remaining in the U.S….
Depending on who’s defining it, to whom, and why, SB Nation is either a popular website best-known for puckish, irreverent coverage and such whimsical projects as Jon Bois’s 17776, or a sprawling network of “team” or “fan” websites, each tightly focused on a particular topic, like the New York Mets or professional boxing. In either…
WEST BRANCH, Mich.—When she graduated from high school, Taylor Tibbetts was a bright star in this small Northern Michigan town. She won an $18,000-a-year swimming scholarship to Converse College in Spartanburg, S.C., and departed for her freshman year with high hopes. Once on campus, however, she felt overwhelmed by her courses and scared and isolated…
Los Angeles — Samuel Talavera Jr. did everything his bosses asked. Most days, the trucker would drive more than 16 hours straight hauling LG dishwashers and Kumho tires to warehouses around Los Angeles, on their way to retail stores nationwide. He rarely went home to his family. At night, he crawled into the back of…
(via My Pink Soapbox’s flickr) The country’s first freelancer protections against nonpayment go into effect in New York City today, so now’s a good time to brush up on a law intended to help a full third of the city’s workforce get paid on time. To recap, the law mandates that freelancers be…
Reporters and editors at the New York news organizations DNAinfo and Gothamist have agreed to unionize after combining their operations last month. An “overwhelming” majority of the 26 members of the newsroom staffs of the two websites signed cards agreeing to be represented by the Writers Guild of America East, according to organizers and staff…
There’s a saying that is sometimes attributed to Karl Marx or Slavoj Zizek—apocryphally, in both cases—that tidily sums up the existential angst some Americans feel at the start of a traditional work week: You don’t hate Mondays. You hate capitalism. The simple thesis here is that there’s nothing intrinsic to “Monday,” which is just a…
On weekends, Colleen teaches fitness classes. Mary builds websites. Luke sells vintage video games. Tony designs and 3D-prints custom Star Wars miniatures. I write for the internet. Among my friends, and 20- and 30-somethings as a whole, the side hustle–the gig you work in addition to your day job–is so ubiquitous that, in April, Glamour…