Stream of Reading (Prepare to be Forwarded) – An Archive of What I'm Reading
In our Pho Issue, we published this excerpt from Andrea Nguyen’s The Pho Cookbook, coming in 2017 from Ten Speed Press. Subscribe today for more great stuff like this. Pho is so elemental to Vietnamese culture that people talk about it in terms of romantic relationships. Rice is the dutiful wife you can rely on, we…
The credo of Thiel’s venture-capital firm: “We wanted flying cars, instead we got 140 characters.” Credit Photograph by Robert Maxwell Barrier Status: ‘none’ Peter Thiel pulled an iPhone out of his jeans pocket and held it up. “I don’t consider this to be a technological breakthrough,” he said. “Compare this with the Apollo space…
Just about everybody interested in the Middle Ages, who has played Dungeons and Dragons, or read historical and fantasy novels knows what a military flail is. It’s one of these: A one-handed military flail (modern reproduction) A military flail is a medieval weapon consisting of a short handle attached to a chain, at the end…
One of the joys of modern technology is how easy it is to immerse yourself in the past. Every day, more libraries and archives are pushing pieces of their collections online in easily browsable interfaces. The New York Public Library, for instance, has historic menus and interactive floor plans. Chronicling America is a searchable repository…
By Eliza Gray/Detmold More than 70 years later, the prosecution of a 94-year-old former SS guard renews questions about how to assign blame for the Holocaust On a cold, gray morning in February, Irene Weiss was waiting patiently in the courtroom in Detmold, a small city in northern Germany. She had come a long way…
gallery js end gallery js start of gallery code fullscreen A little bit more than four months from opening, a thin film of dust covers everything. Only a handful of exhibits have been installed. Still, it is already clear that the National Museum of African American History and Culture is stunning. A Smithsonian more than…
Marie Duplessis, French courtesan and Parisian celebrity, was a striking Victorian beauty. In her best-known portrait, by Édouard Viénot, her glossy black hair frames a beautiful, oval face with sparkling eyes and ivory skin. But Duplessis’ fame was short-lived. Like Violetta, the protagonist in Giuseppe Verdi’s opera La Traviata whose tale Duplessis inspired, Duplessis was…
Today in Tedium: In an era where paper is becoming less important than ever, it feels a bit bizarre at this point to go back in time just 35 years ago, when paper was perhaps having its greatest moment of all time. We were just a few years from the desktop publishing revolution, which expanded…
There’s trouble afoot inside the Emoji Council of Elders, or, at the very least, signs of a low-simmering schism that’s being referred to by some of its participants — perhaps with less humor than one might expect — as “Emojigeddon.” Emails seen by BuzzFeed News reveal an emerging tension at the Unicode Consortium — the…
Treasury Secretary Jack Lew is expected to announce this week that Alexander Hamilton’s face will remain on the front of the $10 bill and a woman will replace Andrew Jackson on the face of the $20 bill, a senior government source told CNN on Saturday. Lew announced last summer that he was considering redesigning the…