Stream of Reading (Prepare to be Forwarded) – An Archive of What I'm Reading
Photo Donald J. Trump on Saturday in Birmingham, Ala., where he said he had seen thousands cheering in New Jersey when the World Trade Center fell on Sept. 11, 2001. Credit Eric Schultz/Associated Press How alarmed were New Jersey officials by reports of Muslims dancing in the streets of Jersey City and Paterson on Sept….
A hundred years ago, if you were a pedestrian, crossing the street was simple: You walked across it. Today, if there’s traffic in the area and you want to follow the law, you need to find a crosswalk. And if there’s a traffic light, you need to wait for it to change to green. IN…
“The Man In The High Castle.” (David Berg/Amazon) We have a Nazi analogy problem. “Nazi,” in an argument, doesn’t buy quite as much as it used to. We have Godwin’s Law (as an online discussion goes on, the probability of a Nazi comparison approaches 1) and its corollaries (the first person to make a Hitler…
Anne Frank’s diary is one of the most powerful historical texts of the 20th Century. It documents the persecution of Jews in Nazi-occupied Europe in a way that is both incredibly detailed and (rare for such pieces) easy for children to relate to. So, if there’s one text that deserves to be freely available to all of…
Sometime in the past 20 years, people soured on email. Culturally, it went from delightful to burdensome, a shift that’s reflected in the very language of the inbox. In the 1990s, AOL would gleefully announce, “You’ve got mail!” Today, Gmail celebrates the opposite: “No new mail!” So what happened to email? What happened to us?…
Source: Most of the material from this comic came from this book It’s going to be okay. – The Oatmeal.
The hip-hop radio ads coming out of Ben Carson’s presidential campaign this week, to much laughter and derision, represent what Republican outreach to African Americans often looks like these days. But there was a time when Republicans took diversifying their base much more seriously. In the early 1970s, even President Richard Nixon’s administration, with its…
At some point, even Desert Storm got it’s own set of trading cards. (Image: UnknownNet Photography/Flickr) Maybe you remember collecting X-Men cards during your childhood, or maybe your parents had a collection of baseball cards that they were convinced would one day put you through college. Trading cards for athletes and superheroes seem to have been around forever. But the…
Pants or skirt, this room is available to whoever needs it. Photo by James Knopf/Thinkstock Houston voters repealed an anti-discrimination ordinance on Tuesday, Nov. 3, in part because, as the New York Times observed, “Opponents said the measure would allow men claiming to be women to enter women’s bathrooms and inflict harm, and that…
Are memorials to racists of yore a present-day crisis? That was the gist of Lincoln Caplan’s recent essay in The Atlantic. Caplan wrote about the white-supremacist lineage of Calhoun College, one of 12 residential colleges that make up Yale University’s undergraduate community. Named for the alumnus John C. Calhoun, the building is a legacy to…