Stream of Reading (Prepare to be Forwarded) – An Archive of What I'm Reading
From the very first game in the series through to today, India’s supposedly-peaceful leader Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi has been famous for one thing: dropping nukes. And there’s a very good reason for it. It’s not your mind playing tricks on you, or a case of myth becoming accepted fact, he really does drop nukes more than…
This summer, comics universes are colliding, converging and in some cases ending — but one comics fan is spending his summer reminiscing on one that’s been gone for years, and turning it into a project. For the past year, Joseph Hedges has been working slowly and dilligently trying to track down the players involved with…
The celebrated poet Maya Angelou crafted a number of lines that have resonated with her readers — but the one on this stamp, it turns out, isn’t one of them. AP hide caption itoggle caption AP The celebrated poet Maya Angelou crafted a number of lines that have resonated with her readers — but the…
150 years after Robert E. Lee surrendered at Appomattox, Americans are still fighting over the great issues at the heart of the conflict. Wikimedia Commons On this 150th anniversary of the surrender at Appomattox, Americans mark the end of the Civil War. The questions at the heart of the war, though, still occupy the nation,…
hullaballoons: HELP I ACCIDENTALLY STARTED A PRESIDENTIAL CONSPIRACY I MADE THIS WEBSITE LIKE 6 YEARS AGO ITS FAKE EVERYTHING ON IT IS FAKE I MADE IT ALL UP AND NOW??????? I DID THIS????? THIS VERIFIED FB WOMAN WANTED TO BELIEVE JAMES BUCHANAN THE 15TH PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES REALLY RAISED PYGMY GOATS IN THE…
The Great American News Anchor is no different from the Great and Powerful Oz.<br /><br /> How is it possible that the inane institution of the anchorman has endured for more than 60 years? Some two months into Brian Williams’s six-month banishment from NBC for making stuff up, it’s not known whether he will ever…
On shirts, they’re on the left for the ladies and on the right for the gents. That’s because of horses, babies, and Napoleon. Mars and Venus, in shirts (J. Crew/The Atlantic) “Are you wearing lady clothes?” Darryl Philbin asked Michael Scott. INSERT IN_ARTICLE AD No, the regional manager of the fictional Dunder Mifflin insisted: His…
In nautical (and aeronautical) contexts, a vessel may declare a number of “souls onboard”. I’ve googled around for origin of that phrase, but haven’t found a definitive explanation. Most discussions of the phrase I’ve seen on aeronautical forums and obviously concern the usage in aviation, with the discussion often revolving around on rescuers tallying the…
The earliest reference I can find to ‘souls’ as a count of persons is mid-eighteenth century, although it probably was in use earlier. It appears in maritime commerce, as the number of living humans aboard a ship, and in civics, as the population of a town or city. I think that in the early 1700s…
The task of historians in our time is to unbury the buried. For journalists, it is to see that the truth of events is never interred—or at least that enough of it is available for later historians to dig up the whole. The age is impoverished in both respects. Christian Appy, an accomplished historian of…