Stream of Reading (Prepare to be Forwarded) – An Archive of What I'm Reading
I never took an AP course in high school. I’m pretty sure it was because I never qualified for it (I went straight B-minuses throughout my high school career), but it was also because I went to school back when taking AP courses wasn’t the dire necessity that it is for today’s students. According tothis…
A gerbil (Rodrique Ngowi/AP) After nearly eight centuries of accusing the black rat for spreading the bubonic plague, scientists say they have compelling evidence to exonerate the much-maligned rodent. In the process, they’ve identified a new culprit: gerbils. It’s always the cute ones you have to watch out for, isn’t it? According to a study published in the…
A collection of personal letters, photos and papers from civil rights icon Rosa Parks is being made public for the first time. (Published Tuesday, Feb 3, 2015) Rosa Parks, who refused to give up her seat on a segregated bus, reflected later on how it felt to be treated less than equal and once feistily…
The letter S appears nowhere in the word “dollar”, yet an S with a line through it ($) is unmistakably the dollar sign. But why an S? Why isn’t the dollar sign something like a Đ (like the former South Vietnamese đồng, or the totally-not-a-joke-currency Dogecoin)? There’s a good story behind it, but here’s a…
Okay, without looking, what do you picture when you see the phrase “broken on the wheel,” as in the old-timey medieval execution method? (WITHOUT LOOKING.) LIKE SELF, you probably had a general sense of some bejerkined fellow stretched out over a big wheel (possibly the kind of wheel that spins on a water-mill, possibly a…
On June 30th, 1974, Alberta Williams King was gunned down while she played the organ for the “Lord’s Prayer” at Ebenezer Baptist Church. As a Christian civil rights activist, she was assassinated…just like her son, Martin Luther King, Jr. But most people remember only one. Until a month ago, I was one of those people….
A few weeks ago, someone reported this to us at Medium: “I just started an article in Polish. I can type in every letter, except Ś. When I press the key for Ś, the letter just doesn’t appear. It only happens on Medium.” This was odd. We don’t really special-case any language in any way,…
Start Article Post Content Andre Singer’s “Night Will Fall,” debuting on HBO on Monday, tells the story of what happened to producer Sidney Bernstein and director Alfred Hitchcock’s hundreds of thousands of hours of footage of the liberation of the Nazi concentration camps.Vivid, chilling and horrific, the images were part of an Allied-commissioned project in…
Consider the humble video game cartridge. It’s a small, durable plastic box that imparts the most immediate, user-friendly software experience ever created. Just plug it in, and you’re playing a game in seconds. If you’ve ever used one, you have two men to thank: Wallace Kirschner and Lawrence Haskel, who invented the game cartridge 40…
One of the most unlikely harbingers of the computer age was a Christian mystic. After getting his ass kicked by Muslim scholars, he thought up a device that would let him win any argument, answer any question, and convert all people to the one true faith. A Man of Many Names and Many Talents The…