Stream of Reading (Prepare to be Forwarded) – An Archive of What I'm Reading
Note to readers: Two letters published in the L.A. Times Travel section in print on Sunday, Dec. 11, and here online did not meet editorial standards. Our Readers’ Representative will address this issue shortly. Japanese internment I see that writer Carolina A. Miranda has attached herself to the “I feel-good” contingent that feels sorry for the…
The tail of a 99-million-year-old dinosaur, including bones, soft tissue, and even feathers, has been found preserved in amber, according to a report published today in the journal Current Biology. While individual dinosaur-era feathers have been found in amber, and evidence for feathered dinosaurs is captured in fossil impressions, this is the first time that…
It was January 1975, and the Watergate Babies had arrived in Washington looking for blood. The Watergate Babies—as the recently elected Democratic congressmen were known—were young, idealistic liberals who had been swept into office on a promise to clean up government, end the war in Vietnam, and rid the nation’s capital of the kind of…
Napoleon Hill is the most famous conman you’ve probably never heard of. Born into poverty in rural Virginia at the end of the 19th century, Hill went on to write one of the most successful self-help books of the 20th century: Think and Grow Rich. In fact, he helped invent the genre. But it’s the…
Home › History › The traveling corpses of the medieval prince-bishops of Würzburg The traveling corpses of the medieval prince-bishops of Würzburg By strangeremains on December 4, 2016 • Body Syrian bishop’s during his funeral. The corpse is seated in church, between 1940 and 1946. Image credit: Eric and Edith Matson Photograph Collection via Wikipedia. While doing…
With the election of Donald Trump, the latent threat of American authoritarianism—identified decades ago by German intellectuals—is on the verge of being realized. Credit PHOTOGRAPH BY DAMON WINTER / THE NEW YORK TIMES / REDUX Barrier Status: ‘none’ Shortly after the Presidential election, a small piece of good news came over the wire: the Thomas Mann…
Google Microdata Mobile only ad Article “Cover” Progress Isn’t Natural Humans invented it—and not that long ago. Google Metadata A 1770 engraving of a steam engine crushing a wall Bettman / Getty How and why did the modern world and its unprecedented prosperity begin? Many bookshelves are full of learned tomes by historians, economists, political…
Children in the Manzanar internment camp in California. (AP/National Park Service) There is dangerous talk these days by those who have the ear of some at the highest levels of government. Earlier this week, Carl Higbie, an outspoken Trump surrogate and co-chair of Great America PAC, gave an interview with Megyn Kelly of Fox News….
There are few things hotter in tech right now than artificial intelligence. You’ll hear people with titles like “chief experience officer” and “thinkfluence concierge” talk about “neural networks” and “machine learning” and “natural language processing.” Alexa, Siri, Cortana … the Google Assistant? The idea is, you can talk to your computer as if it were…
In rural North Dakota, a small county and an insular religious sect are caught in a stand-off over a decaying piece of America’s atomic history. The long shadow cast by nuclear weapons and the Cold War is not as far in the past as we might like to think… Should you find yourself with time…