Stream of Reading (Prepare to be Forwarded) – An Archive of What I'm Reading
In the early days of the social web, putting someone’s name in multiple parentheses was meant to give that person a cute virtual hug. Today, it’s something far more sinister. Neo-Nazis, anti-Semites and white nationalists have begun using three sets of parentheses encasing a Jewish surname — for instance, (((Fleishman))) — to identify and…
Women have been tracking their menstrual cycles since at least the time of Saint Augustine, and yet when Apple introduced its much ballyhooed smartwatch and Health app in 2014, there was one glaring omission: a period tracker. The fact that it took Apple three months longer than it takes a woman to gestate a human…
Peer-to-peer, short-term housing platform Airbnb is probably my favorite consumer web company. A traveling member since 2011, my wife SACM and I have been hosting travelers too for most of the last year. I’m a proud and happy user. Yet I know that some of the loudest news about Airbnb in its last couple years of mainstream…
Governor Andrew Cuomo and Cardinal Timothy Dolan. Photo: AP From 2007 to the end of 2015, the New York Daily News reports, the New York Catholic Conference, led by Cardinal Timothy Dolan, paid top Albany lobbyists more than $2.1 million to help block legislation, including the Child Victims Act, that would make it easier for…
(Spoilers, and potential spoilers, below.) At this rate, every Game of Thrones character will be dead by Episode 8. In the first half of this season, we’ve lost over a dozen reasonably important characters, as the showrunners prune George R.R. Martin’s overstuffed plots and cut a swelling budget. For the last two weeks, I’ve said…
In “The Wearing and Shedding of Enchanted Shoes,” Isabel Cardigos, Director of the Research Centre at the Centro de Estudos Ataíde Oliveira in Portugal, wrote, “Shoes are paradoxical objects in that they constrict feet and yet free them to cover greater distances in space.” Indeed, fictional shoes enable “positive” transformation in women’s lives, but the…
What if Annie Wilkes had the internet? Annie, of course, is the antagonist of Stephen King’s Misery, a pre-web story about the dark side of the relationship between fan and creator. When Annie finds novelist Paul Sheldon – the author of her favorite romance series, about a woman named Misery Chastain – in a car…
Ludovic BertronExactly how many Americans identify as a different gender than the one they were labeled as at birth? In fact, no one knows. Both government and private-sector researchers have been trying to improve their methods of measuring the number of gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgender people—not to mention the increasing cadre of mostly young people…
ATLANTA — The Senior Class Day Convocation at Spelman, the elite, all-women’s historically black college, had been underway for all of 10 minutes Friday afternoon before there was an interruption in the program. Senior class president Neah Evering had just given her heartfelt welcome to a chapel overflowing with graduates and their loved ones, kicking…
“Thots & Thoughts” is a column in which musings on dating, sex, race, religion, and politics all come together—from a bird’s-eye view. In terms of artistic license, Drake has every right to continue making music about emotional immaturity. He has every right to a whiny outlook on his failed relationships (fictional and otherwise). Likewise, his…