Stream of Reading (Prepare to be Forwarded) – An Archive of What I'm Reading
White House chief of staff John Kelly and White House press secretary Sarah Sanders listen during a Roosevelt Room event Oct. 31, 2017, at the White House in Washington, D.C. Photo: Alex Wong (Getty Images) I thought white people were evil. I was wrong. Whenever anyone mentions the historical atrocity of chattel slavery, white people…
Graphic: Jim Cooke (The Atlantic) If you must know one thing about journalist Jesse Singal, it’s that he loves reporting on trans issues—trans kids, in particular. If you must know another thing, it’s that a lot of trans people, myself included, loathe his coverage of trans issues with a once-fiery passion that has since cooled…
The fires on the streets of Ferguson, Missouri, had barely stopped burning when the Department of Justice released an extraordinary report on the city’s police department. In the findings of the 2015 investigation of the Ferguson Police Department, the DOJ’s Civil Rights Division detailed how a municipality had built its social contract on a slow-rolling…
It was immediately clear that change was afoot in Dallas. I’ve attended the annual gatherings of the Southern Baptist Convention dozens of times, but walking around the convention center this week, I was struck by how unfamiliar it all felt. When I was a child, the convention hall was a sea of silver combovers and…
On a recent Thursday at a bar in Crown Heights, Brooklyn, Jacq the Stripper was warming up a small crowd of ten or fifteen people who had come to attend a fund-raiser for the Black Sex Workers Collective. Jacq, who wore a T-shirt that said “TIP HER” on it, is not a black sex worker….
The sci-fi writer William Gibson once said, “The future has arrived — it’s just not evenly distributed yet.” In America in 2018, the same could be said of authoritarianism. Since Donald Trump was elected, there’s been a boom in best-selling books about the fragility of liberal democracy, including Madeleine Albright’s “Fascism: A Warning,” and Timothy…
Left: Migrant children at a Kansas City detention center in 2014. Photo by AP/Eric Gay, File. Right: Donald Trump. Photo by Chip Somodevilla/Getty When the Trump administration announced this month it would criminally prosecute everyone who crossed the border illegally, which meant jailing immigrant parents and separating them from their children, it effectively manufactured a whole new…
(Smith Collection/Gado/Getty Images) It’s officially the beginning of Pride month; however, the celebrations at YouTube appear to be lukewarm at best. The video streaming platform, which has long been a haven for independent LGBTQ+ creatives, has recently been accused by users and channels of running advertisements by anti-LGBTQ+ brands alongside creator content. Screenshots and…
‘Sometimes our systems get it wrong’, says spokesperson for video streaming giant YouTube has been accused of preventing videos that contain LGBT+ related words from making money, by popular users of the video-sharing platform. At the same time they have also claimed that the video streaming were running adverts for gay conversion therapy and companies that were…
In hindsight, our son was gearing up to wear a dress to school for quite some time. For months, he wore dresses—or his purple-and-green mermaid costume—on weekends and after school. Then he began wearing them to sleep in lieu of pajamas, changing out of them after breakfast. Finally, one morning, I brought him his clean…