Stream of Reading (Prepare to be Forwarded) – An Archive of What I'm Reading
If you pulled over one hundred people on the street, and asked them to state a religious belief they hold, I’m not sure you would get any answer more plausible than “the pyramids were built for the storage of grain.” Would you now? Yet we mock Ben Carson for this, but we do not make…
Ben Carson suggested creating transgender bathrooms in an interview Thursday with Fusion’s Jorge Ramos. Questioned about Houston voters’ rejection of a law banning LGBT discrimination this week, Carson said: “How about we have a transgender bathroom?” “It is not fair for them to make everybody else uncomfortable,” Carson said of transgender people. “It’s one of…
The hip-hop radio ads coming out of Ben Carson’s presidential campaign this week, to much laughter and derision, represent what Republican outreach to African Americans often looks like these days. But there was a time when Republicans took diversifying their base much more seriously. In the early 1970s, even President Richard Nixon’s administration, with its…
EXCLUSIVE: Amy Pascal’s Pascal Pictures has won a bidding battle for Crash Override: How To Save The Internet From Itself, a memoir by game designer Zoe Quinn that sold to Touchstone/Simon & Schuster and will be published September, 2016. The property was bid on by several studios and TV outlets, and several actresses are circling, with…
I can’t even. I’ve been tracking misogynistic ridiculousness on this blog for five years, but I’m not sure I ‘ve ever run across anything quite as ridiculous as this. A prominent Open Source guru, Eric Raymond, is warning tech dudes to be extra super duper careful around their female colleagues, because any one of them…
By writing this, I don’t mean to imply that many people call me beautiful. They don’t. And I’m not saying this because I would like them to. As the title suggests, I would rather they not. Why? Because if we were all to be very honest with ourselves, we would admit that I’m not beautiful…
Pants or skirt, this room is available to whoever needs it. Photo by James Knopf/Thinkstock Houston voters repealed an anti-discrimination ordinance on Tuesday, Nov. 3, in part because, as the New York Times observed, “Opponents said the measure would allow men claiming to be women to enter women’s bathrooms and inflict harm, and that…
Are memorials to racists of yore a present-day crisis? That was the gist of Lincoln Caplan’s recent essay in The Atlantic. Caplan wrote about the white-supremacist lineage of Calhoun College, one of 12 residential colleges that make up Yale University’s undergraduate community. Named for the alumnus John C. Calhoun, the building is a legacy to…
Ta-Nehisi Coates is appearing this Thursday, October 29, at Town Hall Seattle, as part of Seattle Arts & Lectures. From the opening sentence of Ta-Nehisi Coates’s acclaimed memoir, Between the World and Me, we know his chief concern is the destruction of the black body. Citing a television news interview he was called to do, he…
The past month or so has seen the publication of two books from men who, a decade ago, created questionable blueprints of what dating should be like for an entitled generation of dudes. Unexpectedly (to their former selves, at least) the new stories from these teachers—who, not so long ago, were demonstrating how to sleep…