Stream of Reading (Prepare to be Forwarded) – An Archive of What I'm Reading
One day in March of this year, a Google engineer named Justine Tunney created a strange and ultimately doomed petition at the White House website. The petition proposed a three-point national referendum, as follows: 1. Retire all government employees with full pensions. 2. Transfer administrative authority to the tech industry. 3. Appoint [Google executive chairman]…
Greta Thunberg, the 16-year-old Swedish climate change activist, has become the new target for rightwing men, who are losing their shit over a teenager. On Fox News on Monday night, Michael Knowles, a conservative troll and Daily Wire podcast host, described Thunberg as a “mentally ill Swedish child” who is “being exploited by her parents…
Why do right-wing men hate Greta Thunberg and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez so much? Researchers have some troubling answers to that question. Climate skeptic Bjørn Lomborg has built his global brand on keeping his cool. “Cool it,” his best-selling book told those worried about the warming planet. For some reason, however, he seems to have difficulty sticking…
“Margaret Atwood’s new novel is being greeted as the long-awaited feminist dystopia, and I am afraid that for some time it will be viewed as a test of the imaginative power of feminist paranoia,” the writer and critic Barbara Ehrenreich wrote in 1986, soon after the publication of Margaret Atwood’s novel The Handmaid’s Tale. To…
It’s Thursday, so it’s time for another blackface scandal. We’ve covered a variety of Al Jolson sightings while on the blackface beat, but this is our first with an international dateline. We learned last night that Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau wore blackface to an “Arabian Nights”-themed party at the private school where he was…
How are you supposed to react when a robot calls you a “gook”? At first glance, ImageNet Roulette seems like just another viral selfie app – those irresistible 21st-century magic mirrors that offer a simulacrum of insight in exchange for a photograph of your face. Want to know what you will look like in 30…
Donald Trump thinks he can flip New Mexico, a state he lost by eight percentage points, in 2020. That task will require him to win over a significant portion of the 49.1 percent of New Mexicans who identify as Latinx, a demographic he’s having some trouble with, for some reason. So, at a rally in…
In a memo he sent before leaving the company, a former Google employee criticized the internet giant and its employees, noting that he regularly encountered racism during his experience as a Black worker at the company. The memo, obtained by Motherboard, is titled “The Weight of Silence,” and argues that Google is lacking in diversity,…
LOU DOBBS (HOST): I know that it must just gladden your heart to see a bunch of demonstrators at an Immigration Customs Enforcement facility blocking the path of a guard and then complaining about the fact that he sought to do what is within his rights, which is to proceed to park his vehicle and go to work. TOM HOMAN (GUEST): Well exactly….
A growing movement of American Jews is mobilizing against U.S. immigration policy across the country. Drawing parallels between past Jewish suffering and the experiences of Latinx immigrants today, protesters chant ‘close the camps’ and ‘never again is now.’ Hundreds of American Jews protest against ICE raids at an Amazon store in New York City, August…