Stream of Reading (Prepare to be Forwarded) – An Archive of What I'm Reading
This weekend, a man wearing a skull mask posted a video on YouTube outlining his plans to murder me. I know his real name. I documented it and sent it to law enforcement, praying something is finally done. I have received these death threats and 43 others in the last five months. This experience is the basis of a Law & Order episode…
Marin County is the odd hippie commune in the college that is the United States. You know what I’m talking about — that rundown house on the edge of campus which you would walk by only to get to the Arts Center, because passing by meant watching unwashed students spitting kombucha into each other’s mouths….
For the past eight years, TechCrunch has hosted a bizarro tech world version of the Oscars called the Crunchies. The industry gets all dolled up, walks the “green carpet,” and watches Silicon Valley insiders present trophies for categories like “Best On-Demand Service” and “Best Overall Startup.” At the eighth annual Crunchies last Thursday, the best startup…
For his 50th birthday, Jim Tananbaum, chief executive officer of Foresite Capital, threw himself an extravagant party at Burning Man, the annual sybaritic arts festival and all-hours rave that attracts 60,000-plus to the Black Rock Desert in Nevada over the week before Labor Day. Tananbaum’s bash went so well, he decided to host an even…
The internet has made everybody audible. And, as a result, anybody can become a victim of a pitchfork-wielding mob, if you happen to say something online that the mob wants silenced. Nowhere has this reality been clearer than in the backlash against nascent feminism on Twitter. Simply sharing an anecdote or observation has become an…
Over the past two years, Shanley Kane achieved a kind of celebrity on Twitter, where, as @shanley, she claimed to be leading a crusade for women in tech. But now some people wonder if the whole thing was a massive hoax. What’s most interesting is that, whether she intended to or not, Kane pioneered a…
Game developer and frequent Gamergate target Brianna Wu says she fears for her safety due to a bizarre and threatening YouTube video posted by a Massachusetts man this weekend. The man has posted several videos accusing Wu of trying to assassinate him; the newest video shows him standing next to his wrecked car, which he…
I.“Hey Anna, do you like pizza?”I was just sitting down to dinner one evening this past November when I looked through some new Twitter notifications on my phone. My night, I realized regretfully, was about to get very, very stupid. The Twitter user was named “Davidkalac69,” the photo a white egg on a purple background….
So, to state the obvious: Jon Chait is a jerk who somehow manages to be both condescending and wounded in his piece on political correctness. He gets the basic nature of language policing wrong, and his solutions are wrong, and he’s a centrist Democrat scold who is just as eager to shut people out of…
Jonathan Chait has written an article for New York Magazine about his concerns that political correctness threatens free debate by trying to silence certain points of view. Political correctness, in Chait’s view, is a “system of left-wing ideological repression” that threatens the “bedrock liberal ideal” of a “free political marketplace where we can reason together…