Stream of Reading (Prepare to be Forwarded) – An Archive of What I'm Reading
‘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…
Earlier this month, when Attorney General Jeff Sessions announced plans to prosecute “100 percent” of migrants illegally crossing the Mexican border, it became official US policy to routinely separate children from their parents. Already, hundreds of children have been ripped from their families: 658 kids in the first 13 days of the program alone, Customs…
Photo: Mark Wilson (Getty Images) Does Betsy DeVos care more about furthering the xenophobic and racist policies of this administration than she does about educating the children of this country? The education secretary’s latest statement would lead us to believe that is indeed the case, since she basically told schools to call the police on…
Joshua Adam Schulte, the former CIA worker suspected of passing the agency’s hacking secrets to WikiLeaks, previously posted the source code for an internal CIA tool to his account on the public code-sharing site GitHub, The Daily Beast has learned. That potential red flag was apparently missed by the spy agency just months after Edward…
Horseshoe crabs are sometimes called “living fossils” because they have been around in some form for more than 450 million years. In this time, the Earth has gone through multiple major ice ages, a Great Dying, the formation and subsequent breaking up of Pangaea, and an asteroid impact that killed the dinosaurs and most of…
]Last month, suit-and-tie white supremacist Jared Taylor, founder of the race-realism rag American Renaissance, was scheduled to appear at the University of Alabama. For the talk—”Diversity: Is It Good for America?”—his sponsors, Students for America First, promoted it with a tweet including the hashtag “Defendthe1st.” As it so happened, no free-speech showdown took place. The…
I could only have seen it there, on the waxed hardwood floor of my elementary-school auditorium, because I was young then, barely 7 years old, and cable had not yet come to the city, and if it had, my father would not have believed in it. Yes, it had to have happened like this, like…
Donated water bottles in Flint in 2016. Photo: AP If residents in Flint, Michigan, need some bottled water, they can’t rely on the state anymore. The city of nearly 100,000 is still reeling—nearly four years later—from a crisis that left residents (and their children) exposed to dangerous levels of lead in their water supply. However,…
A pair of women ride a LimeBike scooter. Photo by the author The Bay Area serves as America’s sandbox. The tech world’s most far-fetched ideas are often sketched and tested here, and if they’re successful, they’ll spread throughout the country. The latest trend to materialize here is motorized scooters you can rent through an app….
President Donald Trump shakes hands with James Comey, then director of the FBI, in the Blue Room of the White House on Jan. 22, 2017, in Washington, D.C. Photo: Andrew Harrer-Pool (Getty Images) Apparently, Michael Cohen isn’t the only person Donald Trump tried to get to act as a fixer for him. In his upcoming…