Stream of Reading (Prepare to be Forwarded) – An Archive of What I'm Reading
For the last two years, the minute hand of the Doomsday Clock stayed set at three minutes before the hour, the closest it had been to midnight since the early 1980s. In its two most recent annual announcements on the Clock, the Science and Security Board warned: “The probability of global catastrophe is very high,…
Credit Damon Winter/The New York Times It is now two and one-half minutes to midnight. Our organization, the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, is marking the 70th anniversary of its Doomsday Clock on Thursday by moving it 30 seconds closer to midnight. In 2016, the global security landscape darkened as the international community failed to…
Rex Tillerson, President-elect Trump’s nominee for secretary of state, had a rocky first day facing members of the Senate during his confirmation hearing on Jan. 11 at the Capitol. (Peter Stevenson/The Washington Post) Secretary of State Rex Tillerson’s job running the State Department just got considerably more difficult. The entire senior level of management officials…
The US Department of Agriculture rescinded an order stopping scientists and other employees at its main research division from publishing documents meant to explain science to the public. In an email sent to scientists on Tuesday evening and obtained by BuzzFeed News, Chavonda Jacobs-Young, administrator of the department’s science arm, the Agricultural Research Service (ARS),…
close story-meta Should we journalists use the word “lie” to describe President Trump’s most manifest falsehoods? That debate has roiled the news world. The Times this week used the word “lie” in a front-page headline, and I agreed with that decision, but there’s a counterargument that lying requires an intention to deceive — and that…
According to a new index, America’s democracy score deteriorated in 2016 react-empty: 350 react-text: 413 AMERICA, which has long defined itself as a standard-bearer of democracy for the world, has become a “flawed democracy” according to the taxonomy used in the annual Democracy Index from the Economist Intelligence Unit, our sister company. Although its score…
President Trump plans to sign executive orders Wednesday enabling construction of his proposed wall on the U.S.-Mexico border and targeting cities where local leaders refuse to hand over illegal immigrants for deportation, according to White House officials familiar with the decisions. The actions, part of a multi-day focus on immigration, are among an array of…
President Trump (that still feels way weirder than writing 2017 on a check) apparently shocked congressional leaders yesterday by claiming, in an extended riff, that he only lost the popular vote because of between three and five million votes which were cast illegally. The reaction to this has been strong and bipartisan, with both Republican…
Sixteen states are already working on legislation to suppress voters this year. President Trump falsely claimed during a meeting with congressional leaders Monday that he would have won the popular vote if it were not for three to five million illegal votes. At least three sources familiar with the meeting told the Washington Postabout Trump’s lie, which…
What began as a Facebook plea from a grandmother in Hawaii eventually spawned an international movement. According to USA Today, an estimated 500,000 protesters descended upon D.C. to attend the march — this turnout was larger than the anticipated 231,000 that had RSVPed on the event’s Facebook page. The march may have had a bigger…