Stream of Reading (Prepare to be Forwarded) – An Archive of What I'm Reading
When you have a bit of money, your whole calculus for approaching life’s daily decisions shifts compared to when you didn’t; it’s a change that comes with a mental adjustment, too, as you feel a bit more secure than before. But there’s a point at which this transformation spins off its axis into something grotesque…
When then-candidate Donald Trump debuted his “America First” foreign policy, he argued that the nation under President Obama had “absolutely no respect” and was being “laughed at all over the world.” For Trump, little is more important than appearing to project strength. In that April 2016 speech, he vowed again and again that he alone would…
I spent my entire 29th year in what I can only describe as a waking fever dream. This was 2010: the year before I began injecting testosterone, the year I picked my new name, my last year in San Francisco, the end of a life (mine) and an era (all of ours) — in more…
President Donald Trump confirmed on Saturday that the United States will withdraw from a landmark nuclear arms treaty with Russia. “We’re going to terminate the agreement and we’re going to pull out,” Trump told reporters as he boarded Air Force One in Nevada. He was referring to the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty, a historic 1986…
WASHINGTON — The Trump administration is considering narrowly defining gender as a biological, immutable condition determined by genitalia at birth, the most drastic move yet in a governmentwide effort to roll back recognition and protections of transgender people under federal civil rights law. A series of decisions by the Obama administration loosened the legal concept…
From left, President Abdel Fattah el-Sisi of Egypt, King Salman of Saudi Arabia, Melania Trump and President Trump during the opening of an anti-extremist center in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, in May 2017.CreditCreditSaudi Press Agency Handout/European Pressphoto Agency WASHINGTON — I was having dinner here once with a Saudi muck-a-muck. Midway through the interview, he passed…
In the spring of 1990, after he had helped the first George Bush reach the presidency, the political consultant Lee Atwater learned that he was dying. Atwater, who had just turned 39 and was the head of the Republican National Committee, had suffered a seizure while at a political fund-raising breakfast and had been diagnosed with…
Pieter Hanson was in the middle of a marketing exam when his phone started blowing up, buzzing and buzzing until he was convinced something terrible had happened. Too anxious to focus, he whizzed through the rest of his test, handed it in to his University of Central Florida professor and bolted into the hallway to…
It would make sense that the people most likely to believe the testimony of Dr Christine Blasey Ford would be the ones who look like her: middle-aged, white women. But polls and even a cursory glance at cable news show this not to be the case. Fox News host Martha MacCallum said that following Ford’s…
Image: AP The steady erosion of abortion rights in the United States has been nothing if not subtle; through the last decade, a certain kind of restraint has generally been rewarded in the anti-abortion movement. Sweeping bans—at 15 weeks, sometimes earlier—tend to fail for being unconstitutional on their face. But waiting periods, counseling requirements, insurance…