Stream of Reading (Prepare to be Forwarded) – An Archive of What I'm Reading
In June, rightwing academic Kevin Slack published a book-length polemic claiming that ideas that had emerged from what he called the radical left were now so dominant that the US republic its founders envisioned was effectively at an end. Slack, a politics professor at the conservative Hillsdale College in Michigan, made conspiratorial and extreme arguments…
In late June 2019, right after the U.S. Supreme Court released its final opinion of the term, Justice Clarence Thomas boarded a large private jet headed to Indonesia. He and his wife were going on vacation: nine days of island-hopping in a volcanic archipelago on a superyacht staffed by a coterie of attendants and a…
A lot of the—and I can’t believe I need to use this term, but there really is no other way to phrase it—critics of privacy have this tendency to see privacy only through the lens of ‘threat’. As the threat has built and they can’t reconcile their self-image with popular and consistent interest in privacy…
WILMINGTON, Del. (AP) — Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen said Sunday that the federal government would not bail out Silicon Valley Bank, but is working to help depositors who are concerned about their money. The Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation insures deposits up to $250,000, but many of the companies and wealthy people who used the bank…
Because The U.S. Is Too Corrupt To Pass Privacy Legislation, Data Brokers Increasingly Traffic In Sensitive Mental Health Data from the have-you-ever-noticed-that-making-money-is-the-only-thing-we-actually-care-about dept We’ve noted for a long while that the performative hysteria surrounding TikTok is basically a giant distraction from our failures on consumer protection and privacy legislation. Case in point: the growing number…
Credit…Desiree Rios for The New York Times If you want a sense of what separates much of the leadership of the Democratic Party from many of its supporters — of what illustrates their profound disconnect from younger cohorts of liberal and progressive voters — you could do much worse than to read this recent statement…
It’s hard to live in the modern world without feeling like you should start committing some felonies. Shutterstock Dan Brooks Thought Experiments Sometimes, in idle moments, I get a vision of my teenage son’s son — my imaginary unborn grandson — manually pollinating soybeans for 12 hours a day in exchange for a ration of…
The Post-Dirtbag Left For years, “Chapo Trap House” and other podcasts have paired anti-capitalist ideas with the rhetorical style of social media. Is a new form emerging? July 26, 2021 Two shows harness a progressive energy, but they differ sharply in affect.Illustration by Miguel Porlan On the evening of January 6th, while National Guard troops were…
How the ad exchanges are sending your money to a very bad man Welcome back to BRANDED, the newsletter exploring how marketers broke society (and how we can fix it). Here’s what’s new with us: Seb Gorka is a neo-Nazi. This is not an opinion or a personal interpretation. It’s a well-documented fact. He has…
The chilling spectacle of watching the political class redeem a criminal, again. Photo: Gary Hershorn/REUTERS Photo: Gary Hershorn/REUTERS Photo: Gary Hershorn/REUTERS I am not an art critic, but I don’t think George W. Bush’s new portraits are very good. They inspire nothing but malaise and communicate a dilettante energy. Painting is to Bush what politics…