Stream of Reading (Prepare to be Forwarded) – An Archive of What I'm Reading
It seems the phenomenon of Milo Yiannopoulos – the brief, bright arc of his invention – is over. I do not want him to fall without being understood so I will tell you the strange tale of our encounters last year. Monsters should be understood, and pitied, for our own sakes. It is midsummer and…
Lately I have been thinking about one of the first things that I ever wrote for the Internet: a series of interviews with adult virgins, published by the Hairpin. I knew my first subject personally, and, after I interviewed her, I put out an open call. To my surprise, messages came rolling in. Some of…
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…
Leading Democrats are proposing a labor law overhaul that could extend collective bargaining rights to huge swaths of the gig economy, the latest sign of gathering blowback for companies committed to maximizing profits by denying workers rights and benefits often associated with regular employment. On Wednesday, Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders, an independent who caucuses with…
Irony can be a difficult concept to grasp, but some hypothetical examples can illustrate it clearly. It would be ironic, for instance, if people who claimed their free speech was being trampled on were actually being heard more than anybody else. It would be ironic if television hosts and podcasters who believe in “engaging in…
There’s an episode in Season Four of the show Parks and Recreation called “The End of the World,” in which we meet a cult known as “The Reasonabilists.” Members of this cult believe that an alien god named “Zorp” will destroy the world. Every few years, the Reasonabilists predict that Zorp is about to come…
Every so often we must take a break from the real news, because something comes across Twitter that makes us scream at clouds about HOW THE FUCK did Chris Cillizza win the Failing Upward lottery to the point that he’s paid what must be multiple hundreds of thousands of dollars a year, when you combine…
]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…
HOOPERS ISLAND, Md. — There’s something new that has reached this desolate, weathered chain of Chesapeake Bay islands, and it’s starting to choke the watermen’s way of life. It’s fear. And that fear is endangering the centuries-old ecosystem around the crab business on these islands. Nearly half of the Eastern Shore’s crab houses have lost…
WASHINGTON — President Trump told President Emmanuel Macron of France on Tuesday morning that he plans to announce the withdrawal of the United States from the Iran nuclear deal, according to a person briefed on the conversation. Mr. Trump’s decision unravels the signature foreign policy achievement of his predecessor, Barack Obama, isolating the United States…