Stream of Reading (Prepare to be Forwarded) – An Archive of What I'm Reading
Senator Joseph R. Biden Jr. in 1981. His changing record on abortion is getting fresh scrutiny as he considers running for president in a Democratic primary where women are expected to make up a majority of voters.CreditCreditGeorge Tames/The New York Times It was a new era in Washington in 1981, and abortion rights activists were…
But once you realize McConnell has already achieved his life’s dream, and ascended to the limits of his ambition, his behavior suddenly starts to make more sense. He’s not trying to cap off his career with a legislative masterstroke, because he doesn’t care about legislation. He already won. He’s the Senate majority leader, his parliamentary…
Image“We left Egypt, and now we’re leaving the Democratic Party,” Elizabeth Pipko said.CreditCreditAlfredo Chiarappa for The New York Times WASHINGTON — At 23, Elizabeth Pipko has branded herself on social media as a onetime figure skater, a part-time poet and a former Trump campaign aide, an Instagramista whose feed spotlights her Mar-a-Lago wedding and racy…
Photo: Hamilton Nolan BURLINGTON, IOWA—There’s a very nice visitor’s center on the river here. Right by downtown. They’ll tell you everything about Burlington, including the fact that it’s about to flood. That visitor’s center was totally empty on Thursday, even though the national press corps was just two blocks away. We had much more stupid…
Illustration: Angelica Alzona (GMG) SOMEWHERE IN IOWA—Here is what happened, right before everything began to go to hell: It was June of 2015. The president was Barack Obama. I was a reporter for Gawker.com, a thriving independent media outlet. The 2016 presidential election was a year away, and the campaign season had just begun in…
This feature story is a reprint from Unwinnable Monthly #111. If you like what you see, grab the magazine for nine dollars, or subscribe and get all future magazines for half price. ——— In 2008, the Home Secretary of the United Kingdom, Theresa May, instituted an anti-immigration regime known as the ‘hostile environment.’ In the shadow of…
The coward who gunned down 49 Muslim worshippers in New Zealand left behind a white-nationalist screed rationalizing his mass murder as a necessary act to preserve the white race. The manifesto is striking for its trolling—its combination of fanaticism, insincerity, and attempts at irony. The killer was particularly obsessed with the idea of “white genocide,” a…
When Alex, now a high-school senior, saw an Instagram account he followed post about something called QAnon back in 2017, he’d never heard of the viral conspiracy theory before. But the post piqued his interest, and he wanted to know more. So he did what your average teenager would do: He followed several accounts related to it…
In 1963, when Carole Whitehead was an unwed, eighteen-year-old mother in New York, she placed her baby up for adoption. This had always been the plan, but she asked for the record to be open so that one day, if her son was interested, he would be able to contact her. “Don’t tell me I…
When we last left Roger Stone, he was trying to convince federal judge Amy Berman Jackson to put him in jail in advance of his trial, or at least he seemed to be trying to do that. Berman Jackson gag ordered Stone in February after he accidentally oopsie allowed one of his interns to post…