Stream of Reading (Prepare to be Forwarded) – An Archive of What I'm Reading
The Cruel Kids’ Table Among the young, confident, and casually cruel Trumpers who, after conquering Washington, have their sights set on America. At the Power 30 Awards at Sax on January 19. Photo: Mark Peterson/Redux for New York Magazine It’s Monday, January 20, the first night of Donald Trump’s second presidency, and just a couple…
Neo-Nazis are celebrating Elon Musk making two Nazi-like salutes during a speech to tens of thousands of President Donald Trump supporters on Monday. “Elections come and go, some elections are important, some are not, but this one really mattered,” Musk said during his address inside the Capital One Arena in Washington DC, hours after Trump…
WASHINGTON – Tech billionaire Elon Musk, speaking at a Trump celebration rally at Washington’s Capital One Arena, appeared to conclude his remarks with a “Roman salute,” a fascist gesture most commonly associated with Nazi Germany, where it was performed alongside the phrase “Heil Hitler.” The gesture continues to be used among far-right groups worldwide, particularly…
Many of us yearn for a return to one golden age or another. But there’s a community of bloggers taking the idea to an extreme: they want to turn the dial way back to the days before the French Revolution. Neoreactionaries believe that while technology and capitalism have advanced humanity over the past couple centuries,…
Well, well, well. Three years ago, Peter Thiel called me a conspiracy theorist at a Baffler-hosted debate in New York between him and David Graeber. What prompted the characteristically winking and dismissive Thielian deflection was a question from a New York Times reporter, concerning a story on this very blog by yours truly. The story…
In his first public appearance after five years of semiofficial banishment, Curtis Yarvin began to cry. It was late February 2020 and Yarvin was the special guest at a live podcast in Los Angeles. A graphic promoting the event shows the computer engineer turned political philosopher, then 46 years old, wearing his black leather motorcycle…
It was Halloween in Orlando, and we had piled into a car to make a short trip from the Hilton to an after-party down the road, to wind up the first night of the latest edition of a gathering called the National Conservatism Conference. For at least many of the young people, the actual business…
One day in March of this year, a Google engineer named Justine Tunney created a strange and ultimately doomed petition at the White House website. The petition proposed a three-point national referendum, as follows: 1. Retire all government employees with full pensions. 2. Transfer administrative authority to the tech industry. 3. Appoint [Google executive chairman]…