Stream of Reading (Prepare to be Forwarded) – An Archive of What I'm Reading
Photo: Heisenberg Media/Flickr Billionaire douchebag Peter Thiel has plenty of crazy ideas, but his commitment to radical life extension isn’t one of them. Without question, Thiel clings to some rather obnoxious ideas. An ardent libertopian and admirer of the pseudo-intellectual Ayn Rand, the tech mogul believes that freedom and democracy are incompatible, and he questions…
Image: Pixabay The US Drug Enforcement Agency has announced that marijuana will remain a Schedule 1 drug, saying it has “no medical use or purpose.” The decision keeps weed on the same naughty list alongside drugs like LSD and heroin. The Obama Administration has turned down a request by two Democratic governors to change the…
There remains a pervasive notion that happiness can only truly come from finding a spouse, lest one rot of loneliness in some dusty attic. But a new study out of the University of California at Santa Barbara provides a very different view of singledom, one that this single woman finds enormously encouraging. In work presented…
Image: AP What do bong-ripping Olympian Michael Phelps, artisanal snake oil saleswoman Gwyneth Paltrow, and chicken aficionado Jessica Simpson have in common? If you somehow guessed “they’ve all tried the scientifically dubious practice of cupping,” congratulations! You get a gold medal! Last night, as the aforementioned Phelps won his 19th gold medal, Olympics viewers may…
Peter Thiel at the Republican National Convention in Cleveland. Photo: Getty Images Peter Thiel, the tech billionaire-turned-Trump delegate who successfully bankrupted Gawker Media, has long been obsessed with anti-aging technologies. He believes people have been conned by “the ideology of the inevitability of the death of every individual,” and has funded startups dedicated to extending…
Image via AP. Jill Stein, the Green Party’s presidential candidate and also an actual medical doctor, doesn’t appear to be anti-vaccination. But she’s sort of anti-vaxxer adjacent, giving a series of mealy statements to the Washington Post and in a Reddit AMA about whether vaccines are safe. Jill: you don’t have to do this! It’s…
Had there been a male contraceptive pill in 1976, I probably wouldn’t be here to write this. That was the year when, after my mum–may she rest in peace–had been on the pill for 12 years, health worries made her doctor tell her to come off it. “She said to the doctor, ‘I’ll get pregnant’,”…
One evening in the late summer of 2015, Lisa Schwartz was watching television at her Vermont home when an ad for a sleeping pill called Belsomra appeared on the screen. Schwartz, a longtime professor at Dartmouth Medical College, usually muted commercials, but she watched this one closely: a 90-second spot featuring a young woman and…
As an unmarried woman approaching 30, I’m increasingly aware of the looming biological deadline that might make it difficult to have both a career and a family. Or at least what I thought was the biological deadline. In fact, as this video shows, the belief that you’re taking a lot of risk with your fertility…
Pour scorn elsewhere. / Joanna Slodownik Late capitalism is like your love life: it looks a lot less bleak through an Instagram filter. The slow collapse of the social contract is the backdrop for a modern mania for clean eating, healthy living, personal productivity, and “radical self-love”—the insistence that, in spite of all evidence to the…