Stream of Reading (Prepare to be Forwarded) – An Archive of What I'm Reading
Then I gave up and wrote it my damn self. Illustration: Jeremy Sorese for Bloomberg Businessweek ByMay 17, 2018, 4:00 AM EDT What a time for artificial intelligence! Google announced a new AI-powered set of products and services at its I/O conference for developers, including one called Duplex that makes phone calls for you…
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…
I could only have seen it there, on the waxed hardwood floor of my elementary-school auditorium, because I was young then, barely 7 years old, and cable had not yet come to the city, and if it had, my father would not have believed in it. Yes, it had to have happened like this, like…
If I get addicted to vaping, I thought, in March, I will always remember this Texas strip mall. I was walking out of a store called Smoke-N-Chill Novelties, in Southwest Austin, holding a receipt for $62.95 and two crisp, white shrink-wrapped boxes. I got into the driver’s seat of a rental car and began to…
A plume of ash rises from Kilauea on Thursday. (USGS/Reuters) On Monday, a lava lake vanished from the top of Kilauea volcano on the island of Hawaii. The flow of liquid rock that normally fills Puu Oo crater, on the volcano’s eastern flank, had been abruptly turned off. Days later, a crack opened in the ground at a subdivision more than 10 miles…
Less than a week ago, Leilani Estates was the picture of serenity on Hawaii’s Big Island, a subdivision in the island’s eastern Puna district filled with wooden homes nestled in tropical plant-filled lots. The latest eruption of the island’s most active volcano changed everything. Shortly after Kilauea erupted Thursday, the ground split open on the east…
Osborn points to the thousands of wooden casks of aging Tabasco mash Photo: Michael Isaac Stein Row after row of blackened wood barrels are piled 30 feet high in a dim warehouse on Avery Island in southern Louisiana. Harold “Took” Osborn leads me through the endless stacks, in a setting reminiscent of the final scene…
The Great Pacific Garbage Patch is greater than we ever thought. And by greater, I mean worse. According to research published last month, it’s “increasing exponentially and at a faster rate than in surrounding waters.” The slurry of trash and seawater loosely held together by Pacific currents spans 617,762 square miles, roughly twice the size…
Donated water bottles in Flint in 2016. Photo: AP If residents in Flint, Michigan, need some bottled water, they can’t rely on the state anymore. The city of nearly 100,000 is still reeling—nearly four years later—from a crisis that left residents (and their children) exposed to dangerous levels of lead in their water supply. However,…
From 1915 through the 1990s, amid vast improvements in hygiene, nutrition, living conditions and health care, the number of babies of all races who died in the first year of life dropped by over 90 percent — a decrease unparalleled by reductions in other causes of death. But that national decline in infant mortality has…