Stream of Reading (Prepare to be Forwarded) – An Archive of What I'm Reading
We’ve known for some time now that Americans are increasingly dying younger, but the scale and nature of the problem has been a little bit murky. There was speculation that the downturn in American life expectancy was all thanks to “deaths of despair,” but some experts have said that might not be the full story,…
YouTube has a porn problem on some of its popular videos, and it seems to be coming from the same mysterious source. Twitter users and YouTubers have been complaining about an ad that has shown up before videos on popular YouTube pages, including Pewdiepie, Markiplier, and Dude Perfect. The ad shows a woman gyrating (not…
“Hang on, I just have to put my soles on,” I call after the kids, who are racing out the door for a trip to the market. The soles in question are two dove-gray, rubber flaps that snap to the bottoms of my slippers, which I have just imported from London. A slipper-transformer that will…
Gary Rinehart clearly remembers the summer day in 2002 when the stranger walked in and issued his threat. Rinehart was behind the counter of the Square Deal, his “old-time country store,” as he calls it, on the fading town square of Eagleville, Missouri, a tiny farm community 100 miles north of Kansas City. The Square…
Police are searching for the thief, or thieves, who stole a meteorite from the Science Museum of Virginia last week. In most circumstances, a science museum heist to steal celestial space dust would sound like a plot for the forthcoming Avengers: Infinity War or even Ocean’s Eight. This is not one of those circumstances: Museum…
Shaheen Shivji was happier in Kabul. There were bombs going off outside the compound where she worked for a development agency, but she preferred life in the Afghan capital to the one she had at home in Abbotsford, B.C., for one simple reason: She wasn’t lonely. “For the first time in my adult life, I…
Hide captionStephen Hawking smiles during a 2002 symposium in honor of his 60th birthday at the University of Cambridge. Hawking has died at 76. END CLASS=”IMAGECAPTION” END CLASS=”HSLIDE” Previous Next END CLASS=”AUX” END CLASS=”HSLIDEWRAP” Sion Touhig/Getty Images END CLASS=”PHOTOCREDIT” Hide captionHawking, shown in Chicago in 1986, was the Lucasian Professor of Mathematics, a post once…
In December, New York Times editorial page editor James Bennet met with a group of Times employees to answer questions about his much-questioned opinion section. At the time, A.G. Sulzberger, now publisher of the Times, was conducting a tour of the newsroom he was about to inherit, meeting with employees from different corners of the newspaper. The Q&A session…
You might not think of yourself as a dancer. In fact, maybe even the idea of dancing makes your palms sweat. But growing scientific evidence suggests that getting up and grooving with others has a lot of benefits. In our recent study, we found that synchronizing with others while dancing raised pain tolerance. It also…
In Netflix’s Altered Carbon, humanity can transfer consciousness from one body to another by way of an implant called a “Stack” inserted into their spinal cord. Inspired by Richard K. Morgan’s novel of the same name, the show takes place in a cyberpunk future where bodies are merely vessels for digitized human consciousness. It’s…