Stream of Reading (Prepare to be Forwarded) – An Archive of What I'm Reading
1. The Aristocracy Is Dead … For about a week every year in my childhood, I was a member of one of America’s fading aristocracies. Sometimes around Christmas, more often on the Fourth of July, my family would take up residence at one of my grandparents’ country clubs in Chicago, Palm Beach, or Asheville, North…
The fires on the streets of Ferguson, Missouri, had barely stopped burning when the Department of Justice released an extraordinary report on the city’s police department. In the findings of the 2015 investigation of the Ferguson Police Department, the DOJ’s Civil Rights Division detailed how a municipality had built its social contract on a slow-rolling…
It’s late on a Friday afternoon in March, and I’m sitting across from Stephen Miller in his spacious, sunlit West Wing office, trying to figure out whether he’s trolling me. To hear more feature stories, see our full list or get the Audm iPhone app. This is no easy task. A provocateur as skilled as…
A new study has identified the hotspots of philosophical and religious vaccine exemptions: the paperwork that (in some states) you can fill out in lieu of getting your kindergartener vaccinated. Most are in rural areas, but 15 mid-size cities have a dangerous combination of a large population and a high rate of these exemptions. These…
Fake news sucks, and as those eerily accurate videos of a lip-synced Barack Obama demonstrated last year, it’s soon going to get a hell of a lot worse. As a newly revealed video-manipulation system shows, super-realistic fake videos are improving faster than some of us thought possible. The SIGGRAPH 2018 computer graphics and design conference…
French Licorne nuclear test, July 3, 1970. Image: Pierre J/Flickr There are currently about 15,000 nuclear warheads on Earth—enough to blow our planet to kingdom come. It’s complete overkill, literally. But how many nukes is enough to deter an enemy? And how many nukes could an aggressor nation drop on an enemy before the effects…
“In order to keep funding one into the future, it’s very likely the other needs to be cut or significantly reduced,” says Laura Forczyk, a space analyst and the founder of Astralytical, a consulting firm. “Whoever put the 2025 date into the Trump administration’s ear is a fan of SLS/Orion.” Forczyk worked for several years…
“James Fields did nothing wrong,” the post on Facebook read, referring to the man who drove a car through a crowd protesting against white supremacy in Charlottesville in August 2017, killing one. The post accompanied an article from Squawker.org, a conservative website. In training materials given to its army of moderators, Facebook says the post…
Backing away from attempts at censorship, the National Park Service on Friday released a report charting the risks to national parks from sea level rise and storms. Drafts of the report obtained earlier this year by Reveal from The Center for Investigative Reporting showed park service officials had deleted every mention of humans causing climate…
Image: via AP. The Trump administration is expected to announce the implementation of a domestic gag rule on Friday, the New York Times reports. The domestic gag rule, which has been a top priority for anti-abortion conservatives in the administration, would prevent reproductive healthcare providers like Planned Parenthood from accessing Title X funds if they…