Stream of Reading (Prepare to be Forwarded) – An Archive of What I'm Reading
According to a concerning trend piece on the current ‘dating apocalypse’ of twentysomethings, hookup culture has hit a critical mass of excess and indulgence, and the kids are not alright—they are, in fact, all fucked out with nobody to love. RIP going steady. The piece comes courtesy of Vanity Fair via journo Nancy Jo Sales,…
Very, very mild spoilers for Inside Out follow. An important part of the climax of Pixar’s wonderful new film Inside Out involves the realization that all of our emotions are important, that feeling sad can be just as crucial as feeling happy, no matter what others might tell you. But the movie also reveals that…
Many people have experienced harassment or bullying online. However, the victims of such harassment are disproportionately women. Women receive up to 10 times more negative comments than men in online chatrooms and three times the negativity when playing online games. Some have argued this is because women are entering male-dominated spaces that are full of…
/.byline-inner How would you describe a woman who has decided that she never wants children? Selfish? Just going through a phase? Bound to feel alone as she grows older? Our culture has a lot of labels for childless females. One word you don’t often hear in reference to a woman and her personal choice not to procreate? Empowered. But, that’s…
Bonding over nothing is still bonding. This is something that people need to remember when they turn their noses up at the popularity of the Reddit Button. In the three weeks since it has appeared, it has been described as an evil April Fool’s joke, a social experiment, and a total waste of time. The…
In 1998, Carnegie Mellon researchers warned that the internet could make us into hermits. They released a study monitoring the social behavior of 169 people making their first forays online. The web-surfers started talking less with family and friends, and grew more isolated and depressed. “We were surprised to find that what is a social…
Bravo for companies that are starting to focus on innovation again! It’s about time. But even with this renewed attention to innovation, some managers keep projects resource-starved, in the belief that scarcity drives creative invention. Although ingenuity can sometimes spring up when means are scarce, managers beware: It is a dangerous miscalculation to think that…
Jonathan Touboul is a mathematician and a neuroscientist. He holds a PhD in math from France’s prestigious École Polytechnique, where he won a prize for his thesis on how to simulate neurons in the brain. He publishes papers with titles like “Pulsatile localized dynamics in delayed neural-field equations in arbitrary dimension” and “The propagation of…
5 Brainwashing Tricks That Work No Matter How Smart You Are Everyone is talking about Scientology again, and why not? It’s a billion-dollar cult apparently based on convincing actors they have superpowers. But there’s no reason to single them out — look around and you’ll see the world is full of people who’ve either gotten…
HUNTING FOR THE END OF THE LONG TAIL • TUESDAY, FEBRUARY 24, 2015 Today in Tedium: 1995 was the year that Billy Corgan got in our faces and shouted, “Despite all my rage, I am still just a rat in a cage!” And since then, we’ve only gotten angrier as a society. All of our…