Stream of Reading (Prepare to be Forwarded) – An Archive of What I'm Reading
Open Source By ROBERT MACKEY Usually, by the time the public learns the names and biographies of Islamic State militants, or radicals from other groups who attack civilians, they are already dead, and so unable to speak for themselves, except occasionally in the ritualized form of martyrdom videos or manifestoes posted online. This week, however,…
There’s a predictable social media formula for what women’s pictures online should look like. Breasts in barely-there bikinis are good (thumbs-up emoji, even), but breasts with babies attached them are questionable. Women wearing next to nothing is commonplace, but if you’re over a size 10 your account may be banned. Close-up shots of women’s asses…
Sean Rad, the 29-year-old co-founder and CEO of Tinder, wants me to believe he’s a “romantic”, who is “ready to settle down” and have “lots of children”. In fact, the last woman he shared a bedroom with was his mother, Fariba, when he took her to Rome recently — although he nearly fled after seeing all her…
(Co-written by Monique Judge, originally published on Medium.) It all started with a ruined Wednesday morning. A tweet of mine had found its way into a Washington Post op-ed calling for the dismissal of University of Missouri professors accused of assaulting students at a rally celebrating the resignation of the school president. Normally, this wouldn’t…
I’ve been watching with first amusement and then frustration as tweeter after tweeter claim the media aren’t covering things going on in the world that they really, really are covering. At the time of writing, this tweet has had nearly 50,000 retweets… But it’s just blatantly untrue. Search Google News and you will find pages and…
As much as I’ve always wanted to be the subject of someone’s missed connection, I doubt I’m suited to it. Aboard public transport, my go-to facial expression is a stern, furrowed brow. “Solving the crisis in the Middle East, no doubt,” my fellow passengers probably sympathize, contemplating the task of fixing the world’s thorniest geopolitical dilemma…
Australian Essena O’Neill caused a stir when she quit her Instagram modeling career and lambasted the vainglorious “industry.” Even compared to the horror stories about abuse and exploitation in traditional modeling, this sounds exhausting and thankless. And yet it’s typical for New Media and for industries that have been “disrupted” by tech. I found Essena…
he rope swing looked inviting. Photos of it on Airbnb brought my family to the cottage in Texas. Hanging from a tree as casually as baggy jeans, the swing was the essence of leisure, of Southern hospitality, of escape. When my father decided to give it a try on Thanksgiving morning, the trunk it was tied…
While Facebook makes headlines for cooking up new initiatives with publishers, the actual traffic it’s sending those publishers has fallen sharply. Referral traffic (desktop + mobile) to the top 30 Facebook publishers (as defined by their reliance on Facebook) plunged 32 percent from January to October, according to SimpleReach, a distribution analytics company. The more…
Photo Credit Andy Rash As someone with the keen observational skills of Mr. Magoo, it took me a long time to notice a problem social-media acquaintances had been talking about for months. “I woke up to four new people today asking me for money on four different donation platforms,” one friend said. “One was my…