Stream of Reading (Prepare to be Forwarded) – An Archive of What I'm Reading
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…
Begin: Right Rail Advertisement Container End: Right Rail Advertisement Container Begin: WordPress Article Content In California, a state built on the idealism and tacit cruelty of real estate capitalism, no one is innocent. That’s no different with Airbnb and Proposition F, merely the latest of San Francisco’s Brobdingnagian sagas over land-use politics that will go down in today’s election….
Short-term rentals are not a significant factor in SF’s housing shortage. So why are people going crazy about this one company? Disclaimer: If you want to contact the author of this piece and accuse me of something, you can tweet at me. I also wrote a convenient FAQ for people who wanna call me “astroturf.” *** Last year,…
With this first post, I am launching an experimental new online digest called Today in #BlackTwitter. The morning report will briefly recap the most talked about news stories, hashtags and issues among the loose network of users collectively known as “Black Twitter”. TIBT aims to encapsulate the discourse on the social media platform that occurred…
2015 Everett C Parker Lecture: October 20, 2015 This talk was written for the 2015 Everett C Parker Lecture, in honor of his amazing work. Being able to give this lecture is an honor, but it is also deeply humbling in light of his amazing work. Citation: boyd, danah. 2015. “What World Are We Building?”…
New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio took aim at Uber this summer, trying (and failing) to set a cap on the number of its for-hire cars operating in the city. The ride-share service has drawn criticism on a number of issues — including its labor practices — but the mayor said his main concern…
Do androids dream of a three-day week? This week, Professor Stephen Hawking weighed in on the topic that’s obsessing technologists, economists and social scientists around the world: whether a dawning age of robotics is going to spell mass unemployment. “If machines produce everything we need,” Hawking wrote in an “Ask Me Anything” session on Reddit,…
Exactly one year ago*, Facebook’s Chief Product Officer Chris Cox publicly apologized for the company’s discriminatory “real names” policy. I should know: not only was I personally mentioned in Cox’s note, but I was one of the drag queens — along with a broader coalition of artists and activists representing queer and transgender people, survivors of domestic…
With the rise of coding bootcamps, it’s become a popular notion that being able to code is simply a matter of will, not dollars. “Learn how to code and become a developer, it’s easy! Take an eight-week course!” But this couldn’t be further from the truth: Becoming a developer is difficult and often out of…
Discussions of income inequality typically focus on how information technology raises the return to skilled labor, or on the rise of global trade, or perhaps on the way that politics skews power toward the rich and well-connected. But there’s another fundamental driver of income inequality: the improved measurement of worker performance. As we get better…