Stream of Reading (Prepare to be Forwarded) – An Archive of What I'm Reading
Photo: Moises Saman/Magnum Photos There’s a famous Ursula K. Le Guin short story called “The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas,” about a fantasy city called Omelas, a joyous metropolis without guilt or violence, populated by “mature, intelligent, passionate” people who celebrate beautiful festivals and shop at (duh) a “magnificent Farmer’s Market.” Le Guin is…
It’s 8 on a Wednesday morning in January, and David Carroll’s Brooklyn apartment, a sunny, wood-beamed beauty converted from an old sandpaper factory, is buzzing. His 10-year-old daughter, dressed in polka-dot pants, dips out the front door and off to school, Jansport backpack slung over her shoulders. His 5-year-old son darts into the living room…
A conversation with Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey can be incredibly disorienting. Not because he’s particularly clever or thought-provoking, but because he sounds like he should be. He takes long pauses before he speaks. He furrows his brow, setting you up for a considered response from the man many have called a genius. The words themselves sound…
Nervously, I gave a bounty hunter a phone number. He had offered to geolocate a phone for me, using a shady, overlooked service intended not for the cops, but for private individuals and businesses. Armed with just the number and a few hundred dollars, he said he could find the current location of most phones…
This week, protesters scaled the Arc de Triomphe, burned cars, and clashed with police in the third consecutive weekend of riots in France. More than 300 people were arrested in Paris last weekend alone, and 37,000 law enforcement officers have been deployed around the country to restore order. The “Gilets Jaunes” or “Yellow Jackets” protests…
Mitchell Grafton, Updating Vermeer. 2012 We are at the end of an era characterized by the self-portrait. This claim is not provocative—we’ve lived as characters for some time and have all felt it coming. So let me rephrase, we live at the end of an era characterized by relentless anxiety around the self as…
Yesterday outgoing Head of Communications and Policy Elliot Schrage shared more detail with our employees about the work we did with Definers, a Washington, DC PR firm. Many of you have raised questions about our relationship with the Definers consulting firm. We’ve been looking into this and though it is close to a holiday for…
A 16-year-old South Sudanese girl was sold off for marriage to the highest bidder on Facebook in November, raising concerns that the platform has become a “latter-day slave market.” A businessman from South Sudan outbid four others — which included a senior Sudanese government official — after the girl’s family posted a message on Facebook…
GIF: New York Times It’s the 2018 midterms, and today you have your chance to record just how you feel about that. The New York Times has set up a live map of results across the nation, where readers can click one of six emojis (angry, sad, afraid, neutral, happy, and laughing) to have their…
Image This is a crypto coin. Like a real coin, it is a representation of value. Unlike a real coin, you can’t hold it. To help you relate, we have anthropomorphized it. This coin’s every movement — and the movement of every coin like it — is recorded in a constantly updating, shared ledger. That…