Stream of Reading (Prepare to be Forwarded) – An Archive of What I'm Reading
Undead girls begin re-entering the world of the living, emerging from refrigerators. The staring. A leaf alone in the horrible leaves. The dead girl. The staring. —Joshua Beckman, “[The dead girl by the beautiful Bartlett]” At 2:25 a.m. on a quiet Friday night on a deserted country road in southeastern Pennsylvania, the first dead…
“At last he turned to her and said, ‘Am I so very ugly?’” Wood engraving by Walter Crane, 1896. Via the New York Public Library’s digital collections. Beauty and the Beast is officially a box office hit, and so the Disney live-action remake machine will continue to clank merrily along, churning out entertaining movies billed…
Oakhurst Dairy trucks lining up in Portland, Me., in 2006. Credit Pat Wellenbach/Associated Press A class-action lawsuit about overtime pay for truck drivers hinged entirely on a debate that has bitterly divided friends, families and foes: The dreaded — or totally necessary — Oxford comma, perhaps the most polarizing of punctuation marks. What ensued in…
.entry-header General Leia Organa. Official portrait, Hall of Darasuum Kote, Coruscant. Leia Organa, the politician and revolutionary who led the defeat of the Galactic Empire, died after a short illness. She was 60 years old. Hers was a life laced with controversy concerning everything from her tactics to her very ancestry, but her intelligence, commitment…
Throughout the ‘Fake News’ uproar of the post-election cycle I kept thinking back to this line that I wrote in The Boy Kings about the launch of News Feed in 2006. The story concerns a moment when a Facebook coworker tested a News Feed story by putting the two of us ‘in a relationship’ on…
Art by Megan Lara Cynicism is tempting. It hovers constantly at the edge of every hopeful moment, whispering “it will never happen.” It looks intelligent. It looks wry and elegant and worldly. And it has never managed to ensnare Luna Lovegood. Luna has spent years being told to give up. She has spent years being…
With a Trump presidency and the full scope of his campaign promises looming, here’s a look at a future where some of them have come to pass. Welcome to a future where undocumented migrants are rounded up and penalized, private prisons overflow into labor camps, and iPhones are made in America. Cheers. -The editor I…
Rebecca Onion wrote an interesting essay about immersing herself in survivalist “prepper” fiction. (The gateway drug was apocalyptic fiction, so, uh, I might be at risk.) Here’s an illustrative sample: In more than one of these books, the prepper encounters people who expect him to share the resources he’s planned ahead to store. […] In…
This is what 14 trips on the Staten Island Ferry looks like. As someone who grew up on Staten Island, I’ve taken the ferry many times. In college, I masqueraded as an adult and took the morning rush-hour boats to an internship on the Upper West Side. I took mid-day weekend boats to sightsee with…
In the next fifty years the entirety of our inherited archive of cultural works will have to be re-edited within a network of digital storage, access, and dissemination (Jerome McGann, 2001) You have to put the corn where the hogs can get at it (Bill Clinton) Only the paranoid survive (Andrew Grove) Introduction At the…