Stream of Reading (Prepare to be Forwarded) – An Archive of What I'm Reading
First of all, I’m speaking of webpage referral. Second, let me quote Wikipedia: The misspelling referer originated in the original proposal by computer “scientist” Phillip Hallam-Baker to incorporate the field into the HTTP specification.[1] The misspelling was set in stone by the time of its incorporation into the standards document Request for Comments (RFC) 1945;…
In a letter dated May 31, 1960, Flannery O’Connor, the author best known for her classic story, “A Good Man is Hard to Find” (listen to her read the story here) penned a letter to her friend, the playwright Maryat Lee. It begins rather abruptly, likely because it’s responding to something Maryat said in a…
Perhaps you missed it because you have a life, but celebrated American journalist Gay Talese found himself in the outrage buzzsaw last week when the 84-year-old author failed to quickly state that he was influenced by scads of amazing lady-writers. Oh my, the tears that were shed! The garments torn! How dare the author of “Frank…
Photo Gay Talese, whose comments on female writers at a conference in Boston put him in an unfamiliar forum — on Twitter. Credit Robin Marchant/Getty Images On Friday, April 1, the 84-year-old writer Gay Talese made his way from New York to Boston, where he was scheduled to speak at Boston University’s “Power of Narrative”…
NYT executive editor Dean Baquet responds to “Gay Talese Goes Through the Twitter Wringer“: “We published a story yesterday about controversial remarks made by the writer Gay Talese concerning female journalists at a conference at Boston University. The story also recounted an exchange between Talese and Nikole Hannah-Jones, a keynote speaker at the conference and…
Until very recently, the 27-year-old New Yorker who goes by the online alias Ricca was not a Star Wars fan. She’d seen the prequels at some point long ago; she didn’t sit down and watch the original trilogy until last year, when, she said, “it was no longer appropriate not to have seen them as…
I moderate Facebook comments all day. While the rest of the Internet shuts off comments on publications, Facebook comments aren’t going anywhere—they count as engagement to help rank posts in the newsfeed, and there is no way for an admin to turn them off. As the host of a large media non-profit’s page, it is…
I’ve been fantasizing about writing fiction a lot lately. I lie in the bathtub and think about what utterly batshit things I could hide in a novel, things I’d never have to answer for. I’m sure that “So, how much of this character is autobiographical?” would get annoying fast, but anything would be preferable to…
It was after my sophomore year of college that my mother gave me a copy of The Tender Bar, journalist J.R. Moehringer’s sprawling memoir of growing up among the drunks, kooks, and crazies of his neighborhood bar in Manhasset, New York. Moehringer, a Pulitzer-winning reporter who started out as a meek kid in a destitute…
Note from Robin: This saga appeared in my secure dropbox late last month, along with a plea to post it on Facebook today in exactly the format you see here. I gather I’m not the only one to have received those instructions. I can’t vouch for the authenticity of the story, but I thought it…