Stream of Reading (Prepare to be Forwarded) – An Archive of What I'm Reading
Hundreds of thousands of young people around the world have taken to the streets on Friday to protest government inaction on the climate crisis.CreditCreditSydelle Willow Smith for The New York Times Sept. 20, 2019Updated 2:36 p.m. ET They are in open revolt. Anxious about their future on a hotter planet, angry at world leaders for…
NEW YORK—On Monday evening, Elizabeth Warren stood in front of Washington Square Park’s floodlit arches for what was certainly her largest campaign rally to date: the campaign put the crowd at 20,000, though of course, campaigns tend to inflate. “We’re not here today because of famous arches or famous men,” the Massachusetts Senator said. “In fact,…
“Margaret Atwood’s new novel is being greeted as the long-awaited feminist dystopia, and I am afraid that for some time it will be viewed as a test of the imaginative power of feminist paranoia,” the writer and critic Barbara Ehrenreich wrote in 1986, soon after the publication of Margaret Atwood’s novel The Handmaid’s Tale. To…
Camilla Hodgson in San Francisco September 17, 2019 Print this page On a foggy September lunchtime in San Francisco, a group of researchers and data scientists sat around foldable plastic tables in what was once a Christian Science church, evangelising about open-source information and the democratisation of knowledge. The 50-strong party, which had been assembled…
It’s Thursday, so it’s time for another blackface scandal. We’ve covered a variety of Al Jolson sightings while on the blackface beat, but this is our first with an international dateline. We learned last night that Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau wore blackface to an “Arabian Nights”-themed party at the private school where he was…
How are you supposed to react when a robot calls you a “gook”? At first glance, ImageNet Roulette seems like just another viral selfie app – those irresistible 21st-century magic mirrors that offer a simulacrum of insight in exchange for a photograph of your face. Want to know what you will look like in 30…
Adam Neumann was flying high. Literally. His office-rental giant WeWork was months away from being valued at $47 billion. Revenue was doubling annually. And Mr. Neumann was zipping across the Atlantic Ocean in a Gulfstream G650 private jet with friends last summer, smoking marijuana. After the group landed in Israel and left the plane, the flight crew…
“The Trump Administration is revoking California’s Federal Waiver on emissions in order to produce far less expensive cars for the consumer, while at the same time making the cars substantially SAFER,” Trump tweeted. The President made the announcement while visiting California for fundraisers. He was in his hotel in Los Angeles when he sent…
Democrats are not fond of the Electoral College these days, for obvious reasons. Two Republicans, George W. Bush and Donald Trump, have won the presidency in the past 20 years, and both of them galumphed into the Oval Office after losing the popular vote. In this era of tight national races, the system has clearly given Republicans a…
In the run-up to the 2018 midterms, a major element of Democratic Party messaging was that the party would serve as a check on President Trump and the Republican Party. Incoming Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi “will place the emphasis on investigations by Democratic-led committees in the House to keep the Trump administration in…