Stream of Reading (Prepare to be Forwarded) – An Archive of What I'm Reading
The Unsuck D.C. Metro blog and social media account began a decade ago as one of the few ways that residents could learn about delays and other issues on the WMATA rail system. “You’d find problems on the rail faster on his account than by following Metro’s official account,” says Martin Di Caro, a former…
For my column this week, I looked at a rather odd and disturbing trend — the financialisation of the mobile home sector in the US. Big private equity and investment funds are going long on trailer parks, it turns out, buying them up and (say activists) raising rents and threatening housing security for the most…
Here’s an argument you hear a lot: the gigantic cash burn rates at the likes of Tesla and Uber are nothing new, because today’s established tech greats also churned through tons of cash in their early years. In fact, we keep hearing from champions of these glamor stocks on business TV shows and pundits’ blogs…
In this spring’s Christian niche-sensation movie “Unplanned,” which was released at the end of March, the actress Ashley Bratcher plays Abby Johnson, the former Planned Parenthood clinic director from Texas who became an anti-abortion activist. (The movie is based on Johnson’s memoir of the same name.) “Unplanned” had a budget of six million dollars and…
I could smell blood before I even went into the room Thank you for reading. If you’d like to receive every issue of Hell World including pieces like this one from the other day about a bartender in Texas who was arrested for serving alcohol to a man that then went on a shooting massacre…
Angry Birds is so 2009, you might say. “I haven’t played Angry Birds since 2012, at the latest,” you might insist. It doesn’t matter. Angry Birds is still part of your life. As the first wildly successful mobile game, it’s an avatar for the way our understanding of what’s private and what’s personal has…
AirPods are a product of the past. They’re plastic, made of some combination of carbon, hydrogen, oxygen, nitrogen, chlorine, and sulfur. They’re tungsten, tin, tantalum, lithium, and cobalt. The particles that make up these elements were created 13.8 billion years ago, during the Big Bang. Humans extract these elements from the earth, heat them, refine…
xA specter is haunting the straight white liberal sixtysomething American dad—the specter of his damn socialist kids. A generation that grew up eating Cold War propaganda with their cornflakes confronts one in which socialism regularly outpolls capitalism, and it’s happening across the breakfast table. New Yorker writer Adam Gopnik’s new book, A Thousand Small Sanities:…
One jaw-dropping moment during the Senate’s hearing on Tuesday came when Sen. Ted Cruz asked Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg, “Does Facebook consider itself a neutral public forum?” Unsatisfied by Zuckerberg’s response that Facebook is a “platform for all ideas,” Sen. Cruz continued, “Are you a First Amendment speaker expressing your views, or are you a…
Let’s start with the good: For most of its 82 minutes, Game of Thrones’ “The Long Night” was a tense, well-modulated, and gorgeously scored poem to apocalyptic terror. Unlike “Battle of the Bastards,” which repeatedly offered stunning bird’s-eye perspectives of military formations before zooming in to the chaos as it was experienced on the ground, director Miguel Sapochnik…