Stream of Reading (Prepare to be Forwarded) – An Archive of What I'm Reading
Quitting immediately is a privilege, what do we do when we can’t? Recent events at The Markup have given us a rare public flogging of a management decision. Executive management is America’s highest paid working classification but consequences for when they do a bad job seem increasingly unlikely. This has led to a rise in…
Subscribe now Only one person was killed in a shooting at a synagogue in Poway, California on Saturday and merely three other people were shot and that is a miracle isn’t it. It counts as a miracle that a total of only four bodies were struck by bullets at one of these things. Thank god…
Illustration: Art Handler One night in early April, roughly 20 of the Democratic Party’s highest-profile donors from the financial industry sat down over dinner to discuss how exactly they were feeling about the 2020 presidential race. For the most part, it wasn’t great. Convened by two veterans of liberal fund-raising — investors Steven Rattner and…
ImageA bike-share cemetery in Wangqingtuo, China. The town has benefited from the boom in bike-share companies like Ofo and Mobike but is now littered with its discards. Credit Gilles Sabrié for The New York Times Bike-sharing start-ups brought prosperity to Wangqingtuo. Now residents are dealing with the mess they left behind. WANGQINGTUO, China —…
The popularity of Fortnite has been transformative for Epic Games. But the game’s explosive growth led to months of intense crunch for Epic employees and contractors, some of whom say they felt extreme pressure to work grueling hours to maintain Fortnite’s success and profitability, resulting in a toxic, stressful environment at the company. In a…
It all seemed so inevitable: that Jack Dorsey, the C.E.O. and co-founder of Twitter, would appear onstage at last week’s TED ideas conference, in Vancouver; that the conference theme would be “Bigger Than Us,” an ambiguous invocation of either inspiration or fear; that Dorsey, during a session called “Power,” would calmly acknowledge the proliferation of…
Uber, Lyft, Postmates, and Deliveroo. These words are now part of our everyday lexicon. The gig economy has changed the world. I find it hard to remember when I didn’t see hundreds of delivery scooters zipping around the city near our office. Nor do I easily recall when it was unusual to see somebody happily…
Transformational change cannot occur suddenly — and sudden changes rarely turn out to be transformational. It’s clear that common practices at many of our largest tech platforms must change, but hoping for a shouting-at-the-barricades revolution is unrealistic and possibly unhelpful. While we — representing doctors, health tech professionals, and elements of the policymaking community — recognize and share public dissatisfaction with…
Once you hit the first intersection in town, make a right onto Main Street. Go past the fire station and over the railroad tracks. Make your second right after the tracks. If you see a large metal building with a truck parked in overgrown grass, turn around; you’ve gone too far…” These are part of…
I was in the living room of my childhood home, watching my mother as she stared out of the window, reeling from the news of her diagnosis. I could feel the carpet soft under my toes, and hear music in the background. “I wanted to save you from all the suffering,” Mom said as she…