Stream of Reading (Prepare to be Forwarded) – An Archive of What I'm Reading
White supremacists protest at last year’s “Unite the Right” rally in Charlottesville, VA. Photo: AP On July 11th, Spokane, WA Republican Party chairwoman Cecily Wright introduced the alt-right personality James Allsup at a meeting of Northwest Grassroots, a local tea party organization. Allsup—a 22-year-old elected GOP precinct officer and noted white supremacist—is introduced by Wright…
The story of the plastic bag—the kind that is so ubiquitous in grocery stores, in gutters, in the branches of trees—is a story of persuasion, one that began with a battle between paper and plastic in the hearts of the American people. “People are fond of the old paper bag,” Peter Bunten explained to the…
A proposed single-payer health care system in New York state is economically viable and could insure a million people currently without coverage, according to a study from RAND Corp. released Wednesday. The analysis, which looks at the New York Health Act, was commissioned by the New York State Health Foundation. It makes a number of…
On Tuesday evening, the dark recesses of the Internet lit up with talk of politics. “Tampa rally, live coverage,” wrote “Dan,” posting a link to President Trump’s Tampa speech in a thread on 8chan, an anonymous image board also known as Infinitechan or Infinitychan, which might be best described as the unglued twin of better-known…
Good morning. How did you celebrate National Avocado Day? Shamefully, I forgot, so my plans to bathe in a tub of guac will have to wait until…National Guacamole Day, which Google tells me takes place on Sept. 16. Mark your calendars. Chipotle might also have been wishing it had waited until September. The Mexican grill restaurant…
In an ultra-rich-person moment at his latest forever-campaign rally in Tampa on Tuesday night, President Trump claimed you need photo ID to buy groceries in this country as part of a meandering argument for voter ID laws. Trump started by telling his crowd, where conspiracy theorists and Jim Acosta haters were unsurprisingly well represented, that…
Has Chris Mays gone the way of the dinosaur? The whereabouts of the man who helped bring life-size, robotic dinos to malls, museums, zoos and aquariums around the country is unknown. The company he co-founded in 1982, Dinamation International Corp., is in precarious straits. As for its 600 robots, 23 are currently on display at…
In the ballroom of the Hyatt hotel in Sarasota, Florida, the head of the UK’s most influential think tank made an urgent plea for donations for a new international trade unit he was establishing in London. The top priority of the Institute of Economic Affairs’ (IEA) trade unit would be to push for a sweeping,…
The Institute of Economic Affairs is facing two official investigations after it emerged that the thinktank offered potential US donors access to UK government ministers as it raised cash for research to promote free-trade deals demanded by hardline Brexiters. The Charity Commission announced on Monday that it had opened a regulatory compliance case into the…
Cheddar Inc. set out to upend traditional cable TV with its financial news-focused streaming service. Now it is making a push onto the cable dial. The company this week went live on WOW, a Denver-based cable and broadband provider with close to 800,000 subscribers. The network has been made available to about 400,000 of WOW’s…