Stream of Reading (Prepare to be Forwarded) – An Archive of What I'm Reading
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CreditCreditJooHee Yoon BARI WEISS: Everything sucks. That’s the overwhelming feeling I get when I spend too much time on Twitter. It makes me feel anxious and angry and amped up. And that’s on a day when I’m not even trending as a Very Bad Person. This fall I read Jaron Lanier’s book “Ten Arguments for…
For many middle– and high-school students, giving an in-class presentation was a rite of passage. Teachers would call up students, one by one, to present their work in front of the class and, though it was often nerve-racking, many people claim it helped turn them into more confident public speakers. “Coming from somebody with severe anxiety,…
A tall, unemployed man took his niece to see Serena and Venus Williams play each other at the United States Open on Friday of last week. The man, a free-agent football player clad in a simple black T-shirt, was briefly shown on the video board at Arthur Ashe Stadium to thunderous applause from the crowd….
ImageFacebook’s chief executive, Mark Zuckerberg, told Congress this year that he wanted the company to “be a platform for all ideas.”CreditCreditTom Brenner/The New York Times SAN FRANCISCO — The post went up quietly on Facebook’s internal message board last week. Titled “We Have a Problem With Political Diversity,” it quickly took off inside the social…
Which Web sites get the most traffic? According to the ranking service Alexa, the top three sites in the United States, as of this writing, are Google, YouTube, and Facebook. (Porn, somewhat hearteningly, doesn’t crack the top ten.) The rankings don’t reflect everything—the dark Web, the nouveau-riche recluses harvesting bitcoin—but, for the most part, people…
Can Twitter be saved? I’m not talking about last week’s social media stock price plunge. It’s the ritualization of Gamergate-style uproar and dishonest brigading that has me disillusioned with the platform. I know soul-searching about Twitter is a bit of a journalistic trope at this point, since we all seem to be simultaneously enraptured with…
Wanna Thompson, 26, has long considered herself a Nicki Minaj fan. As a freelance writer living in Toronto, Ms. Thompson also counts herself as a cultural critic with a focus on hip-hop, and with her insights, she has built an audience via her personal website and social media feeds. So when she posted a tweet…
There was a time when eBay was practically synonymous with buying and selling things online. Now it’s surprisingly easy to forget that it exists, until you need to buy something you can’t find anywhere else or clear some space in the attic. Or until someone like Elon Musk, made fabulously wealthy when PayPal was acquired…
Three years ago, Lisa Linh quit her full-time job to travel the world and document it on Instagram, where she has nearly 100,000 followers; since then, she has stayed in breathtaking hotels everywhere from Mexico to Quebec to the Cook Islands. Often, she stays for free. Linh is part of an ever-growing class of people who have…
Companies hiring for technical positions often slip language into their job postings that appeals to men. They say they’re looking for “ninjas,” who seek to “obliterate competition,” and are capable of “dominating.” By now, these wordings are a well understood form of bias that produces more male candidates than female. But one job in the…