Stream of Reading (Prepare to be Forwarded) – An Archive of What I'm Reading
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Imagine a private, global super court that empowers corporations to bend countries to their will. Say a nation tries to prosecute a corrupt CEO or ban dangerous pollution. Imagine that a company could turn to this super court and sue the whole country for daring to interfere with its profits, demanding hundreds of millions or even billions…
In March of last year, Fusion published an article detailing the ways in which Nextdoor, a social network for neighbors, had become a home for racial profiling. In the “Crime and Safety” forum of many Nextdoor communities, users were reporting people as “suspicious” seemingly based primarily on the color of their skin. Nextdoor CEO Nirav…
July 27, 2016 07/27/2016 11:19 a.m. The Dark Internet Humor of Harambe Jokes By Brian Feldman Share Share Tweet Share Share Email Print Photo: SelectALL/Cincinatti Zoo/Getty Images What is so funny about dead animals? The answer is: Nothing. And yet Harambe, the gorilla who was shot and killed in May by security personnel at the…
Clara Rollins was an 18-year-old photography intern at a newspaper in the southeastern United States when a section editor asked her if she’d ever had sex. The editor sent Rollins (not her real name) several flirtatious texts during her two years at the paper, asking her if she would come to his house and whether she…
Ann Coulter rides back to her hotel after appearances on Oct. 23, 2013, in Washington. (Matt McClain/ The Washington Post) Let’s put some cards on the table: I’m not a fan of Ann Coulter. I think her shtick was played out a decade ago. With each passing season, Coulter’s desperate efforts to stay in the…
SRCCON 2016 highlights video, videography by Searle Video. SRCCON is a hands-on conference focused on the practical challenges news technology and data teams encounter every day. We work to make it an inclusive and welcoming event where people can feel comfortable digging into complex problems. This year, SRCCON included more than 50 sessions on a…
It has been more than three months since Gizmodo first published a story claiming Facebook’s human editors were suppressing conservative news content on the site’s Trending Topics section. Facebook vehemently denied the report, but has been dealing with the story’s aftermath ever since. On Friday, Facebook announced another small but notable change to Trending Topics:…
Facebook will no longer employ humans to write descriptions for items in its Trending section, which attracted controversy over allegations of political bias in May. Topics appearing in the Trending section will now appear solely as a short phrase or single word, with an indication of the number of people discussing it on the social…
The staff of alt-right wesbite Breitbart was reported Friday to work in the basement of a rich Egyptian Muslim. Yes, seriously. The Guardian US reported that Breitbart executive and Trump CEO Steve Bannon was registered to vote in Florida, a state he does not live in. Other journalists have since thrown some cold water on the significance of that…
You’ve probably already seen this remarkable “welcome” letter sent to incoming U of C students by Dean John Ellison. It’s probably the dumbest statement I’ve ever seen from a dean, and if you understand the usual antagonistic relationship between the professoriate and the administrative class, you know that’s a strong statement. In this astonishingly…