Stream of Reading (Prepare to be Forwarded) – An Archive of What I'm Reading
“If the facts are against you, argue the law. If the law is against you, argue the facts. If the law and the facts are against you, pound the table and yell like hell.” ―Carl Sandburg Elon Musk built Tesla, Inc., by turning Tesla into a great story. This story — one that’s partly about…
President Donald Trump defied a federal court judge who ruled Wednesday that it was unconstitutional for the president to block people on Twitter over their dissenting political views. Judge Naomi Reice Buchwald in Manhattan ruled that comments on Trump’s personal Twitter account—and those of other officials in the U.S. government—were public forums and that blocking critics for…
Photo: Jeff Chiu (AP) Throughout Bad Blood, John Carreyrou’s excellent new book about fraudulent blood-testing company Theranos and its founder Elizabeth Holmes, the $9 billion company keeps running into the same problem: would-be investors or retailers want to see a demonstration of its technology. This is an issue for Elizabeth Holmes’s company, because their shit…
Entrepreneur Elon Musk thinks journalism needs fixing, and he’s got just the answer. Enraged last week by negative media coverage of Tesla, his car company, the tech billionaire proposed a rating system in which the public would vote on the credibility of individual journalists and news sites. As with all things Musk, the sketchy idea…
Earlier this month, when Attorney General Jeff Sessions announced plans to prosecute “100 percent” of migrants illegally crossing the Mexican border, it became official US policy to routinely separate children from their parents. Already, hundreds of children have been ripped from their families: 658 kids in the first 13 days of the program alone, Customs…
Watching the film Phantom Thread, I kept wondering why I was supposed to be interested in a control freak who is consistently unpleasant to all the people around him. I kept looking at the other characters—his sister who manages his couture business, his seamstresses, eventually the furniture (as a child, I read a very nice…
An image from The Happytime Murders. Photo: STX The first trailer for the hard-R-rated puppet film The Happytime Murders says that the film is “no Sesame, all Street,” and the people responsible for Sesame Street are not happy about it. In fact, they’re suing. Sesame Workshop, the company responsible for the long-running family program Sesame…
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…
Photo: Mark Wilson (Getty Images) Does Betsy DeVos care more about furthering the xenophobic and racist policies of this administration than she does about educating the children of this country? The education secretary’s latest statement would lead us to believe that is indeed the case, since she basically told schools to call the police on…
Illustration: Gizmodo What’s the most terrifying thing you can imagine an Amazon Echo doing? Think realistically. Would it be something simple but sinister, like the artificially intelligent speaker recording a conversation between you and a loved one and then sending that recording to an acquaintance? That seems pretty bad to me. And guess what: it’s…