Stream of Reading (Prepare to be Forwarded) – An Archive of What I'm Reading
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…
There has been a lot of burning lately. Last week, wildfires broke out in the Arctic Circle, where temperatures reached almost 90 degrees; they are still roiling northern Sweden, 21 of them. And this week, wildfires swept through the Greek seaside, outside Athens, killing at least 80 and hospitalizing almost 200. At one resort, dozens…
The leaked tape recording of Michael Cohen and Donald Trump discussing how to handle the payoff to silence yet another extracurricular paramour, Karen McDougal, is more important, it seems to me, than has been generally acknowledged. It’s only a shade under three minutes long. But unlike the Billy Bush tape, Trump is not performing or…
An estimated half-million New Yorkers are undocumented. Whether they’ve lived here for two months or 20 years, they came to this city of immigrants—a place where more than a third of the population was born in another country—looking for the same things that have brought newcomers here for centuries: work and school opportunities, religious freedom,…
storytext MoviePass is on life support. Helios and Matheson, the parent company of the popular movie subscription service, said that it had a service outage on Thursday because it couldn’t afford to pay for movie tickets. The company borrowed $5 million in cash Friday to pay its merchant and fulfillment processors, according to a regulatory…
The shift towards audio and voice-based digital user interfaces forces publishers to develop new tools, adapt workflows and ensure new ways of monetization. This week, Google DNI has approved to co-fund a €1.2 million open-source project with a collaborative approach we now will be working on until the end of 2020. It is called VAMP — pun…
Image wrap box Free blurb with Takeaway In the run-up to Snap’s second quarter earnings due Aug. 7, several Wall Street analysts have lowered their estimates for what the company has already warned will be a weak quarter. The after-effects of Snap’s troubled app redesign earlier this year hurt user growth, which is expected to…