Stream of Reading (Prepare to be Forwarded) – An Archive of What I'm Reading
TV ReviewsAll of our TV reviews in one convenient place. Crank Yankers feels much older, culturally speaking, than it actually is: The prank call puppet show originally ran on Comedy Central from 2002 to 2005, but even then it seemed pulled by the gravity of old comedic modes like stock characters and catch phrases….
Greta Thunberg, the 16-year-old Swedish climate change activist, has become the new target for rightwing men, who are losing their shit over a teenager. On Fox News on Monday night, Michael Knowles, a conservative troll and Daily Wire podcast host, described Thunberg as a “mentally ill Swedish child” who is “being exploited by her parents…
We’re in the midst of an all-out panic over vaping, spurred by real concerns after hundreds of people have fallen ill after vaping and several people have died. While the exact causes are unknown, it’s become fairly clear that the main culprit, if not the only one, is the addition of Vitamin E oil to…
TV ReviewsAll of our TV reviews in one convenient place. Congratulations to Netflix: After over seven years of commissioning original series, it finally got around to creating its own Law & Order. This isn’t intended as a slam on its new international production, Criminal, but rather a compliment. The long-running NBC procedural didn’t run…
Things are looking good for Elizabeth Warren right now: she has been rising steadily in the polls and now leads Joe Biden in Iowa by two percentage points—the first time she’s polled ahead of the former vice president in the state. She’s been drawing massive crowds, from New York City to Iowa City, and is…
Why do right-wing men hate Greta Thunberg and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez so much? Researchers have some troubling answers to that question. Climate skeptic Bjørn Lomborg has built his global brand on keeping his cool. “Cool it,” his best-selling book told those worried about the warming planet. For some reason, however, he seems to have difficulty sticking…
Hundreds of thousands of young people around the world have taken to the streets on Friday to protest government inaction on the climate crisis.CreditCreditSydelle Willow Smith for The New York Times Sept. 20, 2019Updated 2:36 p.m. ET They are in open revolt. Anxious about their future on a hotter planet, angry at world leaders for…
NEW YORK—On Monday evening, Elizabeth Warren stood in front of Washington Square Park’s floodlit arches for what was certainly her largest campaign rally to date: the campaign put the crowd at 20,000, though of course, campaigns tend to inflate. “We’re not here today because of famous arches or famous men,” the Massachusetts Senator said. “In fact,…
“Margaret Atwood’s new novel is being greeted as the long-awaited feminist dystopia, and I am afraid that for some time it will be viewed as a test of the imaginative power of feminist paranoia,” the writer and critic Barbara Ehrenreich wrote in 1986, soon after the publication of Margaret Atwood’s novel The Handmaid’s Tale. To…
Camilla Hodgson in San Francisco September 17, 2019 Print this page On a foggy September lunchtime in San Francisco, a group of researchers and data scientists sat around foldable plastic tables in what was once a Christian Science church, evangelising about open-source information and the democratisation of knowledge. The 50-strong party, which had been assembled…