Bummer. 38 Studios has laid off all its employees.

Let’s get caught up. And bear with me – this section required some revision on my part.

• If you recall, the troubled video game company recently missed a payment to the state of Rhode Island, which had engineered a massive GOVERNMENT HANDOUT LOAN DEAL to lure them from Massachusetts.
• Bad news: employees now out of work. Good news: employees weren’t getting paid anyway because ownership had chosen not to pay them missed payroll. Full story »

As I Facebooked last night:

After more than three years of writing, editing, revising, and of course enduring the emotional agony that engenders so many of my best ideas, I have finally arrived at what I’m choosing to call a 1.0 version of my new book, tentatively entitled The Butterfly Machine.

Now, like any business-savvy poet, I’m on to the business of auctioning off movie rights and booking venues for the impending world tour.

[aherm] [cough] [ahem] Full story »

How comforting to discover, long before $2 billion evaporates in our quadrennial mayhem of misdirection, the finale! Survey says: Obama gets an encore, unless the wary one flubs big-time or a Black Swan sidelines his headlines. I got evidence: the latest poll, elitist expertise, stock charts and detailed voting patterns back to 1860. Match that, Mitt, you twit.

But, alas for the left, few glad tidings, just which brand of anti-progressive runs the White House. Okay, pedestrian mini-series deliver more suspense, but that’s what we got. No high drama every election. Instead, a six-month horror show full of faux suspense plays out – ”will the nice, stumbling right centrist beat back the mechanized, alien throwback?” — only for the nation to end up treading water.

Full story »

by Evans Mehew

Rifling through Google News this morning, I saw numerous headlines reporting layoffs affecting corporations (HP, Timberland, T-Mobile USA, etc.) and local governments. Spring has sprung, and economic recovery beckons … safety and security for all is just around the corner.

Not.

As Americans in the 21st century, we (luckily) live in a society/culture that values education. It’s revered, sitting right up there with other pillars of our society, such as American Idol, Facebook and Angry Birds. One might argue that the pursuit of education should be a lifelong mindest and worldview, rather than a set activity for a specific amount of time whose tangible output is a piece of paper … but never mind about that. For now, we’ll just focus our attention upon the piece of paper. Full story »

I’ve been reading The Hunt for KSM by Terry McDermott and Josh Meyer (Little, Brown, 2012). Valuable and engrossing as this account of how Khalid Sheikh Mohammed was brought to justice — if you call waterboarding justice — it’s also frustrating. While The Hunt for KSM isn’t a biography per se, it provides just enough details of his early life to leave you wishing that the authors had discovered and shared with the reader the wellspring — however poisoned — of his motivation. (Not to discount the legitimacy of some of his beef with the West.)

In other words what, beyond indoctrination and a college experience in the United States that soured him on American culture (in the timeless tradition of U.S. disaffection of influential Islamist theorist Sayyid Qutb) drove a middle-class kid from Pakistan who grew up in Kuwait to become an alleged mass murderer, as well as to personally cut someone’s (Daniel Pearl’s) throat? Full story »

I had a dream when I was 10 years old and was thrilled when Alan Shepard, in the first manned Mercury Mission, orbited the earth. Okay, we were a bit  behind the Soviets, but, still we had done it, and very soon, I knew we would eclipse them. And we did.

On that day, I decided I wanted to be an astronaut, too. To explore space. Never mind that women, including the legendary Mercury 13, were not part of NASA’s mission back then. It was a manly task in this pre-lib era. Never mind that my Coke bottle-thick glasses (in a fashionable blue metallic complete with fake diamonds) would have rendered me ineligible, I still dreamed the dream back then. Full story »

Want to know who woke up screaming this morning? This guy:

Miami, home to one of the NBA’s showpiece franchises, is in deep trouble versus Indiana. Full story »

Unpaid interns feeling exploited may want to check out a web site launched by a NYC law firm, Outten & Golden LLP. The firm is trolling for more clients. Full story »

Part six of a series.

When The Heartland Institute pulled down their billboard comparing actual climate realists to terrorist Ted Kaczynski, Heartland president Joseph Bast published a brief press release explaining why he ran the advertisement. At the end of the largely unrepentant release, Bast wrote “We do not apologize for running the ad.” Since then, Bast and James M. Taylor, managing editor of the Heartland periodical Energy and Climate News, have gone on the attack instead of apologizing for making a dishonest comparison.

However, the new attacks are just as dishonest, deceptive, and hypocritical as the original billboard and its accompanying essay were. Full story »

If you’re not from Washington State, you might only know of Adam Smith for sponsoring HR 4192 – Due Process and Military Detention Amendments Act, a laudable act, to be sure. While it was hardly major news in March when he introduced the bill, news of his sponsorship piggy-backed on the momentous occasion of US District Judge Katherine Forrest’s ruling that, “that Section 1021 of NDAA was facially unconstitutional — a rare finding — because of the potential that it could violate the 1st Amendment” (LA Times, May 18, 2012). Smith gets his mention way down at the bottom (similarly in coverage elsewhere, as well). Sadly, his attempt to protect citizens from indefinite military detention without due process failed 182-238.

Late Friday the 18th, however, BuzzFeed broke the news that the same Adam Smith would like you to believe that: Full story »

We seem to offer this up each year around this time. Congratulations, grads, and please accept this tidbit of advice from those of us here at S&R: always remember where you’re from, but don’t ever let it keep you from where you want to go.

Carlos Fuentes, Mexico’s dominant literary figure over the past many decades, passed away several days ago. He was a remarkable writer—international in taste (serving as Mexcico’s ambassador to France at one point), but resolutely ground in Mexico’s complex and often tragic history.

Fuentes was probably best known in the US for The Old Gringo, but I always thought this was a relatively slight work compared with some of his other efforts. Reading Terra Nostra and Christopher Unborn were, if not transformative, nonetheless significant literary experiences of my life. He was often associated with the Magical Realism of many Latin American authors, but this was a bit too limiting. He could do everything, much like Vargas Llosa. The Buried Mirror is his history of the continent told from a Latin Perspective, and it’s a fascinating and informative read. Every couple of pages I had to stop and think, I didn’t know that. Full story »

Full story »

I visited my local hospital’s emergency room in the middle of the night back in March because a kidney stone had barged into my urinary tract. It woke me from my deep, pharmaceutically induced slumber with a pain best described as being stabbed with a knitting needle — from the inside. The stone is still causing pain, but not of the physical variety. But first, what’s a kidney stone story without a description of the physical pain?

In the wee hours of that March night, the stabbing pain attacked my back midway between my last rib and my hip. Here’s how my sleepy brain figured out what was going on: Man-that-hurts-like-hell-did-I-pull-a-muscle-doing-the-yard-work-today? Let-me-feel-around-back-there-it-doesn’t-feel-like-a-pulled-muscle-OH-FCK-IT’S-A-FCKNG-KIDNEY-STONE. Full story »

Watch the two TED talks below. The question, which represents 100% of your final grade, follows.

First, Nick Hanauer in 2012.

Full story »

The Obama administration, writes Foreign Policy in Focus co-director John Feffer in his valuable new book Crusade 2.0: The West’s Resurgent War on Islam (City Lights Books), “continues to misunderstand the nature of political life in the Middle East. In his 1985 survey of the Arab world called The Arabs, journalist Peter Mansfield concluded in his final chapter that ‘no one can tell what social and political institutions the Arab people will have developed by the end of this momentous century. All that can be said with certainty is that, however much they derive from foreign movements and ideas, they will have a specifically Arab of Islamic character.’ Nearly thirty years later, policy makers and pundits have yet to learn that Islam is an essential part of Arab life, and that includes politics.” [Emphasis added.] Full story »

The zombie apocalypse implies a global pandemic, but most of what I’ve seen so far has been good ol’ fashioned American zombies. The 28 Days franchise has English zombies, as does Shaun of the Dead, but since zombies don’t speak, the difference in accents is pretty much moot. World War Z provides an excellent international perspective, of course, but on the silver screen, the walking dead have been mostly Western.

That’s why The Dead (2010) looked so enticing (wait, can the dead be enticing? Oh, never mind…). The Dead promised a look at the apocalypse from a non-Western perspective—as if Africa isn’t war-torn enough, zombies overrun the continent—so I snatched it up.

Good call. Full story »

So there seems to be a firestorm over the issue of whether Facebook co-founder and Brazilian-born Eduardo Saverin should have given up his US citizenship. While some on the Right have apparently taken this as a vindication that the US tax system is one step away from the Apocalypse, and we should therefore celebrate Saverin’s courage or something, the position on the left, if I can characterize it as a position, is that Saverin deserves his own special circle in hell. Mistermix over at Balloon Juice is outraged. Josh Marshall at TPM is scandalized, and is still devoting multiple posts to the subject. The Nation is fuming. The nerve of this guy. And the comments. Jeez, it’s like stepping into the comments at NRO. The level of invective is comparable, as is the level of knowledge on occasion, since so many people apparently derive their sense of history and current events from movies. Of course, US companies, as we mention below, do this from time to time, and the outrage level has been considerably lower.

Oh, honestly. Grow up. Full story »