  “Live forever!” Mr. Electro told him. Ray Bradbury was twelve years old and had just seen Mr. Electro get strapped to the electric chair at the traveling carnival. Someone threw the switch. Mr. Electro got electrocuted. It was Labor Day weekend, 1932.
After the show, after his recovery, Mr. Electro took the young Bradbury aside. “We’ve met before,” Mr. Electro told him. “You were my best friend in France in 1918, and you died in my arms in the battle of the Ardennes forest that year. And here you are, born again, in a new body, with a new name. Welcome back!”
“When he came to me,” Bradbury later wrote, “he tapped me on both shoulders and then the tip of my nose. The lightning jumped into me.” And that’s when he told Bradbury, “Live forever!”
“I decided it was the greatest idea I had ever heard,” Bradbury said. Full story »
Finding a word or phrase that describes the journalism industry today is not that difficult. Since 2007, contraction — some big newspapers folded and suits fired tens of thousands of journalists — describes well the process. The result? A free fall to obscurity, a corporate-led collapse into irrelevance fit. But are industry leaders paying attention to the attendant contraction in the industry’s former print audience?
The history is clear: Newspapers wrongly did not recognize the Internet as a viable threat to its news and advertising franchises. Ad revenues fell dramatically, much lost to the Internet. Suits cut costs. At some southeastern U.S. papers, people losing jobs this week include serious, experienced, and award-winning journalists (an example). Hundreds of jobs will be lost as managers of The Times-Picayune, The Birmingham News, and The Huntsville Times shift focus and financial outlook from print to Web.
Next cost target: Newsprint. Newspapers have reduced the number of days on which they actually print newspapers. The most visible of these over the past week have been at Advance Publications-owned newspapers in New Orleans and Alabama. (Advance, a private company, is owned by the Newhouse family.) Want to lose a print reader? Don’t give her a paper to read.
Why is such severe contraction necessary if it reduces the quality and quantity of the product sold? Full story »
 Recently I was pondering Donald Trump’s inexplicable behavior on the campaign trail, allegedly on behalf of GOP nominee Mitt Romney. I was only able to conceive of two possible explanations that would account for his ludicrous Orly Taitz act: either he is secretly working for Obama or he’s actually a covert performance artist working on a long, episodic political satire of some sort.
Then it hit me.
I’m still in the process of nailing down all the details, a process made difficult because the trail is so well-covered, but the inescapable conclusion is this: the man we think is Donald Trump isn’t. The real Trump, the man born in 1946 to Fred and Mary Anne Trump in Scotland, the man who attended Wharton and established a lucrative career as a real estate developer, is lying on a beach somewhere soaking up the sunshine and living the good life.
Available evidence suggests that in the early 1980s Trump was approached by a wealthy, famous man who wanted to buy his identity. Full story »
The Champ beat Joe Frazier. He beat George Foreman. He beat Ken Norton, Sonny Liston and Floyd Patterson. Full story »
 Once again, Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney has taken to task the president of the United States. This time, it’s over the federal subsidies provided to A123 Systems, a manufacturer of batteries for electric cars. A123, report Bill Vlasic and Matt Wald of The New York Times, is supposed to be “a centerpiece of his administration’s effort to use $2 billion in government subsidies to jump-start production of sophisticated electric batteries in the United States.”
A123, despite the promise of a new technology it plans to reveal soon, has been losing money — and some of that money has been provided as a subsidy by the feds. There are reasons, of course: a weak economy, lukewarm demand for electric vehicles whose prices have yet to descend to the financial means of the masses, and difficult, complicated issues unresolved by engineers.
President Obama faced a political debacle after Solyndra stumbled and failed. So A123 failure coupled to his desire to use government funding to enhance a new energy economy has provided Romney with a chance to roar again about the power of the free market.
Full story »
 Not to belabor the point – because it doesn’t really need a lot of explanation – but the US Top 40 has sucked moose balls for a very long time. The fashion in recent years has tended toward prefabricated diva pop, braindead hit-hop and cynical producer-driven techno-pop music-like product. Imagine Simon Cowell’s iPod, in other words. Oscar Wilde once described fox hunting as “the unspeakable in pursuit of the inedible.” Find a way to work “unlistenable” into the phrase somehow and you have the whole US hit music industry just about nailed.
So imagine my bafflement at the top of the Billboard Hot 100 charts in 2012. Full story »
Visible Storage
- in the basement of the Rietberg Museum, Zürich
Sinuous bodies joining hands in Indian sandstone
ankle linked across a ledge—
Peruvian puma beside West Mexican fetishes
vermillion delicate
bone masks & rhinos of Mali
& La Côte d’Ivoire—
Oblong faces & dark mystery stare
empty-eyed
longing to be touched through the glass. Full story »
Talk about starting your military career at the top, with guns blazing. Full story »
David Sanger of the New York Times is often rebuked for operating under the assumption that Iran is determined to develop nuclear weapons when the evidence suggests otherwise. But when he sticks to straight reporting, as with the excerpt from his new book in the Times on June 1 about the cyberattacks against Iran, we owe him a debt of thanks. He’s opened our eyes to the extent to which the United States and President Obama were involved with Stuxnet. Full story »
 The Dutch team, working out in preparation for its opening match at EURO 2012, was targeted Thursday by racist chanting from the crowd in Krakow. UEFA’s response was…disappointing.
UEFA, a day after reportedly denying the chants were racially motivated, acknowledged them Friday.
“UEFA has now been made aware that there were some isolated incidents of racist chanting,” UEFA said in a statement. Full story »
Confession: supporting non-intervention in Syria requires considerable restraint on the part of this author. In Problem From Hell, Samantha Power had me at Rafael Lemkin.* To someone with a savior complex (okay, me), it seems like the most virtuous use of military resources: rescuing innocents, deposing tyrants.
Problem is, as we well know, in practice, it seldom works. Also in theory, military intervention is more likely to be successful when mandated by an international body. Unfortunately, it’s as difficult to get anything constructive done in the U.N. Security Council as it is in the U.S. Congress. Full story »
 Following the unauthorized publication of confidential Heartland Institute documents by Peter Gleick on February 14, 2012, Heartland’s president Joseph Bast identified one document that he claimed was forged. Starting on February 16, Heartland employed Protek International, a firm that conducts digital forensic investigations, to investigate whether or not the allegedly fabricated “2012 Climate Strategy” memo (aka the Memo) had been authored at The Heartland Institute. On May 1, 2012, Heartland published Protek’s investigation report and that the report supported Heartland’s claim that the Memo had not been created by anyone at The Heartland Institute.
While Protek’s report does provide some very limited support for that announcement, the short press release goes far beyond what the report actually says. The press release, taglined to Bast but almost certainly written by Heartland’s communications director Jim Lakely, falsely and repeatedly claims that Protek’s investigation points to Peter Gleick as the author of the allegedly fabricated Memo. Full story »
 The Pacific Institute just issued a press release announcing the reinstatement of Peter Gleick to his position of Institute president. Among other things, the press release states
An independent review conducted by outside counsel on behalf of the Institute has supported what Dr. Gleick has stated publicly regarding his interaction with the Heartland Institute.
According to Nancy Ross, the Pacific Institute’s Director of Communications, the Institute will not be releasing the details of the independent investigation. [update 6/7/2012: Ms. Ross provided additional clarification to S&R this morning, writing that the report would not be released "because it is a confidential personnel matter."] The press release goes on to say that “The Board of Directors accepts Dr. Gleick’s apology for his lapse in judgment.” Full story »
 On May 1, 2012, The Heartland Institute published a digital forensics report from Protek International, a computer and information forensics and security firm based out of Chicago. Heartland hired Protek to investigate whether there was evidence that anyone from Heartland had written the “2012 Heartland Climate Strategy” memo (aka the Memo) that Heartland claims was fabricated by Peter Gleick when he falsified his identity in order to acquire and then leak confidential Heartland documents in February, 2012.
As a result of their investigation, Protek concluded that the Memo had not been created on Heartland’s computer system and didn’t exist there or in Heartland’s email system prior to its publication on February 14, 2012. An S&R analysis of Protek’s investigation report finds that this broad conclusion is not supported by the details of Protek’s investigation. Full story »
  I am a survivor of the zombie apocalypse.
Or am I?
I spent the spring semester filling my head with a whole bunch of stories about the end of the world as we know it (and I feel fine), motivated solely by curiosity. What is it about zombies that continues to capture public imagination? Why are they such a hot pop cultural commodity?
I watched TV and movies (and, frankly, zombie movies gross me out, so it wasn’t all necessarily great fun), read books and comics, interviewed folks, and indulged my inquisitiveness just to see what I could find out. And you know what? I learned something. Full story »
At the New York Times, Thomas Erdbrink reported on the latest cyberattack on Iran via a virus known Flame. “Iran’s Computer Emergency Response Team Coordination Centre,” he writes, “fears that it’s potentially more harmful than the 2010 Stuxnet virus. … In contrast … the newly identified virus is designed not to do damage but to secretly collect information from a wide variety of sources.”
At Asia Times Online, Pierre Klochendler elaborates:
“Flame can easily be described as one of the most complex threats ever discovered. Big and incredibly sophisticated, it redefines the notion of cyber-war and cyber-espionage,” Alexander Gostev posted on the Securelist blog of Kaspersky Labs, the company that uncovered the worm. Gostev is head of the firm’s Global Research and Analysis Team. Full story »
 A make-up woman brushes a small lock of my hair so it drapes slightly over my forehead. That errant wisp tested well with focus groups of women. I glance at the TelePrompter, reciting silently the first few lines. My administrative aide, a former K Street lobbyist doing a two-year turn of “public service” before returning to her high six-figure income, reminds me to at least act humble. The director raises his hand: “five, four, three, two …” and points to me. I begin to speak to the many millions of registered voters in my state whom I have deluded and misled for three terms.
Good evening, my fellow Americans. I’m here tonight to announce that I will seek re-election to another term as your United States senator. I’d like to tell you why it’s important that you return me to a fourth term in office.
I have accumulated power on the Hill. Full story »
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