cyrus.mortazavi

I think some may have already figured this out from the five minute trailer, but now the showrunners have gone ahead and let the cat out of the bag – officially – on who John Wesley Shipp will be playing on The CW’s The Flash.

Here’s Executive Producer Greg Berlanti’s statement:

Given his history with The Flash, [executive producers] Andrew [Kreisberg], Geoff [Johns] and I could only think of one person we wanted to play Barry’s father and that was John Wesley Shipp. He gives a fantastic and emotional performance in the pilot and we are looking forward to his presence in many more episodes. Also, personally, it was just wonderful to work with him again since my days at Dawson’s Creek. He’s a great actor and a great guy.

Shipp, of course, played the original Barry Allen aka The Flash on a short-lived TV series in 1990. Now he’ll play Barry Allen’s dad opposite Grant Gustin. Passing the torch, indeed.

John Wesley Shipp’s Role On The CW’s The Flash Revealed

A great filmmaker could make a brilliant biopic of Harry Houdini, but it seems like nobody wants to try right now. Dean Parisot, director of Galaxy Quest, is readying a film about the great magician and escape artist, but the plans are for The Secret Life of Houdini to be an adventure film.

According to The Hollywood Reporter, the film is so detached from reality that folk are saying it will be “in the vein of Indiana Jones.” Something similar was planned for the Ripley’s Believe it or Not movie a few years back, and there was even a moment or two when Depp was linked to that film, but it didn’t come to pass.

Anyway, there we go. Johnny Depp in period clothes, unpicking handcuffs faster than the eye can see and romancing woman in frilly dresses while he chases around after some Maguffin or another. It all seems quite box office friendly.

Johnny Depp Getting Ready To Play Houdini In An Indiana Jones-Style Adventure Movie

by Jonah Shepp

Eat your heart out, John McCain. Motherboard takes a look at what these Iranian scientists are up to:

We’ve seen how drones can be a crucial asset to search and rescue operations, but Iran’s RTS Lab has taken an entirely new angle. RTS’s Pars drone carries a payload of life preservers that can be delivered to a drowning swimmer far faster than a lifeguard. As we saw in testing in the Caspian Sea, the drone can also work at night, using bright lights, thermal sensors, and a built-in camera to stream video to rescuers on shore.

The concept works well, and it’s an excellent example of how powerful drones—which are cheaper and easier to use than just about any other aerial delivery vehicle—can actually be.

And other advice from Maïa Mazaurette, a French sex columnist:

[H]ow would you describe the French attitude toward sex?

I can only compare it to the countries I’ve lived in — Germany, and now Denmark, and I’ve made some trips to the U.S. I’d say the main difference is that in France we’re so straightforward. We don’t have these dating rituals; we just start with sex! And then, if the sex was good enough or we feel connected somehow, then we would try to build a relationship.

So you always have sex on the first date, then?

Absolutely! But it’s not even an issue because there is no date. There is just first sex. You think someone is attractive, you give it a try. I think it really makes sense. (Of course I say that, because I’m French, right?) But if you don’t have sex first, you build up too much pressure. You start thinking, I have seen this guy for four or five restaurants, or however you do it in the U.S., and what if it fails? If you get sex out the way first, then you can only have good surprises.

I never dated an American guy, but even with Danish and German guys, there were so many dates and it was taking so much time. At some point I just felt like, Ahhh! Stop it, are you going to kiss me? Are we going to your place? My place? Do something! I felt like I was investing a lot of time in something that might not be worth it anyway.

It’s interesting to me that France is a predominantly Catholic nation, and yet the culture is so sexually free.

Yes, but we don’t connect sex with ethics or morality or values in general, you know? There have been many studies about how French people don’t care about the sex life of our president, or if a person is unfaithful. It’s absolutely not a problem for me. Now, if my boyfriend and I have an agreement, that’s important. But I actually see a lot of my friends who are a bit older than me, maybe 40 or 45, who are always renegotiating the boundaries of their relationship. And a lot of them are okay with being unfaithful, as long as you don’t say it. It’s actually quite old-fashioned, as if we’re in the Victorian era, and your husband or your wife is the person you share children, a house, and money with, but for passion or a bit of adventure, you go elsewhere. The couple is not the place for adventure. It’s the place where you want to feel safe and watch Game of Thrones.

Update from a reader:

Maybe the French “start with sex,” but they are among the least sexually satisfied people on the planet, as regularly found in the annual Durex global sex survey. So maybe French advice on sex isn’t so good.

A new study out of Harvard appears to strengthen the case that neonicotinoid pesticides are behind the sharp decline in the honeybee population over the past six years:

According to lead author Chensheng (Alex) Lu, “We demonstrated again in this study that neonicotinoids are highly likely to be responsible for triggering [Colony Collapse Disorder] in honey bee hives that were healthy prior to the arrival of winter.”

To perform the latest study, the researchers examined 18 bee colonies in three different locations in central Massachusetts. They split each colony into three groups — one treated with a neonicotinoid called imidacloprid, one with a neonicotinoid called clothianidin, and one left in pristine condition to serve as a control group. The scientists monitored the groups from October 2012 to April 2013 and found that, by the end of that period, half of the neonicotinoid colonies had been decimated, while only one of the control colonies was destroyed by a common intestinal parasite, Nosema cerenae.

But Lisa Beyer points out that the study fed the bees dosages of insecticides “far in excess of anything bees would encounter in agricultural fields”:

In any case, it should be noted that whatever results the researchers created in the lab, in trials in which bees have been placed in farm fields treated with neonicotinoids, the colonies have done fine.

Lu’s new study nonetheless is receiving significant — and largely uncritical — media attention and strengthening the call by some environmentalists to prohibit neonicotinoid use in the U.S. Such a ban would be a mistake. It would compel U.S. farmers to use older pesticides that haven’t been subjected to bee studies and may be more hazardous to cultivated bees, not to mention wildlife and humans.

What’s more, the focus on neonics draws attention away from more plausible causes of bee deaths. First is the Varroa mite, which spreads lethal infections and has developed resistance to miticides. More research is needed on strategies to defeat this parasite. Second is the decline in bee food sources. High corn and soybean prices have accelerated the conversion of open land to cropland, leaving bees little to eat outside of the few weeks when a crop blossoms. Maybe if the government limited the subsidies that encourage fence-to-fence single-crop planting, more marginal land would be left fallow and could feed bees.

Bryan Walsh weighs both sides of the debate:

The chemical companies that make neonicotinoids are, unsurprisingly, skeptical that their products are behind the plight of the honeybee. “Extensive research has shown that these products do not represent a long-term threat to bee colonies,” David Fischer, the director of pollinator safety at Bayer, said in recent Congressional testimony. But the very purpose of pesticides is to kill insects, and no one would deny that such chemicals are almost certainly one of many factors hurting honeybees today. (It’s notable that a recent study found that the diversity of pollinators like bees was 50% higher on organic farms than on conventional farms.)

Many independent experts, however, doubt that neonicotinoids should get all the blame. Australia still uses neonicotinoid pesticides, but honeybee populations there are not in decline—something that may be due to the fact that varroahave yet to infest the country’s hives.

Recent Dish on the beepocalypse here and here.

Commenting on Romney’s and Santorum’s recent endorsements of a higher minimum wage, Douthat wishes moderate Republicans would fight for more economically sound conservative ways to help low-wage workers:

In fairness to the pro-minimum wage Republicans, there are various nuances here — indexing the wage to inflation, as Rick Santorum has proposed, is better than just having periodic, politically-motivated hikes, and the state-based minimum wage increases favored by some Republican politicians would have fewer perverse effects than a federal increase. And of course the minimum wage is a winning issue in the polls, and you can’t win every policy battle …

… but the case for tactical surrender would be a lot stronger if more Republican politicians, and Republican moderates especially, would first actually try to make the argument for an alternative, right-of-center suite of policies on jobs and wages. That could mean payroll tax cuts, it could mean an expanded Earned Income Tax credit or (as Marco Rubio has proposed) a wage subsidy as a replacement for the EITC, it could mean some of the American Enterprise Institute’s Michael Strain’s proposals to help the unemployed … there’s a whole range of potential policies, and policy combinations, that might deliver some of the minimum wage increase’s benefits with fewer downside risks.

Reihan is on the same page but sees why it won’t happen:

The irony is that the conservatives who might be amenable to something like Strain’s approach — let’s not risk excluding workers from the formal labor market by raising the statutory minimum wage, but let’s spend intelligently to get people back to work — are the ones who are embracing a minimum wage increase as (essentially) a proxy for some better mix of policies, or as a way of signaling that they care about the well-being of American workers and that they’re willing to use the power of government to improve their well-being. And most of the conservatives opposed to a minimum wage increase are also disinclined toward active labor market policies of the kind Strain has in mind, including an expansion of federal wage subsidies, on the grounds that such policies represent big government overreach, or that they involve spending money we don’t have. It’s no wonder that low- and middle-income voters are skeptical as to whether conservatives are doing enough to defend their interests.

Over the last couple of weeks, I binge-watched all 22 episodes from the first season of Marvel’s Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. Like many viewers, I had enjoyed the pilot, in which a minor character from the Marvel movie canon who had apparently been killed off in 2012’s The Avengers was resurrected to lead a team of mere mortals trying to maintain order in a universe full of superheroes. And like more than half of those viewers, I had fled after the next few episodes bored me out of my skull. The freak-of-the-week plotting was slack. The internal logic was nonexistent, even for comic-book material; one episode hinged on S.H.I.E.L.D.’s refusal to believe someone might be telekinetic, but their skepticism was expressed while they were nonchalantly sorting through debris left by gods who traveled through an interdimensional portal from another world. The tonal inconsistency (The A-Team one week, The X-Files the next) felt like the hallmark of a series that didn’t know what it wanted to be. And the main characters — boss, lady boss, nerd, she-nerd, hunk, tech girl — were so two-dimensional that you’d almost think they’d been conceived as a series of drawings with voice bubbles near their heads.

I went back because I heard it had gotten better, and the rumors were true: In the last nine hours of its first season on ABC, Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. settled into a confident groove and found its identity as a modestly brisk and suspenseful, fully serialized adventure drama, like Alias in its heyday but with more chrome, CG, and backstory. The characterizations are still threadbare, but in retrospect, many of the plot threads and portents that felt random and cluttered in the first half of the season turned out to be shrewdly laying track for the second. Not that it mattered. Bad is bad, and those first 11 hours were still largely cruddy.

In the world of comic books, decades-old characters — and sometimes entire product lines — are constantly being rebooted with “This. Changes. Everything” events that actually just change a couple of things. In a medium in which you can always get away with shouting “Do over!” it’s standard procedure to end a long run of draggy issues with a big starting-from-scratch flourish, on the assumption that faithful if irked readers will stay on board and those who have drifted away will return. But as Marvel and ABC learned the hard way this year, TV is a different business: You don’t get 11 hours of leeway for public growing pains, and — with extremely rare exceptions — people don’t come running back just because Twitter spreads the word that you’ve finally nailed it. Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D.’s creative improvement did not twitch the ratings needle even slightly: The season’s second half fared even worse than the bad episodes that pushed everyone away. Demographically, the series maintained enough strength to earn its second-season renewal,⁴ although it was probably a fait accompli in any case given Marvel’s importance to Disney, which owns ABC (and, full disclosure, Grantland). But if the bleeding continues, the already inevitable season-ending tie-in to the opening of the next Avengers movie (scheduled for May 1, 2015) could be the show’s swan song.

Even as they dominate the box office, comic-book movies are approaching a moment fraught with peril. If one definition of a bubble is that everybody with an investment to protect insists that it isn’t a bubble, then we should probably take as a warning the breezy assertion of Marvel’s chief creative officer, Joe Quesada, that “We’re not the Western … The sky’s really the limit for us, as long as we as a collective industry continue to produce great material.” But let’s give him the benefit of the doubt and try out a more specific definition: A bubble reaches its maximum pre-pop circumference when the manufacturers of a product double down even as trouble spots begin to appear.

That, I would argue, is what has happened in the last month, in both movies and television. Last season’s prime-time schedule included two hour-long network series based on comic books: S.H.I.E.L.D. and the CW’s Arrow, a clever, Easter egg–packed take on a problematic, frequently overhauled DC character that draws 2 million or 3 million viewers — a true-believers-only audience of a size that would get it canceled on a Big Four network. (S.H.I.E.L.D.’s same-day audience hovers around 6 million.)⁵ Those aren’t numbers that should spark an imitative frenzy. Nevertheless, everybody wants in on the action. Marvel not only got a S.H.I.E.L.D. renewal but also sold an eight-episode Captain America spinoff, Agent Carter, to ABC. DC oversaw four pilots and saw every one of them go to series — The Flash and iZombie will air on the CW, Constantine (an adaptation of Hellblazer, which spawned an indifferently received Keanu Reeves movie a decade ago) will join NBC’s lineup, and the Batman prequel Gotham, featuring everybody but Batman, is Fox’s big hope for fall. (That’s not even counting the 60 hours of Marvel live-action series, beginning with 13 hours of Daredevil, that Netflix will launch next year.)

On the movie front, things are even sweatier: Because ownership of Marvel’s properties has been scattered across several studios over the years, and because DC (via Warner Bros.) is finally lumbering forth with its own late-arriving attempt to ape Marvel’s success, no fewer than five different companies are trying to get in the game, stay in the game, or own the game. Fox will follow this weekend’s X-Men: Days of Future Past, a huge, very expensive attempt to extend a series that is now seven films and 14 years old, with at least three sequels and/or spinoffs as well as a Fantastic Four reboot (2015), for which it has already planned the sequel, because these days only wusses wait for “popular demand.” Last week Universal announced an “untitled event project” for 2016 that is widely rumored to showcase the one biggish Marvel character it owns, Sub-Mariner. The official Marvel Universe, released by its owner, Disney — the one that started with Iron Man in 2008, crested with The Avengers, and is now nine movies old — is planning two more a year at least through 2018, starting with the incongruously lighthearted-looking Guardians of the Galaxy in August. And then there’s Spider-Man: The disappointing performance of Sony’s Amazing Spider-Man 2, by far the lowest-grossing domestically of the five films in the series, suggests serious audience weariness with a premature reboot; that damaged brand could use a multiyear rest. But undaunted, Sony is zipping ahead with two sequels and two spinoffs over the next four years.

There is a wishful whiff of “too big to fail” thinking, if not outright tulip fever, about this multi-studio scrum involving dozens of projects, billions of dollars, and the fervent belief that the audience will remain big enough to prevent these movies from cannibalizing one another. Shouldn’t the struggle of Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D., which was spun out of the highest-grossing comic-book movie in history and which could barely get through its freshman season, give everyone pause? Sure, execution counts: The second Captain America movie has outgrossed the first by $75 million because it’s better, and Spidey’s downward spiral is largely the fault of weak, repetitive storytelling (and also of a character too light and thin to support such somber and protracted attention). If Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. had been at its strongest from day one, perhaps we’d be talking about it as a major hit rather than, as the New York Times recently called it, a “disappointment” that proved “inaccessible for many rank-and-file viewers.”

But my all-you-can-eat gorging on the series made me aware of a deeper and more systemic problem — one that suggests that the comic-book culture that spawned all this filmmaking may have to be cut loose if the genre is to continue to thrive. Has the zeal and dedication of the fans themselves — and the attention paid to them — become the problem? If so, the solution is pretty stark. As Heroes — the famous comics-inspired flameout now being revived by NBC — might put it: Kill the cheerleaders, save the world.

Comic-book readers are a noisy, enthusiastic, and committed demographic. But for all the cosplay and convention-going, they’re also a tiny one. The best-selling monthly comic book in the first quarter of this year was DC’s Batman, which sold slightly more than 100,000 copies per issue. Even for popular characters like the Flash, Thor, Wolverine, and the X-Men, 30,000 to 60,000 copies is more typical. That has long meant that, from a business standpoint, the primary job of a comic book is to entice readers to buy other comic books, usually by suggesting that they have been lucky enough to stumble onto a small part of a larger story that can be fully appreciated only by investing in the entire universe alluded to in editors’ teases (“As explained in Deadpool #17!”), references, or promises of multi-part, multi-title crossovers. Comic books exist in a permanent state of implication: Something really big is always about to happen, apocalypse is just around the corner, staggering ramifications are forever impending, never quite here.

And in the last 10 years, no company has exploited that more effectively than Marvel. The M.O. of its movies and TV shows is always to suggest that you are entering a world that will reward your commitment to consume more Marvel products — one of which is teased in a post-credits sequence at the end of every film. The idea is that interconnectedness enhances the content, but in practice, interconnectedness often becomes the content; the stories themselves can play as flat, by-the-numbers action enriched mainly by the way they link to the larger whole. It’s not a particularly big deal that in 2012, the Avengers defeated a bunch of otherworldly bad guys while they laid waste to the streets and buildings of New York City; we get three summer movies like that every year. The point is that it took five earlier films to build to that humdrum grandiosity and you had to see them all! In Marvel movies, the anticipation is the orgasm.

Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. is the most brazen manifestation of this branding ethos; it was conceived as a rest stop where fans of the Marvel Universe movies could satisfy their appetite for more content. That content was intended to steer them back to the on-ramp toward more movies, which would then, in turn, drive audiences back toward the show, and so forth unto eternity. But that kind of mammoth strategizing can too easily undercut the fact that a TV show is supposed to be its own reward. To tell its creators that they can do whatever they want as long as they don’t use any good superheroes from the Marvel Universe is risky. To force them to waste an episode or two last fall leading out from the truly dumb Thor: The Dark World is self-defeating. And to have the spring episodes (and the entire direction of the series) tied in so closely to Captain America: The Winter Soldier that you had to see the movie in its first four days of release to maintain perfect continuity is to impose an undue burden (however cleverly handled) on a show and its viewers.

Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. felt, for too much of its season, like a means rather than an end — a brand extension of the movies that couldn’t find a heartbeat as a freestanding series. Here, Marvel seemed to be saying. We’ll throw you one carefully negotiated minute of Samuel L. Jackson as Nick Fury in this episode, a passing reference to Iron Man in the next, a minor character from Thor two weeks from now, and a vague sense that a lot of teen mutants are out there even though rights issues mean that X-Men must never be mentioned. Are you not entertained?

Not really, as it turned out, because entertainment that feels designed to be peripheral to larger entertainment isn’t that entertaining. Constant referentiality is neither good world-building nor good storytelling, and S.H.I.E.L.D. didn’t really get on its feet until it came up with a central plotline — the agency was revealed to have been infiltrated for decades by a Nazi cult and one of the six team members was a traitor — that could be enjoyed by someone who had never read a comic book or seen a Marvel movie.

But by then, it may have been too late. During its first half-season, the series became an agonized case study in the self-defeat of trying to serve too many potential constituencies: committed viewers who crave serialized storytelling; casual viewers who want to be able to jump in and out; comic-book fanboys who expect their dedication and knowledge to be catered to (or at least winked at); comic-book-movie fans who like action and sci-fi spectacle and don’t give a crap about “mythology”; kids watching at 8 p.m. (a slot, and a demographic, the series will leave behind next season); ’shippers who live for what one comics vet who helped create the original S.H.I.E.L.D. angrily dismissed as “low-grade, touchy-feely soap opera”; boys who don’t like it when ladies talk or do things; and the Lost generation, a viewership for whom long-form storytelling is primarily about amassing multiple clues to an eventual payoff that cannot possibly meet expectations.

Faced with so many mouths to feed, Marvel tripped over a paradox — hard-core comic-book buffs are about 4 percent of the show’s total audience, but they make about 80 percent of the noise. No wonder Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. — a creation overseen by that hard-core 4 percent — felt compelled to keep servicing them. Figures from the Marvel Universe — Deathlok, Lorelei, Agent Victoria Hand — were introduced in the name of feeding the faithful, with little regard to how they functioned as characters for the vast majority of viewers to whom those names mean nothing. It doesn’t matter that Lorelei, a beautiful, sexually manipulative Asgardian who can enslave men with her voice, has been kicking around the Thor comic books for 30 years and that her mere presence on TV is a nod to the in-the-know. As a villainess in a show aimed primarily at adults, she is as risible as the almost identical version that Joan Collins played for laughs in the Adam West Batman series 50 years ago, not to mention an unwelcome reminder of how befuddled most superhero comic books remain about what to do with women. Promises of something larger were made in so many early S.H.I.E.L.D. episodes that the names began to blur: The Big Bad was the Centipede Group. No, “the Clairvoyant.” No, Hydra! No, whoever has custody of the Infinity Stones! For people who read comic books, that kind of terminological overexuberance can create a pleasing sense of something perpetually impending and epic. For everyone else, I suspect the reaction was closer to “What is this shit, and exactly how much of it do I have to keep track of?” In its zeal to go big, S.H.I.E.L.D. didn’t simply lose viewers; it locked them out.

The cost of that approach may be starting to sink in. By the time Gotham was announced as part of Fox’s fall 2014 schedule a couple weeks ago, the Internet had already been going wild with every new casting report — Young Riddler! Young Catwoman! Young Bruce Wayne! Why no Joker yet?! But even though he now has custody of the single comic-book property with which the American public has the deepest familiarity, Fox head Kevin Reilly sounded a note of appropriate caution. Gotham can succeed, he said, “as long as we keep our eyes on what’s important, which is to create a great television show with captivating characters and tight storytelling. We can’t get caught up in the trappings of the franchise.”

“The trappings of the franchise” is a polite and politic way of saying that Gotham has to risk, and perhaps even court, nerd wrath in the name of the greater good, which is to create entertainment that is pleasurable for the story it tells, not for the promise of a larger world that it obsessively evokes but never delivers. Satisfaction that’s always one movie or episode away isn’t a legitimate artistic model. And as Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D.’s rough road demonstrates, it’s also bad for business. The patience of an audience is never quite as limitless as it appears. Even in the middle of a boom. And especially at the end of a bubble. 

Illustration by Alexis Ziritt

And another comic book adaptation is headed for TV. NBC has announced it has picked up Constantine, based on the DC comics character, as pitched by Daniel Cerone and David S. Goyer.

Welsh actor Matt Ryan got cast in the title role, and while we’ve seen him in character already, along with today’s news we also now have a first still from a scene of the actual show, showing Ryan’s Constantine and Lucy Griffiths as Liv, a young woman who can see the supernatural.

Looks good from here. This should show up on NBC’s fall schedule.

NBC Picks Up Constantine To Series; First Still Image Released

Though it’s related in a slightly fudgey fashion, Sci-Fi Now’s new interview with Bryan Singer appears to be confirming plans to recast some central X-Men for the upcoming Apocalypse.

Though I’ve been told – and stand by my source – that the “older X-Men” will make some sort of appearance in Apocalypse, the film will focus on the First Class crew in the 80s. Singer now says that this opens up for a story about his first X-Men line-up coming together.

Sci-Fi Now had a proposal about this, and Singer had something say about that proposal. Here’s how they put it:

Of course, this means X-Men: Apocalypse is in the right time zone to revisit and recast iconic original characters Cyclops, Jean Grey and Storm.

Cyclops and Jean Grey, played by James Marsden and Famke Janssen, were killed in X-Men: The Last Stand (although Janssen reprised the role for dream sequences in The Wolverine), while Halle Berry returns as Storm for the post-apocalyptic segments of X-Men: Days Of Future Past.

“Yeah,” Singer confirms when that exact question is put to him, “exactly.”

So, either he’s going to recast the roles or he meant something else. I doubt anybody will get face time with him soon to confirm, so we’ll be left hanging a while, I think.

More time for the internet to fancast, anyway.

X-Men: Apocalypse Seems Set To Feature Younger, Re-Cast Versions Of Storm, Jean Grey And Cyclops

It is the elephant in the room as we approach 2016. Not that the issues of dynasties and oligarchies are not being aired. They are, relentlessly. But have we truly absorbed the sheer national embarrassment that out of a country of more than 300 million people, the two likeliest presidential nominees for the two major parties will be the wife of a former president and the brother and son of two former presidents? It’s impossible to think of any developed Western democracy that could even begin to match this pathetic, incestuous indictment of a democratic system.

Britain – that repository of privilege and class and monarchy? Well, two Miliband brothers did vie to become leader of the opposition quite recently, I suppose. But after that: not so much. France? Well, there is Marine le Pen. Canada? Germany? I’m sure readers can turn up some other dynastic impulses in other Western countries. But I can’t believe they can rival the concentration of family power in the US.

Now of course the US has long been dynastic in its politics. From the Adamses to the Roosevelts and the Tafts to the Kennedys, America’s robust capitalist economy has thrown up wealthy, connected families who have brought entire family trees into office. And it’s not all bad. Some have been motivated by more than power – some even dedicated to noblesse oblige. And the last two elections – in which a previously obscure son of a single mother managed to prevent a dynastic coronation in his own party and then defeated another family political dynasty, the Romneys – show that we’re not Rome yet.

But surely, our new emperors are looking more Roman by the day. The names themselves – like Caesar or Tudor – become brands. The brands create large, sprawling networks of hangers-on, former elected officials, fundraisers, media stars, and all the corporate synergy something like the Clinton Foundation can muster up. Politics becomes at times about daddy issues, or fidelity questions, or succession crises – like the monarchies of old. And outsiders have fewer chances of breaking through the celebrity-pol chatter – because the sheer cost of politics has become so astonishing in an era where there are close to no limits on campaign finance.

Is there anything to be done? Vote for Rand Paul … oh, wait a minute.

He only has his job because of his father as well. When even the mavericks are dynasts, you begin to see the scope of the problem. And what’s striking about American dynasticism is its relative indifference to criticism. In fact, dynasty is often embraced as an advantage. I can’t believe that George W. Bush would have been elected without his family name, for example, and the early fundraising prowess it bestowed on him. It gave him a leg-up in Texas and then the dynasty reassured those who were worried about his, let us say, jejune qualities, that there was a responsible family business to back up the new entrepreneur. And so Cheney was the back-stop. And we know where that ended up. The idea that the dauphin would retain one of the last king’s advisers is so … old Europe. By which I mean circa 1500 – 1900.

And to watch Dubya wax lyrical about his brother without even a trace of embarrassment at the open dynasticism of it all is almost as disturbing as the Clinton family’s prepping of Chelsea for heir apparent. Both the Bushes and the Clintons are shameless about this. Hillary will clasp Bill to her side as an asset for her future administration, just as Jeb could invoke the increasingly fond memories of his father. And no one really protests the fetid privilege and undemocratic spirit of the entire enterprise. I guess it’s just one of those American quirks that keeps getting quirkier.

But one thing I don’t think we’ve really thought through is how this picture of late-American oligarchy and dynasticism affects America’s stature in the world. America’s preaching about equality of opportunity and democratic virtues cannot but be etiolated by the sense that it’s all a scam, that America is one big oligarchy perpetuating its incestuous elites in a manner far more similar to a declining monarchy than a rising, robust democracy. That weakens the soft power America can wield, and undermines the ideals America has previously stood for. All Americans are equal, but a tiny few, by virtue of birth, are far, far more equal than others. I just want to utter a sharp protest – before we forget about it all, all over again.

The following is an excerpt from Blake J. Harris’s new book, Console Wars. It has been slightly modified for this publication.

On September 23, 1889, just weeks before his thirtieth birthday, an entrepreneur named Fusajiro Yamauchi opened a small, rickety-looking shop in the heart of Kyoto. To attract the attention of passing rickshaws and wealthy denizens, he inscribed the name of his new enterprise on the storefront window: Nintendo, which had been selected by combining the kanji characters nin, ten, and do. Taken together, they meant roughly “leave luck to heaven” — though, like most successful entrepreneurs, Yamauchi found success by making his own luck. In an era where most businessmen were content to survive off the modest returns of regional mainstays such as sake, silk, and tea, he decided it was time to try something new. So instead of selling a conventional product, Fusajiro Yamauchi opted for a controversial one, a product that the Japanese government had legalized only five years earlier: playing cards.

In the heart of Kyoto, he and a small team of employees crafted paper from the bark of mulberry trees, mixed with soft clay, and then added the hanafuda card designs with inks made from berries and flower petals. Nintendo’s cards, particularly a series called Daitoryo (which featured an outline of Napoleon Bonaparte on the package), became the most successful in all of Kyoto.

After several decades of staggering success, Fusajiro Yamauchi retired in 1929 and was succeeded by his son-in-law Sekiryo Yamauchi, who ran Nintendo efficiently for nineteen years, but in 1948 he had a stroke and was forced to retire. With no male children, he offered Nintendo’s presidency to his grandson, Hiroshi, who was twenty-one and studying law at Waseda University. It didn’t take long for Hiroshi Yamauchi to make his presence known. He fired every manager that had been appointed by his grandfather and replaced them with young go-getters who he believed could usher Nintendo beyond its conservative past.

With innovation on his mind,Yamauchi branched out into a number of other, less lucrative endeavors, including an instant-rice company and a pay-by-the-hour “love hotel.” These disappointments led Yamauchi to the conclusion that Nintendo’s greatest asset was the meticulous distribution system that it had built over decades of selling playing cards. With such an intricate and expansive pipeline already in place, he narrowed his entrepreneurial scope to products that could be sold in toy and department stores and settled upon a new category called “videogames.”

Yamauchi wanted Nintendo to aggressively get into the videogame business, which was really two separate businesses: home consoles and coin-operated arcade games. He saw the potential in these industries and took the necessary steps for Nintendo to enter both. Despite middling results from titles like Wild Gunman and Battle Shark, Yamauchi remained committed to his new vision and continued to allocate a vast amount of resources toward videogames. In 1977 Nintendo released a shoebox-sized orange console called the Color TV-Game 6, which played six slightly different versions of electronic tennis and was met with a mixed reception. Though the console managed to sell one million units, it ultimately lost money. Nevertheless, Yamauchi remained undeterred. Nintendo continued to put out arcade games (striking out with duds like Monkey Magic and Block Fever) and also continued to release home consoles (like the Color TV-Game 15, which offered fifteen slightly different versions of electronic tennis).

By this point, Nintendo already had penetrated most of Japan, and so Yamauchi set his sights on the place where the videogame frenzy had started: America.

1. Arakawa

Yamauchi had dipped a toe into this red, white, and blue pool a few years earlier and was encouraged by the results. In the late 1970s Nintendo had begun working with a trading company that would export arcade cabinets to American distributors, who would in turn sell these games to vendors in the United States. Though the profits from this arrangement were minimal, Yamauchi believed that if he could cut out the trading companies and send over someone he trusted to grow Nintendo’s business organically, then there was a lot of money to be made.

The American market would be risky, tricky, and perpetually persnickety. There appeared to be only one man properly equipped for the challenge: Minoru Arakawa, a frustratingly shy but brilliant thirty-four-year-old MIT graduate. Not only did Arakawa possess the insight and intellect to open a U.S. division of Nintendo, but he was already living in North America and had an incalculable fondness for America (some of his most cherished memories had come from a post college cross-country trip he’d taken in a used Volkswagen bus).

In every way, Minoru Arakawa appeared to be the perfect candidate … except that he happened to be married to Yamauchi’s daughter, Yoko, who blamed Nintendo for turning her father callous. She simply refused to let her husband join Nintendo, as she did not want to watch history repeat itself.

Yamauchi initially proposed the idea to Arakawa in early 1980. Following a pleasant family dinner, Yamauchi spent two hours discussing his plans for the expansion of Nintendo and concluded by stating that the success of his plan hinged on Arakawa. Anticipating his daughter’s reluctance, Yamauchi explained that this American division would be a completely independent subsidiary. Arakawa wrestled with the decision as well as with the objections of his wife, who cautioned him that no matter what he accomplished, he would always be perceived as nothing more than the son-in-law. Arakawa decided that the opportunity was too good to pass up, and in May 1980 he and his wife left Vancouver to start Nintendo of America (NOA).

Arakawa and his wife spent their days at the office and their nights observing games and players at local arcades. They learned a lot this way, but no amount of knowledge could make up for the fact that for Nintendo to gain a foothold, they needed a strong sales network. So Arakawa set up a meeting with a couple of guys who he thought might be able to help: Al Stone and Ron Judy.

2. Stone and Judy

Al Stone and Ron Judy were old friends from the University of Washington, where they had lived in the same frat house and had been known to embark on promising get-rich-quick schemes together (like buying soon-to-be-discarded local wine cheaply and then reselling it to their college brethren with less sophisticated palates). After graduating, they started a trucking business in Seattle called Chase Express. Chase struggled, and while they continued to invest in it and hope for a turnaround, they also began looking for alternative business opportunities.

They eventually found their answer, though it still involved big rigs. Through a friend in Hawaii, Ron Judy had been informed that a Japanese trading company was seeking a distributor to sell some arcade games made by Nintendo. Intrigued, he agreed to test the waters and received a crate containing a few arcade cabinets of Nintendo’s Space Fever. Though the game was little more than a shameless rip-off of Taito’s Space Invaders, Judy got his brother-in-law to place the games in some of the taverns he owned in south Seattle. Much to his delight, the machines were quickly overrun with quarters, which convinced him and Stone that this was their future. They formed a distribution company called Far East Video and used their assets from the trucking industry to travel around the country and sell Nintendo games to bars, arcades, hotel lounges, and pizza parlors.

Space Fever was followed by Space Launcher (underwhelming), which was followed by Space Firebird (disappointing), which was followed by a slew of unsuccessful non-space-themed games. After this string of mediocre misfires, Stone and Judy were ready to quit, and Arakawa couldn’t help but reconsider his new vocation. More than ever, Nintendo of America needed a megahit, like Pong or Pac-Man. And just when it appeared time was running out, Arakawa believed that he’d found what he needed: Radarscope.

At first glance, Radarscope may have appeared to be just another shoot-’em-up space game, but it distinguished itself with incredibly sharp graphics and an innovative 3-D perspective. After receiving positive feedback from test locations around the Seattle area, Arakawa invested much of NOA’s remaining resources in three thousand units. But a few weeks later, before the rest of the arcade cabinets even arrived, Arakawa felt an ominous chill upon revisiting the test locations, where he noticed that nobody was playing his crucial new game. That foreboding was validated after the three thousand units finally arrived and Stone and Judy found that operators had little interest. Radarscope was fun at first, the consensus appeared to be, but it lacked replay value.

3. Miyamoto

With so much invested in this game, the last remaining hope was for a designer in Japan to quickly create a game and send over processors with that new game to America, where NOA employees could swap out the motherboard and then repaint the arcade cabinets. This task was given to Shigeru Miyamoto, a floppy-haired first-time designer who believed that videogames should be treated with the same respect given to books, movies, and television shows. His efforts to elevate the art form were given a boost when he was informed that Nintendo was close to finalizing a licensing deal with King Features, enabling him to develop his game around the popular cartoon series Popeye the Sailor Man. Using those characters, he began crafting a game where Popeye must rescue his beloved Olive Oyl by hopping over obstacles tossed in his way by his obese archenemy, Bluto.

Shipments containing the code for Miyamoto’s new game began to arrive. Due to last-minute negotiation issues with King Features, Nintendo had lost the rights to Popeye, which forced Miyamoto to come up with something else. As a result, Arakawa, Stone, Judy, and a handful of warehouse employees didn’t know what to expect. They inserted the new processor into one of the thousands of unsold Radarscope machines and then watched the lights flicker as the words “Donkey Kong” came to life on the arcade screen. The initial impression was that this was a silly game with an even sillier name. Who would possibly want to play a game where a tiny red plumber must rescue his beloved princess by hopping over obstacles tossed in his way by an obese gorilla? Yet, with no remaining options, Stone and Judy set out across the country to sell it.

Never before had there been a quarter magnet quite like Donkey Kong. It was so successful, in fact, that it eventually attracted the attention of a major Hollywood studio, whose high-priced legal team believed that the game violated copyrights, and they threatened to crush Nintendo. To avoid this potentially crippling blow, Arakawa turned to the only lawyer he knew in Seattle: Howard Lincoln, an elegant, imposing former naval attorney whose only claim to fame was having modeled for Norman Rockwell’s painting The Scoutmaster when he was a child.

4. Lincoln

Lincoln had first crossed paths with Arakawa about one year earlier when Stone and Judy needed him to review their contract with Nintendo of America. After that, Lincoln slowly but surely took on the role of Arakawa’s consigliere, weighing in on any matter with legal ramifications. As Nintendo of America grew, Lincoln drew up new employment agreements, looked at various business deals, and handled some tough matters (like siccing the U.S. marshals on Donkey Kong counterfeiters). Through it all, Lincoln and Arakawa forged an unshakable friendship. Which is why Lincoln was the first person Arakawa contacted when, in April 1982, MCA Universal sent a telex to NCL explaining that Nintendo had forty-eight hours to hand over all profits from Donkey Kong due to the game’s copyright infringement on their 1933 classic King Kong.

It didn’t take long for them to realize that this was a high-stakes shakedown. Though never explicit, Universal’s ultimatum was simple: Settle or we’ll make life at Nintendo so difficult that the company will fold. The prudent thing to do was pay the ransom. But Lincoln had an ace tucked up his sleeve: in all of his research, there didn’t appear to be a single document indicating that Universal had trademarked King Kong, which would place the gorilla in the public domain. And in early 1983, Judge Robert W. Sweet sided with Nintendo. He concluded that they had not infringed and, as Lincoln had predicted earlier, he awarded Nintendo over $1 million in legal fees and damages.

The Donkey Kong fiasco-turned-feat caused many ripples, but three waves in particular were instrumental in creating the eventual tsunami that would be Nintendo. First, Lincoln became NOA’s senior vice president. Second the countersuit set the tone for the litigious stance that many would say later defined the company. And third — and most importantly — the verdict kept the Donkey cash flowing, providing Nintendo with a war chest at what would soon prove to be a crucial moment.

5. Borofsky and Associates

By the early 1980s, the videogame bonanza had become so lucrative that everyone wanted in. This included companies that had no business entering the market (like Purina), companies that didn’t understand the market (like Dunhill Electronics, whose Tax Avoiders allowed players to jockey past a maze of evil accountants and onerous IRS agents), and lowbrow outfits that polarized the market (like Mystique, whose flair for pornographic titles was highlighted by their 1982 anticlassic Custer’s Revenge, which follows a naked cowboy on his quest to rape Native American women). The marketplace was overrun by a glut of smut, muck, and mediocrity.

And just like that, the North American videogame industry ground to a halt. Hardware companies (like Atari) went bankrupt, software companies (like Sega) were sold for pennies on the dollar, and retailers (like Sears) vowed never to go into the business again. Meanwhile, Nintendo quietly glided through the bloody waters on a gorilla-shaped raft. The continuing cash flow from Donkey Kong enabled Arakawa, Stone, Judy, and Lincoln to dream of a new world order, one where NOA miraculously resurrected the industry and Nintendo reigned supreme. Not now, perhaps, but one day soon.

In Japan, however, that time had already come. Yamauchi’s large investment in R&D had paid off in the Family Computer. The Famicom, as it was commonly called, was an 8-bit console that stood head and shoulders above anything that had ever come before. It was released in July 1983 along with three games: Donkey Kong, Donkey Kong Jr., and Popeye, which Miyamoto ended up designing after licensing negotiations got back on track. The Famicom stumbled out of the gate but was soon rescued by heavy advertising and the release that September of Super Mario Bros. (another Miyamoto brainchild).

As sales soared to staggering heights, Yamauchi pressured his son-in-law to introduce the Famicom in America. Arakawa resisted, exercising patience. The U.S. market was still licking its wounds from the videogame crash, and releasing the right console at the wrong time would be a recipe for disaster. For this reason, he continued to rebuff the suggestion until 1984, when he was finally willing to consider the notion— but only if the console Nintendo of America sold looked nothing like a console at all.

This wolf-in-sheep’s-clothing logic led to the Advanced Video System (AVS). Though the guts of this machine were nearly identical to the Famicom’s, the AVS hardly resembled its foreign relative. It came with a computer keyboard, a musical keyboard, and a cassette recorder; and aesthetically, it was slim and sleek, with a subdued gray coloring that contrasted sharply with the Famicom’s peppy red and white palette. Nintendo’s AVS, the non-console console, was first introduced at the 1984 Winter Consumer Electronics Show. Arakawa simply wanted to gauge the market reaction, which was distressing: nothing but scoffs, sighs, and sob stories. Nobody there wanted anything to do with the AVS, except for a tanned man with piercing blue eyes who stared at the Advanced Video System as if it were the sword in the stone. He then introduced himself with an understated sureness that would have made even King Arthur jealous. His name was Sam Borofsky.

Borofsky ran Sam Borofsky Associates, a marketing and sales representative firm based in Manhattan. Back in the late seventies, they became one of the first firms to represent videogames, and at the height of the boom they had been responsible for over 30 percent of Atari’s sales. If Nintendo of America ever wanted retailers to reopen their doors, then these were the guys who ought to do the knocking. From Borofsky’s end, the attraction was equally strong. Ever since Atari had imploded, he’d been scouring the country in search of the next big thing, and as he reviewed what Nintendo had to offer, he believed he had found it.

Arakawa, however, still needed convincing, which Borofsky was happy to provide. He spent months detailing the reasons for Atari’s downfall and outlining plans for a proposed launch. Meanwhile, Nintendo of America put another new costume on the Famicom, dressing it up as an all-in-one entertainment center for kids. The result of the rebranding effort was a clunky gray lunchbox-like contraption and, along with that, a new lexicon to differentiate it from its predecessors: cartridges were now dubbed Game Paks, the hardware was dubbed the Control Deck, and the entire videogame console was rechristened the Nintendo Entertainment System (NES). And to round out the renovation, the NES came with a pair of groundbreaking peripherals: a slick light-zapper gun and an amiable interactive robot named R.O.B.

6. The Launch

Focus groups suggested that the NES would be a colossal flop, R.O.B. kept malfunctioning during pitches, and the press showed no interest. Arakawa, however, remained undeterred. He temporarily relocated a handful of employees to the East Coast after leasing a warehouse in Hackensack, New Jersey, where Nintendo could house inventory, build in-store displays, and, most important, resemble a legitimate company to still-skeptical retailers. To keep tabs on the progress, Ron Judy made frequent visits to New York, often accompanied by Bruce Lowry, NOA’s bright and blustery VP of sales. Lowry was occasionally able to help Borofsky persuade the big toy chains. At the top of their wish list was Toys “R” Us, whose eventual decision to stock the NES provided Nintendo with much-needed momentum going into the launch.

On the morning of the big day, the Nintendo of America team gathered at FAO Schwarz, where Nintendo had paid for an elaborate window display and an attractive floor space that featured a small mountain of televisions with game footage playing. The moment of truth had finally arrived, and within moments of the store’s opening an excited customer eagerly approached the display, grabbing an NES and all fifteen of its games. The NOA team looked on, watching everything they had been working toward so suddenly come to fruition. It was a dream come true — until they were snapped back to reality upon learning that Customer #1 was actually just a competitor doing due diligence.

That Christmas, the NES was available in over five hundred stores. Though no staggering success, Nintendo managed to sell half of the 100,000 units they’d stocked, which effectively proved to the world that the videogame industry was not dead but had simply been hibernating.

Heading into 1987, what NOA really needed was someone to help roll out the NES nationwide and ensure that at the end of this roller-coaster ride, Nintendo would wind up on top. Someone to prove that the NES was more than just this year’s Christmas fad. Someone who could exploit the potential for expansion and transform Nintendo from a niche sensation into a global juggernaut.

7. Main

That someone turned out to be Peter Main, though at the time he was dealing with matters much more pressing than corporate expansion: beef dip sandwiches and garlic butter buns. As the president of White Spot, a Canadian fast-food chain, Main was used to eating, sleeping, and breathing burgers, but in the summer of 1985 his mind went into overdrive when an outbreak of botulism swept through Vancouver. Health officials alleged that improper refrigeration of garlic oil concentrate was the likely cause and that Main’s restaurants were responsible for the epidemic. Following this horrifying news, he spent much of the next year doing damage control, ensuring that the issue had been resolved and defending the integrity of his beef dip sandwich. When the public outcry finally died down and White Spot’s reputation was restored, he stepped down from his post and took a long vacation to decide what he’d like to do next. That’s when Arakawa called and asked Main to join Nintendo of America.

Before Peter Main and Minoru Arakawa were ever colleagues they were friends, and ever since Arakawa had left Vancouver to start NOA, he had been trying to recruit Main. For years Main declined these job offers. Videogames were a far cry from hamburgers, but even though he turned down Arakawa, he often provided friendly advice on Nintendo of America’s strange yet profitable forays into the restaurant business (Arakawa had gone ahead and bought the British Columbia franchise rights to Chuck E. Cheese as well as a pair of seafood bistros in Vancouver). Main’s expertise as a restauranteur only fueled Arakawa’s desire to rope him in, but time after time Main declined the overtures — until that fateful call in late 1986. This time Main was open to a major life change, and it didn’t hurt that Ron Judy was planning to relocate to Europe, which would effectively make Main NOA’s number three.

Though Main lacked any videogame experience, his outsider mentality allowed him to look at the business as something novel and spectacular. To spread this new gospel, he choreographed what he would later describe as Nintendo’s “storming of Normandy,” a full-out advertising, promotion, and distribution blitz that accompanied the rollout of the NES into stores nationwide. Meanwhile, Main provided a trustworthy-looking corporate (and Caucasian) face to a company that many in the outside world still viewed as a foreign curiosity. Main was an expert charmer. And that charm, that talent for cultivating friendships, gained the company credibility with Wall Street, trust from retailers, and respect from parents wanting to know what they were buying.

Month after month, Nintendo of America grew stronger. They sold 2.3 million consoles in 1987 and 6.1 million in 1988. As staggering as these numbers were, sales of the hardware were nothing compared to the software: the company unloaded 10 million games in 1987, and 33 million more in 1988. With numbers like these, it didn’t take Main long to realize that, at the end of the day, the console was just the movie theater, but it was the movies that kept people coming back for more. This personal revelation led to a Hollywood-like title-driven business strategy, and his coining of the phrase “the name of the game is the game.”

Main’s approach to sales and marketing coincided with Arakawa’s overarching philosophy of “quality over quantity.” As Nintendo exploded, there were plenty of opportunities to make a quick buck (hardware upgrades, unnecessary peripherals), exploit the company’s beloved characters (movies, theme parks), or dilute the brand by trying to attract an audience older than Nintendo’s six-to-fourteen-year-olds. But these kinds of things didn’t interest Arakawa. What propelled him was a desire to continually provide Nintendo’s customers with a unique user experience. He set up a toll-free telephone line where Nintendo “Game Counselors” were available all day to help players get through difficult levels, and he initiated the Nintendo Fun Club, which sent a free newsletter to any customer who had sent in a warranty card. Both programs were very costly and could have been offset by charging small fees or obtaining sponsorship, but Arakawa believed that doing so would compromise Nintendo’s mission. And to further safeguard Nintendo from the dangers of impurity, he and his team put into place a series of controversial measures:

1. The Nintendo Seal of Quality: Ron Judy had the novel idea of mandating that all games pass a stringent series of tests to be deemed Nintendo-worthy, ensuring high-caliber product and making software developers beholden to Nintendo’s approval.

2. Third-party licensing program: Howard Lincoln’s strict licensing agreement enabled software designers to make games for the NES but restricted the quantity they could make (five titles per year), required full payment up front (months before revenue from a game would be seen), and charged a hefty royalty (around 10 percent). In addition to these stringent terms, all game makers needed to purchase their cartridges directly from Nintendo.

3. Inventory management: Heeding Sam Borofsky’s suggestion, Peter Main devised an incredibly rigid distribution strategy that purposefully provided licensees and retailers with only a fraction of the products they requested. The goal of this technique was twofold: to create a frenzy for whatever products were available, and to protect overeager industry players from themselves.

Though NOA’s methods drew ire from retailers, anger from software developers, and eventually allegations of antitrust violations from the U.S. government, there was no denying that whatever Nintendo was doing was working — so well, in fact, that Peter Main needed additional reinforcements as he inflicted Nintendo-mania on his adopted homeland.

8. Nintendo Power

Help came in the form of Bill White, a straitlaced marketing whiz whose smallish eyes and oversized, round-rimmed glasses emitted a boyish vibe. Though he was only thirty years old (and, after a haircut, could have passed for thirteen), he spoke about brand recognition, market analysis, and strategic alliances with the expertise of someone twice his age. Part of that precocious nature was due to an almost religious belief in the power of marketing, part was due to his father’s history as a Madison Avenue ad man, and part was due to a chronic insecurity that could only be quieted by winning at everything he did. Peter Main saw the potential in White and hired him in April 1988 to become Nintendo’s first director of advertising and public relations.

When White joined NOA, the marketing department consisted of just three people: himself, Main, and Gail Tilden, an exceptionally smart woman with an encyclopedic memory. The lack of manpower forced White to wear many hats, but his most important responsibility was to forge corporate partnerships. Though Nintendo continued the take the videogame world by storm, the rest of the world still didn’t know what a Nintendo was. To build the brand, White courted Fortune 500 companies, resulting in pivotal promotions, like Pepsi placing a Nintendo ad on over 2 billion cans of soda and Tide featuring Mario on the detergent maker’s giant in-store displays. His biggest coup came with the release of Super Mario 3, when he negotiated for McDonald’s to not only make a Mario-themed Happy Meal but also produce a series of commercials centered around the game. By virtue of his efforts, White became Main’s right-hand man, something of a protégé. But as Main fed White’s ambitions and the young marketer swallowed up more and more responsibility, this left Tilden, the other member of the marketing team, with less and less to do. This displeased Arakawa, who set out to find a better way to utilize one of NOA’s most dynamic employees.

Tilden was at home, nursing her six-week-old son, when Arakawa called and asked her to come into the office the next day for an important meeting. So the following day, after dropping off her son with some trusted coworkers, she went into a meeting with Arakawa. The appetite for Nintendo tips, hints, and supplemental information was insatiable, so Arakawa decided that a full-length magazine would be a better way to deliver exactly what his players wanted.

Tilden was put in charge of bringing this idea to life. She didn’t know much about creating, launching, and distributing a magazine, but, as with everything that had come before, she would figure it out. What she was unlikely to figure out, however, was how to become an inside-and-out expert on Nintendo’s games. She played, yes, but she couldn’t close her eyes and tell you which bush to burn in The Legend of Zelda or King Hippo’s fatal flaw in Mike Tyson’s Punch-Out!! For that kind of intel, there was no one better than Nintendo’s resident expert gamer, Howard Phillips, an always-smiling, freckle-faced videogame prodigy.

Technically, Phillips was NOA’s warehouse manager, but along the way he revealed a preternatural talent for playing, testing, and evaluating games. After earning Arakawa’s trust as a tastemaker, he would scour the arcade scene and write detailed assessments that would go to Japan. Sometimes his advice was implemented, sometimes it was ignored, but in the best-case scenarios he would find something hot, such as the 1982 hit Joust, alert Japan’s R&D to it, and watch it result in a similar Nintendo title — in this case a 1983 Joust-like game called Mario Bros. As Nintendo grew, Phillips’s ill-defined role continued to expand, though he continued to remain the warehouse manager. That all changed, however, when he was selected to be the lieutenant for Tilden’s new endeavor.

In July 1988, Nintendo of America shipped out the first issue of Nintendo Power to the 3.4 million members of the Nintendo Fun Club. Over 30 percent of the recipients immediately bought an annual subscription, marking the fastest that a magazine had ever reached one million paid subscribers. And as the magazine’s audience grew, so did the influence of Howard Phillips.

If Nintendo Power gave kids a chance to step inside the candy factory, then he was their Willy Wonka, magically and eccentrically showing them how the sweets were made. Though Mario was Nintendo’s mascot, Phillips became the face of Nintendo. Peter Main took advantage of this, sending Phillips all over the country for press events and on-camera interviews. Main appointed Phillips Nintendo’s first Game Master. Shortly thereafter, Howard Phillips became a national celebrity, boasting a Q score higher than Madonna, Pee-wee Herman, and the Incredible Hulk.

The rise of the Game Master was just the latest sign of Nintendo’s unprecedented success. By 1990, Nintendo of America had sold nearly thirty million consoles, resulting in an NES in one out of every three homes. Videogames were now a $5 billion industry, and Nintendo owned at least 90 percent of that. The numbers were astounding, but Nintendo’s triumph went beyond that. Arakawa had proven that he was more than just the son-in-law, Lincoln had proven that he could take on anyone, and Main had proven that he could swim with the sharks.

Together, they had single-handedly resurrected an industry. And they did it all with only 8 bits. Imagine what they could do with 16 …  

Blake J. Harris is a writer and filmmaker based in New York. He is currently codirecting the documentary based on his book, which is being produced by Scott Rudin, Seth Rogen, and Evan Goldberg. He will also serve as an executive producer on Sony’s feature-film adaptation of Console Wars.

Illustration by Kickpixel.

New studies out of Harvard and Stanford, in which researchers used blood transfusions to reverse the effects of aging in mice, are being heralded as bringing us one step closer to immortality:

Scientists previously demonstrated that the process of aging did not rid tissue of its stem cells. Therefore, these researchers set out to identify the signals, potentially carried in the blood, that could reinvigorate the dormant stem cells of elderly mice. … Evidence from a number of studies pointed to a protein called GDF11. Researchers found much more GDF11 in young mice blood and determined that treatment with this protein alone recapitulated some of the effects of the transfusions.

Scientists demonstrated the benefits of these “young blood infusions” in reversing aging effects in three different body systems. In muscles, young blood revived strength and endurance in old mice. In the heart, it reversed age-induced cardiac hypertrophy (enlargement of the heart). Recent findings now point to rejuvenating effects in the brain.

John Timmer explains why GDF11 is so promising for future research:

It should also be clear that a variety of evidence is building in favor of GDF11 being a general factor that promotes youthful behavior in a variety of tissues. None of the findings on their own would be earth-shattering, but there’s now a large collection of incremental results that paint a pretty compelling picture.

That picture is generally good news, too. GDF11 is part of a large family of signaling molecules (the TGF-ß superfamily) that is extremely well studied. (It’s so well studied that you can order a tiny batch of 98 percent pure human GDF11 that was made in bacteria for as little as $80.) So following up on this work won’t mean starting from scratch with a mystery molecule that no one understands.

If it’s so easy to make GDF11, could places offering injections be far off in the future? Probably not, but we’re a long way from the sort of evidence that would make that a safe, approved therapy for the declines of aging. It’s possible for GDF11 to have both positive and negative effects on a variety of tissues.

Jesus Diaz notes that there really doesn’t appear to be much of a catch to this good news:

There’s only two caveats. The first is that these are experiments with mice. They still have to be tested in humans, who have their own version of GDF11. It will probably work in the same way, but we don’t know for sure yet. The second one is cancer. The moment you start awakening stem cells and telling them to start creating new cells, you may increase the possibilities of cancer. Honestly, I would rather take the chance of cancer than the certainty of dementia or early death because of some heart disease.

That’s why scientists are so excited. The results are clear and there are no conflicts between the two studies, so this is wonderful news so far, they say.

Michael Byrne meditates on how discoveries like these may change the way we think about old age:

If a whole range of diseases are the result of declining GDF11 levels in the body, then it’s not really hard to imagine a disease that just is the decline itself. It’d be one big package of pathologies under one generalized roof, like, say, hypothyroidism, an illness sometimes known as the “great imitator” because it encompasses symptoms and syndromes associated with about every illness ever. Treating it, meanwhile, is just a matter of upping the levels of one hormone in the blood. You might imagine GDF11 deficiency in a similar light, except of course that age happens to everyone.

Society hasn’t really found an “OK” way to die. “Old age” is about the closest we have, and there’s not actually such a thing as dying of old age. People die of aging-related diseases, like the two mentioned above, but also cancer and even just getting the flu as an old person. Bodies get worn down by time because that’s what time does; GDF11 would seem like a way of not buying extra time, but of resetting the clock in general, erasing age and, most strangely, erasing time. Which is where it gets ominous, if vaguely so: the clock itself as the disease.

Walter Russell Mead quips:

Over the years boomers have sucked millennials dry financially in all sorts of ways: by promoting policies that shifted wealth towards them and away from the young; by resisting reform to entitlement programs; by hogging all the job growth; and by supporting reductions in spending that benefits the young (like aid to public colleges).

Now they could be out for millennials’ blood. Young people don’t expect to be looking up the local blood bank instead of the local job bank. But since they’ve got nothing in the bank, maybe it’s worth considering a new way to pay off those college loans.

[Re-posted from earlier today]

My old friends at The Economist have their nickers in a twist (look it up) about the loss of American “credibility” because there has been no military response to Ukraine, little follow-up in Libya, and a crossed red line in Syria. The leader (look it up) makes some vague and confusing statements along the way. It argues that “international norms, such as freedom of navigation, will be weakened,” if the US doesn’t somehow throw its weight around more, while simultaneously acknowledging that “America towers above all others in military spending and experience.” They concede that on Ukraine, military force would be insane and Germany and Britain have made stronger sanctions impossible as of now; they also misstate what happened in Syria. They claim that “The Syrian dictator [used chemical weapons], and Mr Obama did nothing.” Nothing? So how is it that Syria has now peacefully relinquished almost all of its chemical stockpile? And wasn’t resolving that question – and not the broader problem of Syria’s sectarian implosion – the entire point of the threatened strike? Are we supposed to prefer an option that would have dragged the US into the Syrian vortex and not guaranteed any actual success to a policy that kept us out but largely solved the problem?

The first thing to say about this is that The Economist is fundamentally a British paper. It has a vast US readership, but its DNA is British. And being British for the past several decades has meant being reliant on the US to protect its security. Of course the Brits want the US policing every nook and cranny of the world. They don’t have to pay for it; yet they get to enjoy its fruits. They argue, of course, that these are fruits for America as well. And so they are. And if anyone were even thinking of reducing America’s maintenance of international trade routes, for example, they might have a point. But policing the world with the US military is not cost-free at all – either fiscally or in more basic human terms.

Think of the Vietnam War and the Iraq War – both conceived under the influence of the hubristic fumes and the idiocy of the “credibility argument: (see Peter Beinart’s take on that particular fallacy here). Look at the country’s debt – a huge amount of which can be traced to the military-industrial complex that Eisenhower warned us so presciently about, and one that went on steroids in the first decade of this century. And look at average living standards – stagnant for three decades at least in some part because of globalization. You can argue that the US should not withdraw from the world (and I would) – but withdrawal from the world is not the same thing as prudent and sensible recalibration of resources in a debt-racked, over-extended and thereby less effective country on the world stage.

We are not, pace The Economist, still living in the post-Cold War era, when the US ran a surplus. We are living in a post-post-Cold War era where America owes inconceivable sums to China, a soon-to-be-bigger economic power. And if you want to see American influence really decline, then the best way to do that is to maintain unsustainable over-reach. You’d think Brits would have taken this lesson to heart, since that was one core reason they lost their empire as well. And history is littered with the demise of other over-stretched powers, like the Soviet Union or Imperial Spain. The future is littered with other potential over-reach victims, the most obvious of which is Greater Israel, run by many of the same neocons who drove the US into a ditch only a few years ago.

More to the point, it seems increasingly clear to me that this post-post-Cold War era is one destined to last for the foreseeable future. And the fundamentals of that era are increasingly opposed to the concept of American global hegemony.  No one can police the world today as the US did in the 20th Century. The rationale of the world’s policeman has thus radically changed. As Millman notes in a superb piece:

The rise of Japan was followed by the rise of smaller east Asian states and now the rise of the Asian mega-states, China and India. Latin America and the Muslim Middle East have grown into substantial regions, demographically and economically, and are no longer obviously under Western control (or even influence). Africa’s demographic momentum, meanwhile, will carry that continent to far greater prominence by the end of the century than it has ever achieved before.

Not only are these other powers much stronger relative to the US – an inevitable function of the success of US foreign policy in the past – but they don’t accept America’s right to dictate the contours of the global order. Russia is the most obvious example, right now. But that was the deepest lesson of the Iraq catastrophe: the Iraqis didn’t actually want the things that Americans (including me) reflexively thought they wanted. They live by different values and different priorities. The [indigenous] sect beats the [imperial] nation every time; and authoritarianism trumps democracy every time. And our attempt to force them to be live by Bill Kristol’s values only guaranteed the failure.

America’s reflexive belief that its way of the world is superior to everyone else is also increasingly, tragically, attenuated.

It will take decades to recover from the state-authorized torture and detention policies of the Bush administration and the Obama administration’s refusal to adhere to the Geneva Conventions. American democracy is widely seen across the world (and not without reason) as an oligarchy of the super-rich; its Republican hinterlands are regarded as a repository of know-nothingness; its virulent opposition to providing access to healthcare for all is seen a psychosis; its NSA is viewed as a threat to allies; its police-state airport borders the sign of a society less free than many in Western Europe. And there is no Soviet Union to point to when America is challenged on these grounds. The alternative is not obviously much worse.

Now you can go on pretending that this hasn’t happened – and isn’t still happening – as the Economist and the Beltway hand-wringers do. You can topple the Libyan regime on humanitarian grounds, just as in the olden days (except Reagan was much less interventionist). But you’ll leave a nest of Jihadists in your wake. But all this has happened – and America’s collapsing infrastructure has become an emblem of a polity in steep decline. Obama has mitigated this to a heroic extent – but the underlying reality remains. We have to let go of control; we have to stop seeing every crisis in the world as one that America has to resolve; we have to tend to ourselves before we lecture to anyone else. And this the American people understand, as poll after poll tells us. And without the American people squarely behind it, no American foreign policy can succeed.

In the Ukraine crisis you see this most vividly. We supported the Maidan revolution but its practical effect has been to render order and peace throughout the country close to non-existent. Ukraine’s reformers have some responsibility for their predicament. They pissed away the post-Soviet era in rampant corruption, military decline, and economic stagnation. They removed a democratically elected government by violence, something inimical to any hope for democratic reform. They have no coherent plan for resisting Putin’s foul expansionism. Like Morgan Stanley, they expect to be bailed out – and that helped create this crisis. I’m far from exonerating Putin. But if we fail to see the arguments behind the propaganda of the other side, we will fail.

Of course, this process of letting go will be anxiety-producing. Relative decline is never easy for a hegemon, especially one drunk on the fumes of its own self-love. There will be a backlash. But you’ll notice how few of the current critics of Obama’s vastly under-rated foreign policy don’t actually have much to say specifically about how they would better defuse these myriad ructions across the globe (and they are mere ructions compared to the past, it’s worth remembering). At some point they will begin to see that their lack of alternatives is a function of something other than their nemesis in the White House. And at some point, one can only hope, they’ll grow up.

A reader writes:

I’m enjoying the discussion about atheists and morality. Unlike some of your other atheist readers, I’m not particularly offended that we’re often seen as immoral. It’s fairly obvious that the reason we’re viewed that way by the faithful is that they haven’t had much real-life contact with good, moral atheists. It reminds me very much of how conservatives who haven’t interacted with a real gay person often call that community immoral. It’s simply fear of the unknown. My own experience speaks to this.

I grew up a Christian in the Bible Belt, surrounded by a conservative peer group. In my Christian elementary school, atheism was literally unthinkable – it didn’t even occur to me that people didn’t believe in God. In high school, I met my first atheist, and he was one of the warmest, kindest people I’ve ever met. He was super nerdy like me, and we bonded over our similarities. The fact that someone could be so kind and also not believe in God was somewhat shocking to me at the time.

As I slowly deconverted to atheism during college, I would always think back to him as my model of a truly good atheist.

My own view of morality slowly evolved away from needing a God and towards a naturalistic explanation. We are social animals in a harsh world. To survive, we needed to establish rules of conduct that allow us to work together against the elements – a moral code. No God needed. I do hope that, eventually, this will become the prevailing view.

In order for this to happen, we need more people like my high school friend. We need more atheists who are soft-spoken and genuinely good, loving people who can demonstrate by example that atheists aren’t frightening anarchists. Conversion doesn’t happen in debates or through legislation – evangelicals have known this for a long time. Conversion occurs through many personal interactions over years.

I dislike the approach of the New Atheists not because I disagree with their views, but because their methods push the faithful away from atheism. It’s insanely counterproductive. Who wants to be friends with the self-righteous bully? As much as I love Hitchens’ passion, clear-mindedness, and brutally logical arguments, I think my high school friend was a much better advocate for atheism than Hitchens. And don’t get me started on Dawkins. What a fucking asshole. In the same way that the gay community slowly won the argument by being out and showing that they’re just like the rest of us, we atheists need to be out and demonstrate kindness and love to our neighbors.

By the way, the fact that I’m not completely out tears me apart. My mother is a very devout Christian with an anxiety disorder. I fear that telling her about my true beliefs would cause her enormous emotional strife. She might truly believe I’m going to Hell. Who could put that sort of burden on his mother? I hope that, eventually, our religions will evolve to a more accepting view of atheists, so that people like me won’t have to be in the closet.

Previous Dish on the need for atheists to come out here and here.

Lots of movies are shot under another name. Sometimes a nickname, sometimes a way to keep lookie-loos away from the set.

Well, Star Wars Episode VII, whatever it will eventually be called is filming, according to the kind of people who talk to Bleeding Cool, as “AVGO”.

I don’t know why, I don’t know the significance.

Harry Knowles is already saying it’s being called “The Ancient Fear”. But that sounds more like the actual title.

But, if you see a local shoot designated AVGO, see if you can spot Harrison Ford hanging around.

Another Star Wars Episode VII Shooting Nickname?

According to Harry Knowles, citing what he believes to be separate sources but, for all we know, could be the same prankster coming at him from all angles, the ‘working title’ for Star Wars Episode VII is The Ancient Fear.

This refers to Max von Sydow‘s character, he says.

I get it. Ancient vs. New, Fear vs. Hope. Even Phantom Menace chimes with Ancient Fear in some way. It ties all of the titles up in a… well, maybe a bow, maybe a knot. I can’t quite make my mind up right now. Maybe I’m feeling unjustly grumpy because and just need a while to let it bed in.

Just a rumour, but maybe one worth discussing.

Rumour: Star Wars Episode VII Will Be Subtitled The Ancient Fear

Joseph Stromberg makes it:

This graph [above], from the UN report, shows the greenhouse gas emissions that result from producing a kilogram of pork and beef, compared to a kilogram of insect meat … Because demand for meat is rising around the world, livestock production is going to become an increasingly big reason why the planet is warming — unless we find an alternative.

Then there’s the matter of ethics. Obviously, smart people disagree about the ethics of eating meat, and many argue that the pleasure we derive from eating meat outweighs the pain and suffering experienced by a cow or pig in captivity. But few argue that these animals experience no suffering at all. Many scientists who’ve studied the insect nervous system, though, believe that they don’t feel pain. Raising these insects for meat — instead of cows, pigs, and chickens — would reduce the total amount of suffering that results from our appetite for meat.

But just how does one get Americans on board with entomophagy? Nick Cox interviews the young founders of Six Foods, who are looking to do just that:

[Laura] D’Asaro, who was an African Studies major, says she first “caught the bug” after eating a caterpillar on the side of the street while traveling in Tanzania. A lifelong on-and-off vegetarian who enjoyed meat but struggled with the ethical and environmental issues that came with it, she found insects to be a perfect compromise. She told [Rose]Wang, who was then her roommate, about her discovery.

“I never thought she’d be into it, because she’s more traditional,” said D’Asaro. “[But] she’d just been in China and had eaten a scorpion, and said it tasted a little bit like shrimp without the fishy flavor.”

So Wang and D’Asaro started ordering live insects and experimenting with them. They knew they were onto something when they made a box of fifty green caterpillar tacos for a pitch competition and left them in the Harvard Innovation Lab fridge. “We didn’t think to label them,” she said. “We got back from our pitch competition half an hour later… and there were only five of them left, because people had eaten them, not knowing they were insects, and had loved them, and just kept going back for more.”

And Daniella Martin talks to a nutritionist who is trying to market a cricket-based protein powder:

Bodybuilders and extreme athletes tend to be early adopters of nutrition trends. That’s why they are precisely the demographic Dianne Guilfoyle, a school nutrition supervisor in Southern California, hopes to capture with BugMuscle, a protein powder made up entirely of ground insects.

“If people see bodybuilders taking it, they might accept it more willingly,” says Dianne, whose son Daniel is a cage fighter.

There are many benefits to using insects as a base for protein powder. For one, the main existing sources are soybeans and milk whey, both of which cause health concerns for some people. While insect protein might not be a perfect alternative for those with shellfish allergies, for others it could present an alternative that’s healthier for their bodies and the planet than some of the existing options. Previously, whey protein was the only protein powder source to supply a complete amino acid profile: all nine of the essential amino acids required for human nutrition. But guess what else is a great source of these amino acids? That’s right, insects.

Previous Dish on eating bugs here.

Poor Wolverine, he may be retired from the Fox’s X-Men cinematic universe before he’s really had a time to shine. Hugh Jackman confirms to SFX Magazine that he’s “99.9% sure” his next outing as the mutant will be his last:

If I did another one, I’m 99.9 percent sure it would be the last, so that will inform what it is for me.

So, that “if” is still in there. Jackman goes on to say he’s been working with director James Mangold on developing the story and script, but he won’t officially sign on until it’s to his absolute satisfaction:

I’m working with Jim Mangold, which is exciting. Jim came on board The Wolverine after Darren [Aronofsky] left, so he inherited it. And of all the things that Jim can do, one of the great things he does is develop scripts. I’m excited to see what we can come up with, but I haven’t signed on signed on. I’m genuinely at that point where unless it’s better than the last one I’m not going to do it.

If Hugh Jackman Does Wolverine 3, It Will Likely Be His Last Outing As The Character

Well my jaws on the floor. Pretty much my dreamjob opened up with a football franshise that is as well run as it is named. The Washington Redskins are a team that I like to talk about alot because there pretty much a soap opera with RG3 (more specificaly General Hospital).

If you think there is anyone more qualified then me to run the Redskins social media account your a idiot. Legend has it that Native Redskins use to tweet at each other using smoke signals untill there was a war because this one Redskin was stealing content without doing a h/t (headdress tip) and then it all went to hell. I am a student of history if you cant tell allready, I want to bring that same bloodthirsty savage agression (no offense) that we use to have before we got too PC about everything. I will start twitter and facbook fights with every other franshise in the NFC and I will put wierd footporn picks all over Rex Ryans pintrest board- thats my solemn promise to you.

I believe firmly that I am qualified to tweet from the Redskins oficial twitter account as long as I end every tweet with “-Redskins (no offense).” This whole faux outrage about the name would go away literaly overnight.

PLEASE NOTE FROM THE SCREEN GRAB- The Redskins are a Equal Opportunity Employer. 

I subtlety showed that I have a bit of football knowlege myself there. You need to have some intelligents about what the company does as a whole if your going to interview for it.

Never went to college. Didnt need to. Hitler went to college.

You know who didnt went to college? Jesus.

I have many many refrences if you want to check them. There all legitimate and many heavy hitters in the DC media like one guy who got fired from the show who had Rob Ford on to make football picks a coupla times.

The bottom line is I will work harder then anyone else on the team. I will be first in the office tweeting “Rise and grind” to Kirk Cousins at 3:00 AM and last out tweeting “Your to drunk to drive, get a cab” to DeSean Jackson at 2:30 AM. I

You remember when SportCenter did “dream job” and it was like a bunch of guys they found at the plasma center trying to talk into a camra while the chick from sportsnight did phone sex in their earpieces to distract them? Well this is like my “dream job.” Here are my promises and DAY 1 actionable items that are shovel ready:

- Violentley respond to EVERYONE whose saying that the Redskins should change there name . I will turn the teams offical twitter account into William Wallace leading the charge. You want to see a warroir poet? Wait til you see me tweet this:

Now Im not so sure I should be giving away my branding strategy, but your talking to the person who helped destroy Darren Rovells brand. Talk about beating someone on there home turf, something the Redskins could probly use some help in this year.

- I will activley undermind Robert Griffin III using the Redskins offical twitter account. Ill RT every tweet Captain Kirk Cousin’s puts out there and I will manually RT every @RGIII post:

And I guarentee that brand engagement will go up across the bored. I will turn the “Washington Redskins” brand from the most popular in the NFL to the most popular in the world. If you have any questons comments or concerns please contact me directly. Thanks and God bless,.

Flavelle highlights a survey that “asked 3,496 people how they would react if a business tacked on an extra 25 cents to every bill to help cover the cost of health insurance for its employees.” Republicans were much less likely than Democrats to say they’d continue shopping at such an establishment:

Here’s what makes that a head-scratcher: The vast majority of Republican respondents — 78 percent — also told questioners that Obamacare should be repealed. So a significant portion of Republicans don’t think the government should pay for people’s health insurance, but they are not willing to pay even a small amount more so that those people can get covered through their employer.

Which leads to a puzzling question: How, exactly, are these people supposed to get insurance?

A segment of film bloggers and social media denizens were upset that only newcomer Daisy Ridley (okay, and Carrie Fisher) was announced along with the otherwise all-male cast of Star Wars: Episode VII. Whether in response to the growing chatter or not, it’s unclear, but THR have now published a report that casting is not over yet, and at least one more major female role will still be cast.

So this could mean that either Lupita Nyong’o or unknown actress Maisie Richardson-Sellers could still have a shot at a role previously reported to be a descendant of Obi-Wan Kenobi’s. It makes sense, since most people are speculating Ridley is playing Han and Leia’s daughter (because look at where she’s sitting, okay?) – a different character altogether.

I certainly hope this is true. This cast is already in great shape and can only improve with the addition of more great actresses/female characters.

At Least One More Major Female Role To Be Cast In Star Wars: Episode VII

It’s been suggested to me a few times now that the next episode of Sherlock will air this Christmas. It was first suggested just before the third season started airing.

Then when the final episode, His Last Vow, played out I thought I could see clues in the events on screen to back the stories up. I even tweeted about this at the time.

The episode ends on Christmas day with business to still be taken care of. The next episode, I supposed, could pick up at the same time, giving us a Christmas episode at Christmas.

And where better place to put a one-off special of a British TV show than at Christmas. They’re all it, and Steven Moffat clearly has form.

So after Martin Freeman started slipping this and that about a possible Sherlock one-off, I went back to the a couple of the people who mentioned the Christmas plans to me in the first place.

They didn’t know anything new, I’m afraid, but they did give me the go ahead to share this much.

So, was the Sherlock special planned for Christmas? And do Freeman’s comments about not know when it will actually take place suggest that, maybe, it no longer is?

Was The Sherlock One-Off Special Planned For This Christmas?

A reader notes that the chorus of indignation at John Kerry’s use of the term “apartheid state” to refer to Greater Israel’s destiny never actually engages the substance of his statement. So Ted Cruz, calling for Kerry’s resignation:

The fact that Secretary Kerry sees nothing wrong with making such a statement on the eve of Holocaust Remembrance Day demonstrates a shocking lack of sensitivity to the incendiary and damaging nature of his rhetoric.

Whatever else this is, it is not an argument that Israel is not an apartheid state or on its way to becoming so. On the left, we have this from Barbara Boxer:

Israel is the only democracy in the Middle East and any linkage between Israel and apartheid is nonsensical and ridiculous.

But what about those under Israeli control who have no right to vote at all? It doesn’t occur to Boxer that the apartheid-like regime on the West Bank is actually a function of Israeli democracy, since a majority of Israelis support it. But, of course, AIPAC created the template all these lemmings follow and its statement is the purest of them all:

Any suggestion that Israel is, or is at risk of becoming, an apartheid state is offensive and inappropriate.

But is it true? That’s the question AIPAC never wants debated. So it polices the American discourse to prevent it. Since the observation is of the bleeding obvious, this can be hard. Jeffrey Goldberg, my old sparring partner on matters of Israel, wrote this a decade ago:

A de-facto apartheid already exists in the West Bank. Inside the borders of Israel proper, Arabs and Jews are judged by the same set of laws in the same courtrooms; across the Green Line, Jews live under Israeli civil law as well, but their Arab neighbors — people who live, in some cases, just yards away — fall under a different, and substantially undemocratic, set of laws, administered by the Israeli Army. The system is neither as elaborate nor as pervasive as South African apartheid, and it is, officially, temporary. It is nevertheless a form of apartheid, because two different ethnic groups living in the same territory are judged by two separate sets of laws.

Here’s Ehud Barak, former prime minister of Israel, making the exact same argument:

“The simple truth is, if there is one state” including Israel, the West Bank and Gaza, “it will have to be either binational or undemocratic. … if this bloc of millions of Palestinians cannot vote, that will be an apartheid state.”

Here’s Tzipi Livni:

The time has come for the same youth to ask, to what kind of state do they want to leave the gas reserves? To a Jewish democratic Israel? Or to a binational Arab state? Or to an apartheid state? It is impossible to deal with economic issues and to ignore the important diplomatic issues related to two states for two peoples.

Here’s another former prime minister, Ehud Ohlmert:

If the day comes when the two-state solution collapses, and we face a South African-style struggle for equal voting rights (also for the Palestinians in the territories), then, as soon as that happens, the State of Israel is finished.

Of course, Kerry could be criticized for speaking an undiplomatic truth in a meeting he considered off the record. But the peace talks are at a dead end anyway, and it’s perfectly appropriate for a US secretary of state to explain why such a failure is a dreadful portent for the future of Israel. It’s a truth that the Israelis need to hear from Americans just as much as they need to hear it from their own leaders.

The real question is: why do some want this fact deemed off-limits in America when it sure isn’t in Israel? And the answer is obvious: AIPAC has no interest in a two-state solution and wants no impediment to the permanent establishment of Greater Israel, even if that means keeping half or more than half of the country in undemocratic bantustans for ever. That’s another truth no one is allowed to say out loud. But man does it sit there right in front of our noses.

The tectonic plates beneath the US-Israel co-dependent relationship have begun to shift in the last few years. One obvious reason is that the traditional notion of the US trying to broker a two-state solution in Israel/Palestine has now become a target of deserved ridicule. I’ve begun to find myself halting even to use the words “peace process” to describe Israel’s relentless de facto annexation of the West Bank. It seems increasingly like an abuse of the English language and a fiction that no honest observer can really attest to as reality.

From George W. Bush’s “road map” onward, the Israeli government has played the US to the point of absurdity. It first waged a brutal air war on Gaza with impunity. Then it resumed its aggressive and relentless expansion of colonial settlements and settlers on the West Bank. Netanyahu has recently shown he’d rather release murderous terrorists from jail than give up an inch of Greater Israel. The Israeli public has no interest or belief in compromise, as the hard right strengthens its grip on the country’s politics and as the settler faction maintains a stranglehold on the central government. The Israeli economy can continue to flourish even as the the Arab subjects of Greater Israel remain mired in a vast de facto holding pattern, without dignity, without a vote, without any leverage in any peace process. They are behind the wall, and kept in fences. And this is perfectly sustainable for the indefinite future with enough force of arms and economic growth, as the indispensable Roger Cohen recently argued.

The Kerry initiative – his frenetic, relentless attempt to make some progress – reveals merely, I’m afraid, that there is no progress to be made. The entire trajectory of Israel’s founding to today, as John Judis has ably demonstrated, has been the continuous resolution to create a Jewish state all across Palestine, and to slowly punish and immiserate any Palestinians caught on the wrong side of the line, in the hope that they will leave. It would be great to believe that this were not so, but that would require wiping the last decade from our collective memory. I used to believe that Israel was desperate for peace and that the main sticking point was Palestinian intransigence. You could plausibly have held that view a decade and a half ago, but surely not any more.

Palestinians on the West Bank remain as they long have been, kept in tightly controlled areas with checkpoints in between, denied the right to vote for the government that controls their every move, and subject to financial and economic leverage from the Israeli state. Meanwhile, privileged Jewish settlers are given incentives to colonize the Palestinian land, and Israel barrels ahead to make sure no part of Jerusalem could ever be the capital of Palestine. I don’t know of any US ally that behaves this way. I don’t know of any ally that keeps whole populations under its control without a right to vote, and does so on ethnic and religious lines. The last one that did so was South Africa.

If we are talking definitions of words, this is of relevance:

According to the 1998 Rome Statute, the “crime of apartheid” is defined as “inhumane acts… committed in the context of an institutionalized regime of systematic oppression and domination by one racial group over any other racial group or groups and committed with the intention of maintaining that regime.”

How does that not describe the West Bank and Gaza? It may offend some to think of the Jewish state as increasingly like the old South African one. But that, alas, is solely because the the hopes of the past still occlude the ugly reality of the present. It seems to me important that if the United States has no real power to change that brutal unending reality, it can at least call it what it is.

(Photo: Alex Wong/Getty)

Ann Turner rejects the claim that Mary was a prostitute and describes her – the only woman in the New Testament whose full name is used – as “a model of what a true disciple looks like”:

[A]ttempts to move Mary to the background of the Passion Narratives and to erase her as a vital and loving witness to Jesus began well before the fifth century. It began with the writer of Luke, in Acts, where Peter and Paul are given center stage as those who preach to the Gentiles, as those who witness to the risen Christ — ignoring that it is Mary Magdalene, called the Apostle to the Apostles, who first sees the risen Christ in the garden, according to both the Gospels of Matthew and John. In Luke, when Mary and two other women return breathless and excited to say they have seen the Lord, the male disciples think their words are “like nonsense” (Luke 24:11). Is the author of Acts responsible for this erasure of The Magdalene, as she sometimes is called, or is it part of a wider effort to discredit her authority and put Peter at the head of the new church?

In the sixth century, Pope Gregory the Great tried to undermine Mary Magdalene’s reputation by connecting her story to the story of the prostitute that precedes her story in the Gospel of Luke. But this is a later misinterpretation. Luke is clear that Mary was the woman healed by Jesus when he expelled seven demons from her. And Mary responded by contributing to Jesus’ ministry and following him. Luke says she was a woman of means, like some other women who followed Jesus. They were not just followers in the passive sense — they were disciples.

(Image of The Penitent Magdalene by Guido Reni, circa 1635, via Wikimedia Commons)

It’s hard to say:

Dogs have lived with us for as many as 30,000 years—20,000 years longer than cats. More than any other animal on the planet, dogs are tuned in to the “human radio frequency”—the broadcast of our feelings and desires. Indeed, we may be the only station dogs listen to.

Cats, on the other hand, can tune us in if they want to (that’s why they pass the pointing test as well as dogs), but they don’t hang on our every word like dogs do. They’re surfing other channels on the dial. And that’s ultimately what makes them so hard to study. Cats, as any owner knows, are highly intelligent beings. But to science, their minds may forever be a black box.

Still, there may be hope. As scientists begin to experiment with new ways to study animal intelligence—from eye-tracking technology to fMRI machines—they may yet find a way to peek inside the feline mind.

At the “Spotlight on Kelly Sue DeConnick” panel at Wondercon, things erupted into more of a zany chat session than anything else, with DeConnick hosted by Ben Acker of The Thrilling Adventure Hour and My Little Pony. The two were well-matched in sprightliness for a packed room of fans.

Unsurprisingly, there was lots of Captain Marvel cosplay in the audience as DeConnick cuddled a stuffed Tribble that someone had brought her to give to her son.

Since DeConnick’s “opinions are well documented”, Acker asked her if she’d seen Grand Budapest Hotel.

Deconnick replied:  “I did. I like his stuff. I’m a big fan of the palette. I want to paint our hallway Tennenbaum pink”.

Then the rapid-fire discussion went something like this:

BA: “Settle a bet for me. Carol COR or Carol CORPS?” (in terms of pronunciation).

KSD: “Carol COR, corpse would be bad”.

BA: “Give me an exclusive”.

KSD: “Bitch Planet is, I think, going to be out in November for the first issue”.

BA: “What is your favorite curse word?”

KSD: “Jackass” (which she spelled out because there were children in the room).

Then they attempted a “Lightning Round” of questions:

BA: “What do you like or dislike or like about lightning?”

KSD: “My great grandpa was struck by lightning. My great grandma found a body in a cistern, it’s true. She didn’t do it. That we know of. She’s related to me so it’s possible. This was in rural Ohio where my hillbilly family is from. I don’t think she solved the murder, but when I write the story she will.

Most police departments have “citizens police academy”. I did a 12 week police academy. The week that we did the “murder police” I was very excited. The homicide detective was like ‘”it’s not that hard. Most of the time the person you think that did it totally did it”. And that was true”.

BA: “Talk to me about the importance of Community. Not the TV show”.

KSD: “The purpose of fiction is to make us feel connected to one another, to our humanity. Fiction is really about creating community even if it’s only in your head, in your emotional self. The contemporary fandom that has become more present in a time where we are losing our public spaces and they are going into virtual spaces. We are naturally building community there.  It’s all about finding connections”.

BA: “Are you Carol?”

KSD: “I am not Carol Corps. I am not Carol Danvers. It is anarchic. There’s no boss. It’s un-organized but in a good way. There’s no formal organization, no vetting process. You don’t have to do anything, or sign up anywhere. Though we do have cards apparently, which you can just print off on the internet, which amuses me to no end. I like that it’s informal and very welcoming. If you say you’re interested in comics, they will descend upon you and say “let us help you find comics!” Which is the opposite of the past. The way things ought to be”.

BA: “What is your guiltiest pleasure?”

KSD: “I love a lot of terrible things, but I tend not to feel guilty about my pleasure. I have a really uncomplicated taste in music. My husband knows music and has taste. Classic rock. Metal”.

BA: “Do you read things? With and without pictures?”

KSD: “I do. The book that I’ve been reading I’m not crazy in love with. I will quit a book. I’m a lot of pages to just give it up, but I can”.

BA: “What should I read?”

KSD: “Comics-wise I’m a big fan of MIND MGMT, and there’s a book called Sex Criminals. Hawkeye. I have the first issue of the new Bendis/Oeming United States of Murder Inc.  I’m Looking forward to that. Shutter. Nowhere Men”.

Q &A: “If you could write any character you have yet to write, which one would it be?”

KSD: “Modesty Blaise. Peter O’Donnell’s estate won’t do that. And Jaimie McKelvie would draw it in a red hot minute”.

Q&A: “How much did you have to fight for the dynamic of Carol with Jessica Drew in the story?”

KSD: “There was never a fight at all. Funnily enough, there are two Jessicas in the Marvel universe and they are both Carol’s best friends. At first, I wanted to use Jessica Jones, but she was in another storyline, so off the table for awhile. The other Jessica then, I said. My affection for Jessica Drew was happenstance. Now I love her to death”.

Q&A: “Are you elated that she’s followed her in other iterations?”

KSD: “Yeah. It’s always fun to see that when you put something into the universe, someone picks that up and does something with it. It’s very gratifying”.

Q&A: “Is there any chance of a Jessica Drew series by you in the future?”

KSD: “Sure. I would love to do a Jess book. I had a pitch in for a Jess ongoing but I had to withdraw it because I don’t have time. I suspect someone will get to it first. I would like very much for her to have a solo or a team book centered around her. I’d like to see more Jess regardless of whether I’m behind the keyboard or not”.

Q&A: “Carol has a crazy past compared to most heroes in the Marvel U. Did that make it easy or hard to write?”

KSD: “I would argue that that is not unlike the other characters in the Marvel U. They are the longest running continuous narrative in Western history. 70 years. Continuity is the devil. You need to do your research. You need to know it but you can also get completely hamstrung by it if you aren’t careful. The better thing to do is get to the core of the character. What is the thing that defines them? Then tell your story. It’ll become impossible to move forward otherwise”.

Q&A: “Does her presence in space have a crossover with Guardians?”

KSD: “It sure seems like something that would be like her character” (meaningfully pausing).

BA:  “A question from Twitter: Are you writing prose?”

KSD: “I’m starting my first novel in June, and very nervous. Working in comics is like swimming, wit push back where you lose momentum. I have an idea for a story. I write it into a script. The script is interpreted by an artist. Then I change the script. Then I change everything, with beats that have to conform to page turns. There’s all of this external structure. As someone who loves puzzle structures, it’s fun for me. But there’s also part of me that fantasizes, “Can I just write the story?” But also scary. It’s “crazy free”. With prose, it’s just you, so don’t screw it up”.

Q&A: “What draws you to outer space?”

KSD: “I think it’s all theoretical for me. My dad’s a pilot and I love pilot lore. I’m actually terrified to fly. When I got Captain Marvel, Matt wanted to give me the gift of flight lessons and no, that was insane. Matt would go into space in a minute. I wouldn’t. I don’t even like slides, but I like the idea of space. I like what it is in the fiction space, I like it as a frontier. I like what it means to Carol. I like the idea of taking a car into desert and seeing how fast it can go”.

Q&A: “Tell us more about Bitch Planet”.

KSD: It is a “women in prison riff”. If you are familiar with the exploitation films of the 70’s, it’s heavily inspired by that. It’s not going to end up being as retro as I planned for it to be. So, it is a future where in this society you are either compliant or non compliant, and if not, they want to help you be because it’s good for you.

If compliancy camps don’t fix that problem, you’re shunted off to a prison planet. You can be noncompliant by being a criminal, or unpleasant or fat, also if you are argumentative etc. There are five prisoners who will be centered upon on this planet. There’s a woman who is the compliancy model.

It’s going to be mean and funny and bloody. I’m trying to deal with the tropes of the old films…like the shower scene. How do I do a shower scene that isn’t exploitative? One of the things I was thinking about, if we are doing the shower scene, maybe we see the women coming in, we stop watching them and we watch the men watching them, and they are the ones that are objectified. Maybe for the phallic imagery, if someone is watching something through a peephole, maybe they take an ice pick to the eye. Which makes a statement.

There will be a page of classifieds in the back of the comic, and if you send in a dollar to the P.O. Box, I’ll send the item to you. We’re going to make up our own garbage to send you.

I want it to be overwrought and science-fictiony. Everything is going to be really big”.

Q&A: “What inspired you to write Pretty Deadly?”

KSD: “When I was a kid, I was at my grandparents’ house and I got to stay up late and I watched some kind of TV show, a Western. This was like a revenge thing where a woman’s brother or her husband is killed and she goes around tracking down and murdering everyone who was involved. And I was like ‘yes, this is for me’”.

Q&A: “How do you balance kids and a creative life?”

KSD: “While your time is your own, don’t be cute, get on it. Get serious about it. That would be my advice to me. Shut up, go work”.

Kelly Sue DeConnick On Her ‘Hillbilly Family’, Murder, Bitch Planet, And Pretty Deadly At Wondercon

David Leonhardt and Kevin Quealy introduce the graphic above (click to enlarge):

In 1980, the American rich and middle class and most of the poor had higher incomes than their counterparts almost anywhere in the world. But incomes for the middle class and poor in the United States have since been growing more slowly than elsewhere.

The accompanying article goes into more detail:

The findings are striking because the most commonly cited economic statistics — such as per capita gross domestic product — continue to show that the United States has maintained its lead as the world’s richest large country. But those numbers are averages, which do not capture the distribution of income. With a big share of recent income gains in this country flowing to a relatively small slice of high-earning households, most Americans are not keeping pace with their counterparts around the world.

“The idea that the median American has so much more income than the middle class in all other parts of the world is not true these days,” saidLawrence Katz, a Harvard economist who is not associated with LIS. “In 1960, we were massively richer than anyone else. In 1980, we were richer. In the 1990s, we were still richer.”

That is no longer the case, Professor Katz added.

Douthat considers what this change means for politics:

If we get back to where we were in the 1990s, with an economy that’s delivering for the 40th-through-the-60th percentiles but a welfare state that isn’t as generous as the social democracies to the 10th-through-30th, most Americans will probably be inclined to say, well, that’s just our system’s traditional “growth over fairness, opportunity over equality” trade-off working as expected, and there will be more support for efforts to keep the tax-and-transfer share of the U.S. economy close to historic norms. (Though it would help, obviously, if there were more mobility out of the 10th and 20th percentiles than we’re currently seeing.) But if the advantages of the American system are only visible from, say, the 70th or even 80th percentile up, then the case for the low-tax model will seem weaker relative to how its been received and debated in the past, and American politics will probably shift leftward on size-of-government issues (as it already has among the rising generation).

Derek Thompson, meanwhile, looks at why Canada’s middle class is becoming richer than ours:

How did we lose the lead? The authors blame three broad factors: (1) Canada’s education attainment is outpacing the U.S. and most of the world; (2) American middle-class market wages aren’t keeping up with overall economic growth; and (3) Other governments are doing more to redistribute income to poorer families in other countries, particularly in western and northern Europe. One word that doesn’t appear in the article, however, is housing. The U.S. is emerging from a catastrophic collapse of the housing market that obliterated household wealth for millions of middle-class families. Canada, however, is in the midst of a delirious housing boom and a personal debt craze that reminds some economists of the U.S. market exactly a decade ago (before you-know-what happened).

Reihan also focuses on housing:

[H]ere’s the thing: If the U.S. had done more to address the wealth destruction that followed from the housing bust, it is hard to deny that middle- and low-income households would be in a much better position. Indeed, the really scary thing is that, as Mian and Sufi have argued, it’s not clear that low- and middle-income Americans are in a less vulnerable position now than they were before the bust. And if Canada ever does see a house-price correction, as seems at least plausible, it is not clear that the contrast between Canada and the United States will look quite so favorable a few years down the road.

And finally, I’ll make a brief political point. Many conservatives believe that to win Latino voters, they need to take a particular position on immigration reform. They might instead consider paying more attention to the fact that Hispanic household wealth fell by 66 percent from 2005 to 2009, and that many Latino families, and indeed many middle-income families of all backgrounds, are still reeling from the wealth destruction of that era.