Salon.com > R.I.P

Game Theory: “Pure pop for nerd people,” the greatest unknown ’80s band

Fri, 19 Apr 2013 00:00:00 +0000

1. Silent Football

The term “gifted children” dates back to the 1920s, to the unsavory, sometimes racist world of early IQ tests, but it took fifty years to find its niche: “gifted and talented” summer camps became widespread and self-sustaining during the 1970s. The Center for Talented Youth (CTY), sponsored by Johns Hopkins University, opened its doors in 1979: about 9,000 students, aged twelve to sixteen, now attend CTY on six campuses each summer. According to its official website, those students discover “challenging educational opportunities,” in Latin, mathematics, neuroscience, and so on. According to realcty.org, maintained by alumni, they learn an argot (“flying squirrel,” “CTY-S”) and a set of diversions found nowhere else, such as “Silent Football,” “a complex game involving an invisible football, hallucinations, and tattling.… One CTY-er solved a Rubik’s Cube on stage while reciting the first 200 digits of pi.”

RIP Roger Ebert: Movie criticism’s Great Communicator

Fri, 05 Apr 2013 01:10:00 +0000

Roger Ebert, who died on Thursday at age 70 after a long and debilitating struggle with cancer that never sapped his spirit, was the Great Communicator of movie criticism, a genuine and generous man who became the greatest popular advocate the form has ever had. He reached millions of readers with his straightforward prose, and a vastly larger universe of TV viewers in the ‘80s and ‘90s with his gruff but avuncular presence. Even if you’re too young to have grown up watching Ebert spar on the small screen with his late friend and rival Gene Siskel, you still know who he is. Virtually alone among his generation of journalists, Ebert saw the substantive potential of social media early on and translated his fame in print and on TV to the Internet, becoming a Twitter trailblazer and a mentor who showed the rest of us in this imploding profession not just how to survive but how to prosper in the digital age.

A reality star we didn’t really know

Tue, 02 Apr 2013 18:31:00 +0000

We all know Shain Gandee, the edited persona on TV, the one who was supposed to represent Shain Gandee the person, whose untimely death surprised us when it was reported Monday afternoon. Even if you never saw the MTV television series “Buckwild,” on which he appeared, you know Shain. You have friends like him.

I’m not thinking about the go-along-get-along guy who’s up for anything, the one who’s so routinely cheerful that everyone is always happy to have him around. I’m also not thinking about the inventive problem solver, the one who listens carefully to everyone else’s wildest desires and responds, “We can do that” -- then figures out exactly how to satisfy them.

We know Shain, because he was the one who wanted, but never quite got, the prettiest girl in the room. Though the young women on the show mentioned how much they liked his personality and admired his mechanical talents, they weren’t interested in him romantically. That must have hurt. We know this pain. We understand it. And we love those who suffer from it, for their quiet, unrequited yearning.

Richard Ben Cramer: The last trusted reporter

Wed, 09 Jan 2013 01:00:00 +0000

The sad news of Richard Ben Cramer’s death has given the political world an occasion to acknowledge his most ambitious work’s status as the best campaign book ever written. It also prompted one of the principal characters in “What It Takes” to make a startling admission to Salon.

“I'm going to tell you something that I've never told anyone before,” Gary Hart said this afternoon. “I never read the book."

Hart was among the six 1988 presidential candidates Cramer profiled in his book, although that’s a completely inadequate description of what Cramer sought to achieve. For two years, he immersed himself with Robert Caro-ish devotion in the lives of his subjects, hoping to understand who they really were as people, and then spent several more years writing the book. When it was released in 1992, “What It Takes” was greeted with ho-hum reviews and meager sales, but it’s become a cult classic in the years since.

Norman Schwarzkopf, Iraq war general, dies at 78

Fri, 28 Dec 2012 00:27:00 +0000

A U.S. official says retired Gen. H. Norman Schwarzkopf, who commanded the U.S.-led international coalition that drove Saddam Hussein's forces out of Kuwait in 1991, has died. He was 78.

The official tells The Associated Press that Schwarzkopf died Thursday in Tampa, Fla. The official wasn't authorized to release the information publicly and spoke on condition of anonymity.

A much-decorated combat soldier in Vietnam, Schwarzkopf was known popularly as "Stormin' Norman" for a notoriously explosive temper.

He lived in retirement in Tampa, where he had served in his last military assignment as commander-in-chief of U.S. Central Command. That is the headquarters responsible for U.S. military and security concerns in nearly 20 countries from the eastern Mediterranean and Africa to Pakistan.

Even more reasons for gun control

Thu, 20 Dec 2012 15:26:00 +0000

If 2011 numbers are predictive, more than 12,000 people will be killed by guns in America this year.

That’s four times the number of people who died in the Sept. 11 attacks. Yet while we mourned together as a nation after the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, and then went to war against al-Qaida and two sovereign nations, it appears to have taken 20 schoolchildren being gunned down in Connecticut for politicians of either party to challenge the power of the NRA.

And this when even a strong majority of NRA members support common-sense gun control! Exactly how many bodies have to pile up for Washington to find the will to act?

Every day in America, 34 Americans are killed by guns. Every day in America, at least one of those killed is under the age of 14. In the wake of all-too-frequent mass shootings, we tend to ignore the even more frequent, quotidian gun deaths that are devastating our communities, destroying families and endangering our children. Here are just a few stories about lives that might have been saved with sensible gun laws.

Linkin Leatham, 2

Linkin’s parents called their son the “miracle baby” for having overcome several complications at birth and defying doctors’ expectations that he wouldn’t survive. Then, in September, 2-year-old Linkin picked up his father’s handgun and shot himself in the eye, ultimately dying from his wounds. Linkin’s father is a Utah police officer, though the weapon involved in the shooting was not his service weapon.

Robert Bork’s nauseating worldview

Wed, 19 Dec 2012 19:38:00 +0000

Twenty-five years ago Ronald Reagan tried and failed to put Robert Bork on the Supreme Court. Movement conservatives reacted with remarkably durable outrage to this political defeat. To them, of course, this wasn’t a political defeat at all, but a fundamentally illegitimate “politicization” of the nomination process, enabled by supposed slanders aimed at one of the nation’s most distinguished legal scholars.

Bork had become accidentally like a martyr, and he cashed in, quite literally, on his supposed victim status, writing a couple of best-selling books decrying the moral degeneracy of contemporary America, and living large on what has been referred to indelicately as wingnut welfare.

This narrative was always a bunch of nonsense, and although de mortuis nil nisi bonum is a maxim of our profession, the memory of the deceased will not be spared here.