Malcolm Gladwell, successful author.

Ever wonder why you’re not rich and/or famous? If you’re an American, of course you have.

Or, if you happen to be one of the lucky few who’ve actually gotten rich and/or famous, your reaction when it happened was probably “It’s about fucking time my intrinsic greatness was recognized and rewarded.” Just recall Joe the Plumber’s easy acceptance of reporters on his lawn, cheering crowds, recording deals, etc. Like most Americans, he’d been vaguely wondering what took the public so long to appreciate his brilliance, and he was consequently more than ready for his bald-headed close-ups and smug sound-bites.

Anyway, there’s this new book out by former New Yorker columnist Malcolm Gladwell that’s trying to explain to us why we’re not as rich and/or famous as we expected to be. It’s called Outliers: The Story of Success, but really it’s the Story of Why We’re Not Successful.

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First Estonia, then Georgia and now America:

“Suspicions of Russian involvement … Military electronics experts have not pinpointed the source or motive of the attack.”

How do you cope with defeat when your whole creed is “You can’t argue with success”? In the wake of Obama’s victory, American conservatives have some of the best minds to come out of Regent University working on this problem. Little wires are sparking in those Yugo-primate crania, tiny tendrils of smoke are pouring from their hairy ears.

In our new feature, Obama Crawl, The eXiled will introduce you to some of America’s Funniest Lame Rationalizations, featuring yesterday’s apex predators squeaking like confused Scandinavian lemmings as they try to bluff, lie, flirt and betray their way to survival. (more…)

At its root, Fallout 3 is about cleansing the world of life, stealing and hoarding. This makes it a real innovator in the world of role-playing gaming. The last innate human drive unfulfilled was simple raw power, and as the video game evolves, it evolves to look like the kind of power that was adaptable to the evolving human species. Whether it’s Nazis or Lovecraftian horrors, you can safely de-humanize tribes of enemies, then annihilate and profit from them. Our modern civilization is such a bland purgatory in contrast to what our savage desires really lust for, that we have no option but to invent gaming worlds where this behavior seems plausible. (more…)

Six Apart, the company behind the popular TypePad blogging platform, just went Marie Antoinette on us all. With all the jobs being cut in the paper industry and increasing numbers of reporters stuck with nothing to do but moan, the company decided to help out. Introducing the “TypePad Journalist Bailout Program”: a free TypePad Pro blog account for every unemployed professional journalist!  A media famine is afoot, journalists don’t have papers to work for. So…”Let them blog!” For free, of course. All of which helps Six Apart’s bottom line…

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Listen:

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The first polls had just closed when the Republican Right’s “Agony of Defeat” moment arrived. It was just after 8 p.m. — right as Fox’s “America’s Election HQ” show returned from a commercial break, and Brit Hume welcomed viewers back to his “Fair and Balanced” network.

But something wasn’t right: There was a strange lack of background banter, none of the golf-buddy joshing that comes with overconfidence. There was just Bergman-esque silence between every one of Brit Hume’s dramatic pauses. The Fox cameras wandered over an incredible scene: the cream of right-wing/neocon punditry — William Kristol, Fred Barnes and Mort Kondracke — were caught slumped in their chairs during the commercial break, deep in a state of hopelessness and depression. They didn’t see the camera train on them, or maybe they were incapable of faking it, as if they’d been on a three-day Ecstasy roll at Burning Man, and now they were paying the horrible serotonin-deprived price. (more…)