The modern form of Atari is a zombie: a bunch of post-glory-days companies that have acquired the assets and IPs of one of the greats, and use them in all sorts of slightly questionable ways. We've had Atari casinos, concepts for Atari hotels, dabbling in crypto, the nice-looking but wildly overpriced Atari VCS relaunch, and most recently of course Atari got into NFTs. Well, if that wasn't all mad enough, now the rapper Soulja Boy has taken to social media to declare that he, the one and only Soulja Boy, now owns Atari. He's pretty explicit about it too: "I own Atari. The first rapper to ever own a videogame company." Soulja Boy adds that Atari is, apparently, going to buy the Soulja Boy console company for a cool $140 million.

A judge has struck down California’s ballot measure that exempted Uber and other companies from a state law requiring their drivers to be classified as employees eligible for benefits and job protections.

A 52-year-old Westminster woman with back problems faces $1,592.72 in E-470 toll charges because the president of the Colorado Fraternal Order of Police, who also headed the narcotics unit of the Longmont Police Department, used a stolen license plate that comes back as registered to her.

‘He was just out there drilling long threes in his shades and hitting cutters. It was really incredible.’

In short, Roblox is a $45 billion company whose success is built almost entirely off the spending habits and work of children, who see little to no reward for their efforts. The way kids are lured into creating content for the site with promises of making money, the way they have almost zero chance of those games ever making a cent, the way games that do make a few bucks still won’t pay a cent to their creators unless they make over $1000, it all sucks!

It's hardly a groundbreaking proposition to say that after four years of Donald Trump in the White House, the Republican Party of 2021 is less an institution interested in actual legislating than it is a collection of loosely affiliated neo-fascists…

Both reserve soldiers are now accounted for and safe.

A judge sentenced a former Alabama police officer to 25 years in prison Friday for the shooting death of a suicidal man who was holding a gun to his own head. Former Huntsville police officer William “Ben” Darby was convicted in May of killing Jeffrey Parker in 2018. Darby shot Parker while responding to a call after the man phoned 911 saying he was armed and planned to kill himself.

The government says Shroyer went into a restricted part of the Capitol.

For weeks in June and July, workers at a Maine factory making one of America’s most popular rapid tests for Covid-19 were given a task that shocked them: take apart millions of the products they had worked so hard to create and stuff them into garbage bags. Soon afterward, Andy Wilkinson, a site manager for Abbott Laboratories, the manufacturer, stood before rows of employees to announce layoffs. The company canceled contracts with suppliers and shuttered the only other plant making the test, in Illinois, dismissing a work force of 2,000. “The numbers are going down,” he told the workers of the demand for testing, saying it wasn’t their fault. “This is all about money.” As virus cases in the U.S. plummeted this spring, so did Abbott’s Covid-testing sales. But now, amid a new surge in infections, steps the company took to eliminate stock and wind down manufacturing are proving untimely — hobbling efforts to expand screening as the highly contagious Delta strain rages across the country. Demand for the 15-minute antigen test, BinaxNOW, is soaring again as people return to schools and offices. Yet Abbott has reportedly told thousands of newly interested companies that it cannot equip their testing programs in the near future. CVS, Rite Aid and Walgreens locations have been selling out of the at-home version, and Amazon shows shipping delays of up to three weeks. Abbott is scrambling to hire back hundreds of workers.

President Joe Biden on Friday announced his intention to nominate Rahm Emanuel as ambassador to Japan and Nicholas Burns as ambassador to China.

When Facebook this week released its first quarterly report about the most viewed posts in the United States, Guy Rosen, its vice president of integrity, said the social network had undertaken “a long journey” to be “by far the most transparent platform on the internet.” The list showed that the posts with the most reach tended to be innocuous content like recipes and cute animals. Facebook had prepared a similar report for the first three months of the year, but executives never shared it with the public because of concerns that it would look bad for the company, according to internal emails sent by executives and shared with The New York Times. In that report, a copy of which was provided to The Times, the most-viewed link was a news article with a headline suggesting that the coronavirus vaccine was at fault for the death of a Florida doctor. The report also showed that a Facebook page for The Epoch Times, an anti-China newspaper that spreads right-wing conspiracy theories, was the 19th-most-popular page on the platform for the first three months of 2021.

Today in dystopian hellscape news: covid-19 cases in Orlando have apparently gotten so overwhelming that it’s begun impacting the city’s water supply. Yes, really. Orlando Mayor Buddy Dyer asked residents to hold off on washing their cars and watering their lawns “for at least a week,” during a press conference on Friday, citing the city’s recent surge in hospitalizations as the cause. The Orlando Utility Commission, he explained, usually treats the city’s water with tanks of freezing liquid oxygen to make it potable. But right now, those tanks are being diverted to help provide oxygen to the record-breaking number of people in the hospital for covid-19. “We acknowledge that the number one priority for the liquid oxygen should be for hospitals,” Dyer said at a news conference. The concentrated oxygen in these tanks is a precious resource for patients with covid-19-induced lung damage—and one that we’ve already seen run low in other states, like California and New Mexico. The AP notes that the Orlando Utilities Commission typically plows through 10 trucks of liquid oxygen in a week to treat the city’s tap water. But now, anywhere between three to five of those trucks are going to be heading to hospitals instead to help keep covid-19 patients alive. A staggering 40% of the city’s potable water is used for watering lawns, the largest “crop” in the U.S. The utility commission is asking residents to conserve between 25 % and 50% of normal water use per day. “Currently we pump about 90 MGD (millions of gallons per day), and our goal would be to not exceed 50 MGD,” the commission notes. If residents fail to heed the mayor’s plea, the city’s water quality could deteriorate.

What does it feel like to live on the brink of a vast historical change? It feels like now. Of course that sounds hyperbolic, and maybe even panicky, but I think we’re there. Not that a science fiction writer can see the future any better than anyone else; very often worse. But between the pandemic, the accelerating drumbeat of extreme weather events and the accumulations of data and analysis from the scientific community, it’s become an easy call. A few weeks ago, my wife and I drove across the US east to west. In Wyoming, we hit a pall of wildfire smoke so thick that we couldn’t see the mountains just a few miles away on each side of the road. It went on like that for 1,000 miles. Then we arrived in California just in time for the latest report from the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, which documents in meticulous detail the true scale of the climate problem. Humanity now stands on the brink of not just change, but disaster. And because we can see it coming, just as clear as a black storm on the horizon, our attempts to dodge disaster and create a healthy relationship with our only home will bring huge changes in our habits, laws, institutions and technologies. All this is visible to us now. Unlike the people living in the years before the first world war, we won’t be sandbagged by catastrophe. The 2020s will not be filled with surprises — except perhaps at the speed and intensity of the changes coming down. With its atmosphere of dread foreboding, our time more resembles the years preceding the second world war, when everyone lived with a sensation of helplessly sliding down a slippery slope and over a cliff.

After this report published, the Mississippi State Department issued a health alert warning about an increase in ivermectin poisoning incidents. “The Mississippi Poison Control Center has received an increasing number of calls from individuals with potential ivermectin exposure taken to treat or prevent COVID-19 infection,” the alert said. “At least 70% of the recent calls have been related to ingestion of livestock or animal formulations of ivermectin purchased at livestock supply centers. 85% of the callers had mild symptoms, but one individual was instructed to seek further evaluation due to the amount of ivermectin reportedly ingested.” The alert said “no hospitalizations due to ivermectin toxicity have been directly reported to the Mississippi Poison Control Center or the Mississippi State Department of Health.” But MSDH reiterated to Mississippi Free Press reporter Nick Judin today that they had confirmed at least one hospitalization due to ivermectin toxicity, though it had not been reported to the department directly.

Yesterday's newsletter detailed how the media is largely overlooking voices that supported Biden's decision to withdraw from Afghanistan. Instead media reports are almost exclusively highlighting criticism of the withdrawal — often from people complicit in two decades of failed policy in Afghanistan. We have reason to believe that this is not an accident. On Wednesday, Popular Information spoke to a veteran communications professional who has been trying to place prominent voices supportive of the withdrawal on television and in print. The source said that it has been next to impossible: I’ve been in political media for over two decades, and I have never experienced something like this before. Not only can I not get people booked on shows, but I can’t even get TV bookers who frequently book my guests to give me a call back… I’ve fed sources to reporters, who end up not quoting the sources, but do quote multiple voices who are critical of the president and/or put the withdrawal in a negative light. I turn on TV and watch CNN and, frankly, a lot of MSNBC shows, and they’re presenting it as if there’s not a voice out there willing to defend the president and his decision to withdraw. But I offered those very shows those voices, and the shows purposely decided to shut them out.

The largest ghost fleet in the Western Hemisphere lies only 80 miles from the National Aquarium.

A dancer in a spandex suit was all Musk had to show.

New Jersey jails can no longer contract to hold federal immigrant detainees under a bill signed Friday by Gov. Phil Murphy, years after advocates and human rights groups raised strong objections to the money-making practice. Even though the new law bars local and private jails from "entering into, renewing, or extending immigration detention agreements," its language does not address current contracts. Bergen and Hudson counties have such contracts with U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement — with Hudson extending its by 10 years last November. Essex County ends its 13-year contract in August, and removed its immigrant detainees earlier this week, say reports. And while the bill sat on Murphy's desk and he vacationed overseas, a private facility in Elizabeth reportedly renewed its contract with ICE until 2023.

He had a good run