[Novelist Nicholson Baker plays video games:]

Mostly I glided up and down ramps and stairs shooting at enemies, listening to chilly electronica. I played the game in “easy” mode, as opposed to “normal,” “heroic,” or “legendary”—the menu option reads “Laugh as helpless victims flee in terror from their inevitable slaughter”—but it didn’t seem all that easy to me. Short-statured, stocky aliens called Grunts popped up frequently, and with hostile intent—they had munchkin voices and cackled nastily and they said things like “Die, heretic!” I had to kill many of these. Other alien enemies, called Brutes, said, “I will split your bones.” They sounded as if they had ripped up their vocal cords by popping steroids. I used several different weapons to kill them, including the needler, which shot explosive needles, and I plundered dead alien bodies for more guns and ammunition. The Grunts and the Brutes jeered and tried to end my life. I got lost and hit cul-de-sacs and said bad words and hopped up and down near a burning car. Sometimes I died.

via Video games for Xbox and Playstation : The New Yorker.

[Sad, although perhaps unsurprising, facts about the last six years:]

Those were the headlines. But the really interesting stuff was in the body of report, which contains data on incomes going back half a century. What these numbers show, or rather confirm, is that in economic terms much of middle America has experienced four lost decades. Since its founding, the United States has been a country based on enterprise, hard work, and material progress. But for forty years now, the engine that generates across-the-board rises in living standards has been stalled, with incomes stagnating at the bottom and in the middle while growing rapidly at the top.

via Four Lost Decades: Why American Politics Is All Messed Up : The New Yorker.

[More info, with good charts, about the last six years:]

On a day when President Obama talked about the economy and the financial system five years after the collapse of Lehman Brothers, it’s worth being reminded about what has transpired in those years, taking into account the many revisions that have been made to the official statistics since that fateful day in September, 2008. For ease of exposition, I’ll list them individually.

via The Uneven Economic Recovery: Eleven Things We've Learned and Six Charts : The New Yorker.