Perhaps hoping to disprove the economic axiom that we cannot make a living by selling each other hamburgers, McDonald’s will today add fuel to the nascent recovery by hiring 50,000 new workers nationwide. How is that possible? Maybe because the chain is the only place people can afford to eat at anymore. In any event, “The new openings are available across 14,000 restaurants and include crew and management positions, part-time and full-time jobs. The average starting wage is $8 an hour, a McDonald’s (MCD, Fortune 500) spokeswoman said.” Welcome to the new McConomy!

“A trio of researchers from the National University of Singapore — Kenneth Tai, Xue Zheng and Jayanth Narayanan — concludes that ‘touching a teddy bear mitigates the negative effects of exclusion,’ leading to increased levels of cooperative, helpful behavior. They report the stuffed animal seems to have ‘specific psychological significance as a source of comfort and positive feeling,’ brightening the mood of those who are otherwise feeling ostracized.”

The year’s best media scandal has come to a fairly happy end: VegNews, the magazine for vegans, has agreed to stop running delicious pictures of meat, and has actually apologized for doing so. What’s odd is that they spent a week being defensive and bullying and hostile to their readers, but most of the vegans are a friendly, forgiving people, as there is no meat inside them to make them murderous, so for the most part they will not hold a grudge. A happy ending! Let’s all raise our tofurkey dogs in solidarity.

The Arizona legislature has finally passed some laws so crazy that even Republican governor Jan Brewer has refused to sign off on them; unfortunately, they weren’t this one or this one.

The internet is agog with the news that the Daily Mail gets more traffic than the Huffington Post — some 40 million uniques in a month now. (This is sort of like saying that bacon “gets more traffic” than sausages, in a way: people just like breakfasts meats, just as they adore celebrity nipples.) The Daily Mail, unlike the HuffPo, also sells 1.9 million newspapers a day — astounding numbers to American newspaperpeople. (That’s extremely close to the total daily circulation of the Washington Post plus the LA Times plus the New York Times. For real.) Still, almost 2/3rds of their web traffic is from outside of the UK. Their secret isn’t just celebrity nipples though, to be fair. It’s also old-school, small-town newspaper-style death and disaster. The magical thing about the UK is that their tourists are constantly being murdered in Sarasota or plunging to their deaths in Thai waterfalls. It’s like the whole country is the cast of a Final Destination movie. As long as the UK’s number one export is woe-begotten folks on holiday, that’s cash in the bank.

by David Roth and Charles Star

Don’t ask how we got this. It’s not important how we got this. But here’s how we got this: Despite his photographic-negative-with-sunglasses-on-the-back-of-his-head aesthetic, celebrity chef, startlingly discomfiting physical presence and “Minute To Win It” host Guy Fieri is, it turns out, an Awl reader. After Jeff Johnson and I discussed a speculative obesity-enhancement device known as a “sauce wash” in this Yakkin’ About Football chat, Fieri’s lawyers called us to see if we had patented the invention. Long story short, we’ve all now got plenty of those Quiznos’s dollars to spend, and I blow the occasional weekend riding around in Guy’s classic Dodge Charger, watching him get gravy in his eyebrows while eating four-pound fried-meat sandwiches at family restaurants on Florida’s Space Coast. So my invitation to Guy’s Slammin’ Seder ‘Sperience didn’t really come as a surprise. That said, the menu blew my mind, even knowing what I know about the guy and his work. Read on, and get ready to get hungry/queasy!

Hillel Sandwich: Jalapeno-charoset poppers with kickin’ horseradish ranch dipping sauce
Carpas: Turkey sriracha sashimi in WildWrappers™ lettuce cups

Gefilte fish parmigiana “jammers”

Buffalo chicken soup with wasabi-saltpeter matzah balls

Slammin’ Sweet Potato Kugel Bites™ with Scotch Bonnet ginger-soy aioli
Chopped liver sliders, chipotle-schmaltz “zipping” sauce
Brisket Stix™ with Manischewitz-mustard “drizzlers”

Habanero brisket with deep-fried horseradish quinoa “Watza Matza? Balls”™
“Moses In The Basket”: Heavily breaded chicken fingers served in a paper-lined plastic basket with a small container of honey mustard

Matzo-tinis
White Zinfandel Plague-spritzer

Golden raisin-and-halvah macaroons with Coors Banquet Beer sorbet
Dry Gefen yellow cake from a box

David Roth co-writes the Wall Street Journal’s Daily Fix, contributes to the sports blog Can’t Stop the Bleeding and has his own little website. And he tweets!

Charles Star hosts the useless lecture series Adult Education on the first Tuesday of every month at Union Hall in Park Slope. And he tweets.

Photo by Mark Logico, U.S. Navy via Wikimedia Commons.

1k usernames reserved so far…Mon Apr 18 20:18:42 via HootSuite

Kohort
kohort

I just signed up for yet another web thingy and I don’t even know what it is! (I always do this, because I waited till August of 2007 to sign up for Twitter, and I felt stupid.) It’s Kohort, which “will be related to social media,” and which just got $3 million in seed money. Started by some hot guy who went to Duke! It sounds… great! Whatever it is. I guess? With all this hubbub going on — like, while the backers of Color are gunning to be ready to replace Facebook, with the local social network, as opposed to the “friends” network — it’s nice to opt out of the noise and drama and take a look at non-VC-backed startups. They’re not very tricky! In fact, they’re the opposite of tricky, as you generally don’t have someone’s fingers in your pudding, you don’t have any PowerPoint and you don’t have to pay a fortune for lawyers. Also it lowers the schadenfreude! So here’s your basic primer on funding a startup without VC money. (You can also bootstrap your startup by not paying the IRS for a couple years! Or so we hear. P.S. GO MAIL YOUR TAXES.)

I have not checked in with John Vanderslice since, oh, “Me And My 424.” This is my fault, not John Vanderslice’s. I’ve been kind of busy. Anyway, here’s his new one, and I kind of love it. More about the record: “John Vanderslice’s latest album, White Wilderness, was an ambitious undertaking. For starters, the entire record was captured live in two days at Fantasy Studios in Berkeley, Calif. He also made it the most richly orchestrated album of his career, with help from a collective of classically trained musicians called the Magik*Magik Orchestra.” Check it out.

It used to be, back in the day (AKA like, 2008? And 2009?) that you had to get someone to sneakily send you a cruddy iPhone shot of the Times newsroom on Pulitzer day. Now they tweet it themselves. IN ANY EVENT, Executive Editor Bill Keller still has all his hair, despite the long nights he spends tearing at it whilst writing his daily (kidding!) column for the Times mag, and the paper was not snubbed this year, with two Pulitzers, including one shared by the eminently worthy Ellen Barry, the best reporter ever. There’s a little something else for almost everyone in these here Pulitzers, in fact! You’ve got your Globes, your Washington Posts, your LA Times, even your Wall Street Journals. It’s the feel-good Pulitzers of the decade! (Well, except for the Miami Herald, who were finalists in the “Breaking News” category this year, which was then not given an award at all.) It’s almost like they decided to spread the love amongst all the fabled giants of old. (In other news, Jennifer Egan won for fiction!)

The New Scientist takes an in-depth look at the subject of happiness, specifically the ways in which one can achieve it. I’m sure there’s plenty of valuable information over there, so do check it out, but if you’re pressed for time here’s a quick cheat-sheet.