The death race is nothing new to the American experience, but the latest installment of Death Race strikes at the heart of futurist visions of an online video utopia. In this remake, which opened in theaters last Friday, digital technology quantifies all that rests in its path. It's not just video that gets blown to bits. It's also our standards. For entertainment, the ruthless measurement of content's mass appeal leads to the ultimate in mathematical reductionism — monetization, as YouTube's product managers might put it. As such, Death Race is more mockumentary than science fiction. Because its dark, profit-driven Web-video future is not just inevitable. It's already happened.The theme of people killing people with cars has been explored as fantasy in American motion pictures for years. The car chase is at the very core of popular cinema. Just as the camp of Ben Hur's chariot race was dispensed with in the first scene in Rome's arena from Gladiator, so does Death Race dispatch with the camp of Roger Corman's earlier production, Death Race 2000. Then, "T-video satellite" broadcast the race. Now? Choose from a hundred different angles and follow the driver you most closely identify with, all for the low, low price of $99 a heat or $250 for the full package. Mario Kart-style power-ups on the track complete the illusion of "interactivity," allowing viewers the visceral feeling that they alone decide who lives and who dies — just like in a videogame. The stargazing optimists at our sister site io9 noted that buried beneath the subtext of Death Race's villain, a prison warden played by Joan Allen, lay the hungry heart of a pageview baiter:

NASCAR driver Dale Earnhardt, Jr. lends his face to a candy bar called "Big Mo'." That's correct. [AV Club]

It's a New York City Department of Transportation "Gridlock Alert Day" so it's also naturally the perfect time for 10 NASCAR drivers to slowly drive their cars around midtown during the morning rush hour. Jimmie Johnson, Jeff Gordon, and some other dudes whose names you may have heard once or twice on Sportscenter all dragged their stock cars around Times Square this morning, going in a slow-moving, commuter-aggravating circle from Good Morning America's 44th and Broadway studios down to 42nd, over to Madison, up to 53rd, and back down to Times Square, because the best way for NASCAR to boost interest among New Yorkers is to make getting to work on time even more impossible than usual. For, you know, the suckers who have to get to midtown.

Champions Week [NASCAR]

So sad: It appears the beautiful dream of planting a NASCAR track on New York's forgotten borough has finally died, languishing in the spectral headlock-hug of resident opposition. We were about to direct disappointed fans to the NASCAR Cafe in Times Square, but apparently there is no NASCAR Cafe in Times Square. We'd assumed one had just inevitably sprouted there by now. However, from death comes life, as with an SI councilman's resurrection of the phrase "schnapps idea" to characterize the track proposal — i.e., something that seems great after you've had a few drinks. With that name, the recurring column proposal pretty much writes itself. Stay tuned.

Planted in the print version of this month's Vanity Fair along with James Wolcott's broadside versus red states is mention of a Harlequin romance sub-series we had no idea existed, and yet instantly approve of. This series is "set against the backdrop of the thrill-a-minute world of NASCAR." Titles include On the Edge, Dangerous Curves, and (chuckle) In the Groove. Sadly lacking are Killed in a Flaming Ball of Wreckage and Swabbing the Black Crud Out of Your Nostrils After a Day at the Track. Anyway, VF takes aim at the latest title, A NASCAR Holiday:

It looks like Paul Newman's posh right-turning Grand Prix racing won't likely make it to Brooklyn's Floyd Bennett Field. Which means local hoons looking for consolation must return to the idea of a turning steadily left at the proposed NASCAR track on Staten Island. The first SI public hearing on the track ended in something of a fracas, where a city councilman was reportedly placed in a tender headlock by an angry union worker (a NASCAR official dismissed the headlock as "a hug for the TV cameras"). The takeaway: one less reason to ever go near Staten Island, bringing the total well into the negative hundreds.

Because Harlequin romance novels would rather die of a broken heart than be forgotten due to irrelevancy, they've teamed with NASCAR to create a new line of paperbacks geared towards the sensitive gearhead in us all: