PORTLAND, Ore. – Portland police are searching for a 54-year-old man suspected in two stabbings that occurred Wednesday afternoon in Northeast Portland.
Officers were first called at about 3:30 p.m. on Dec. 24 to reports of a stabbing near the 3000 block of Northeast Weidler Street. A 20-year-old man was found with a neck injury and was taken to a local hospital. Officers searched the area but were unable to locate a suspect at that time.
Shortly afterward, police responded to another call involving an assault near Northeast 24th Avenue and Northeast Hancock Street. A 67-year-old man was found with injuries to his neck and head and was transported to a hospital with serious injuries.
Police believe both assaults are connected and were carried out by the same suspect. Both victims have since been released from the hospital.
Detectives with the Portland Police Bureau’s Major Crimes Unit identified Richard Scott Stuart, 54, as the suspect after investigating the incidents throughout the holiday period. An arrest warrant has been issued for Stuart on two counts of attempted murder and other related charges.
Police are asking anyone who sees Stuart to call 911 immediately and not attempt to detain him. Investigators say he may be using public transportation.
Anyone with information about the cases who has not already spoken with police is asked to contact [email protected] and reference case numbers 25-351594 and 25-351601.
Richard Sandoval’s career began in the ‘90s in New York, as the Mexico City-born chef opened a pair of French restaurants. Later, he opened Maya, a contemporary Mexican restaurant on the Upper East Side. Esteemed New York Times critic Ruth Reichl awarded the restaurant two stars.
Sandoval’s star was bright and he opened restaurants all over America and the world. In Chicago, he opened a downtown food hall, Latinicity. He also partnered with several hotels, including the Conrad Chicago where he opened the rooftop restaurant Noyane and Baptiste & Bottle. Those restaurants all closed during the pandemic.
Earlier this year, the celebrity chef returned to the Chicago market with Casa Chi, a Mag Mile restaurant that explores Nikkei cuisine. Now, this month, he opened another restaurant, Toro, a pan-Latin restaurant inside the Fairmont Chicago hotel near Millenium Park — technically it’s located in the Loop.
The new restaurant is inside the Fairmont.
Look for seafood and beef with flavors from Central and South Americas.
The first Toro opened in 2014 in Scottsdale, Arizona, and there are similarities with other locations. For example, the Chicago menu shares items with Sandoval’s Houston restaurant, Toro Toro, which opened in November 2021. Smoked guacamole and swordfish dip are two appetizers from both restaurants. There are also sweet corn empanadas and short rib tacos. Picanha, a cut of beef with a thick fat cap that’s popular in Brazil, has been appearing on more menus stateside lately. Chicago diners will find American-raised wagyu versions of the cut at Toro. While absent from the Chicago restaurant’s name, the Houston location is labeled as a steakhouse. With the Picanha, a 52-ounce prime tomahawk ribeye for $220, for five more cuts of beef, Toro Chicago could also be considered a steakhouse. There are various raw bar items including ceviche made with Peruvian red snapper, bison tiradito, and a few sushi rolls including a vegan oyster mushroom selection.
The cocktails also have a pan-Latin influence, and a press release touts the Flaming Coffee, a drink carted tableside via cart and mixed with rum, tequila, or bourbon and served with a flambéed cinnamon and sugar rim.
Walk through the space below and check out some of the seafood dishes below.
Toro Chicago, inside the Fairmont Chicago, 200 N. Columbus Drive, open 6 a.m. to midnight on Sunday through Thursday; 6 a.m. to 2 a.m. on Saturday. Reservations via OpenTable.
It’s not like celebrated international chef Richard Sandoval planned to open two Chicago restaurants back-to-back. But when the opportunity to launch Toro Chicago inside Streeterville’s Fairmont Chicago, Millennium Park came about, he couldn’t refuse.
In May, Sandoval opened Casa Chi in the InterContinental Chicago Magnificent Mile. It replaced Eno Wine Bar with a focus on Nikkei cuisine that interprets Peruvian ingredients through a Japanese lens — a reflection of the Japanese immigrants who moved to the South American country.
Set to open this fall, Toro Chicago will take a pan-Latin approach to its food and beverage, drawing inspiration from Central and South American countries including Colombia, Mexico, Argentina, Brazil, Peru, and Venezuela.
“You take off running and you never know what’s going to happen,” says Sandoval of the dual restaurant timelines.
There are some 60 restaurants, including several Toro locations, under the Richard Sandoval Hospitality umbrella around the world. While there is plenty of overlap between the menus there are differences too.
“With this brand, we always leave about 30 percent of the menu to localize it,” says Sandoval, adding that everybody looks at Latin American cuisine differently depending on their location. “For example, Mexican food in New York is different than Mexican food in LA It’s understanding these things and creating menu items that reflect that.” At Toro Chicago, that will involve a strong meat component, he says.
Toro Chicago will draw on the cuisines of countries like Colombia, Argentina, Peru, and Venezuela. KTGY/Toro Chicago
Signature Toro dishes that will be on the Chicago menu include Nikkei-inspired angry scorpion Toro roll (crab, cucumber, avocado, and spicy tuna topped with eel sauce), corn- and ají amarillo-filled empanadas garnished with a chimichurri sauce, and lomo saltado, a Peruvian-style dish of beef tenderloin served on a bed of creamy rice topped with crispy potato and spicy rocoto pepper aioli.
Cocktails at Toro Chicago will follow a similar Latin approach. “It’s a lot of playing with South and Central American ingredients,” says Sandoval. “Our mixologists are very creative, so you can expect a cocktail program that is very engaging and visual.” Toro’s Mercado Margarita includes jalapeño-infused El Jimador Blanco tequila topped with a pink hibiscus rosemary foam that slowly melts into the yellow passion fruit in the cocktail.
Like other Toro locations, the Chicago restaurant’s interior design will be colorful with a mix of bold Latin American textiles. The space will seat about 260 guests with two private rooms for 14 and 50.
“I really enjoyed being in Chicago, so when I got the opportunity to come back, I jumped at it,” he says. “I like big cities, but Chicago, to me, is a little calmer. Plus, I think there’s a great food scene here that over the last 15 years or so has really come around.”
Richard Lewis wasn’t the first neurotic stand-up comic, but he was one of the best—and, as contradictory as it sounds, probably the most comfortable. “When I’m on stage, I’m the happiest I could ever be,” he told me in 2022, during an interview about his friend Warren Zevon. “I’m just in touch with who I am, and want to express it. It’s just calm. It’s like the eye of a hurricane.”
Lewis, who died of a heart attack on Tuesday at 76, wasn’t being hyperbolic. Over the course of his career, he spoke and wrote candidly about his strained relationship with his parents, drug use, alcoholism, depression, body dysmorphia, the pain caused by multiple surgeries, and most recently, his experience with Parkinson’s disease. That the Jewish guy with the poofy mane of black (and eventually gray) hair withstood that barrage is both extraordinary and admirable. But what made the self-described “Prince of Pain” special wasn’t his tolerance for personal torment. It was his ability to spin angst into affability. Self-deprecating jokes poured out of Lewis, but the sweat of a desperate hack never did. After all, his act wasn’t a put-on. It was just him.
Lewis was a paranoid person: “On my stationary bike, I have a rearview mirror,” he once quipped. His childhood was rough: whenNew York magazineasked him about his most memorable meal ever, he said, “It was in 1981—the first Thanksgiving I ever had without a social worker present.” And he always found himself in bad situations: in fact, Yale credited him with popularizing the phrase “the (blank) from hell” after his ’70s routine about a cursed date.
For the last 25 years, Lewis happily turned his inner turmoil outward as a recurring character on Curb Your Enthusiasm. In the HBO sitcom, now in its final season, he played an even more miserable version of himself opposite his real-life friend Larry David. Whenever Lewis popped up on Curb, something memorable happened. His delivery of the simplest lines were laugh-out-loud funny. Like when Larry dipped his nose into Lewis’s coffee in Season 10 and Lewis bellowed, “What are you, a fuckin’ goose?” Or when Lewis was shocked to find Larry selling cars at a dealership and shouted, “What are you, fuckin’ Willy Loman?” None of the show’s guest stars, it seemed, were better at breaking David. Often, when the two were meant to be arguing in a scene, you could tell how giddy they both were to be going back and forth with each other. “Richard and I were born three days apart in the same hospital and for most of my life he’s been like a brother to me,” David said in a statement on Wednesday. “He had that rare combination of being the funniest person and also the sweetest. But today he made me sob and for that I’ll never forgive him.”
Lewis was good at making other comics laugh. He was a regular on The Tonight Show Starring Johnny Carson, The Howard Stern Show, Late Night With Conan O’Brien, and The Daily Show. He was also one of David Letterman’s favorite guests, appearing on Late Night 48 times. To Lewis, Letterman’s support was a miracle. But it made sense. “It was just an amazing break for me that he understood me,” Lewis told me. “I bring that up because I’m so self-deprecating, and so is David. He’s so hard on himself.”
Lewis’s late-night ubiquity and his first two stand-up specials, I’m in Painand I’m Exhausted, combined to help make him famous. By 1989, he was costarring in a sitcom with Jamie Lee Curtis called Anything but Love, a will-they-or-won’t-they rom-com that ran for four seasons on ABC, in which Lewis played a magazine columnist named Marty Gold. The fact that an anxious comedian could carry a hit show about a journalist is a bitterly hilarious reminder of the hold both of those professions used to have on America. It’s also proof of how likable Lewis was, even when he wasn’t spilling his guts in a comedy club.
I was too young for his comedy back in the early ’90s, but I remember seeing Lewis in commercials for one of the decade’s strangest products: BoKu, a juice box … but for grown-ups. In the long-running campaign, the eternally black-clad comedian basically just did his stand-up act, simply holding one of the soft drinks in his hand for 30 seconds at a time. When I interviewed him, he said that he had a hand in writing the ads—and he had a ball doing it. Leave it to Richard Lewis, the only man who could sell non-alcoholic juice boxes to adults.
Lewis could relate to people who’d gone through hell. Listening to him talk about Zevon, it was obvious that he revered the musician, and obvious why. “Some of the songs were very self-deprecating,” he said. “He was an exquisite writer.”
“A couple years before I bottomed out and got sober, I remember I was at the Palm restaurant in L.A., and there was a great table of a lot of rockers,” Lewis continued. “Warren was there, and I had never met him before. I wasn’t at the dinner, I was just wandering around the restaurant. It was about six guys, and I knew most of the table. But when I saw Zevon, I was just thrilled that I had the chance to just tell him what I thought about him.”
It turned out that Lewis and Zevon were practically neighbors. They even shopped at the same expensive Laurel Canyon grocer. “I loved it when I ran into him at the store buying $20 granola,” Lewis said. “I would walk around with my cart with him, and try to keep him there as long as possible. When I would make him laugh, I could see his face. He would laugh so loudly, but he took that first one or two seconds to breathe and take it in. Then he just let it out. It was like he really appreciated funny. I knew that, as a friend. Of course I loved that he admired me. You feel like a million bucks.”
Toward the end of Zevon’s life, when he had cancer and had fallen back into his old habits, he stopped talking to Lewis. It was the singer’s way of protecting his friend. “Because he knew I was sober …” Lewis said. “He was a tough guy, but that was what he did to me, and I understood it, and I loved him for it. I didn’t want to force the issue and call him. I did email him, though, and tell him what I thought about him, and that I understood, and that I loved him.”
Lewis compared Zevon to someone else he’d gotten to know in New York. “I used to hang out at Mickey Mantle’s bar and restaurant,” Lewis said. “It was near my hotel in Central Park South. Mantle and I were both alcoholics. I would often times bring my work with me and sit at the bar or in a booth, and go over concert material for hours and drink. He really dug me, Mantle. He had two pictures of me hanging. I say this with a great deal of pride: I was the only non-sports figure to be in that restaurant. There were hundreds of pictures of ballplayers, and me. What’s wrong with this fucking picture? It was crazy.”
Lewis recalls watching Bob Costas’s emotional TV interview with Mantle. It was 1994, about a year before the Yankees great died of liver cancer. The Hall of Famer spoke openly about his alcoholism and failings as a parent. “Here’s the guy going out and wanting to tell people that he might have been worshiped,” Lewis said, “but he could have lived his life a much better and a much healthier way.” That summer, Lewis told me, “I got sober.”
As permanently anguished as he was, Lewis knew he was fortunate to have an outlet for his pain. It’d be a cliché to say that comedy saved him, but it did seem to keep him going until the very end. In the face of a Parkinson’s diagnosis, he returned for the final season of Curb. In last week’s “Vertical Drop, Horizontal Tug,” Larry and Lewis are in the middle of a golf round when Lewis tells Larry that he’s putting him in his will. Larry, of course, is mad about it. He doesn’t need his friend’s money. He says he’ll just donate it to charity. The incredulity, of course, leads to another delightfully familiar argument.
“I’m giving it to you anyway, pal,” Lewis says.
“Oh my God, fuck you,” Larry replies.
That was Lewis. Even when life was cursing him out, he refused to give up.
Video game publisher Activision Blizzard has been embroiled in controversy within the last few years, from allegations that a culture of sexual harassment was allowed to thrive to reports of union-busting by management. But in January 2024, when a new lawsuit was filed against the Call of Duty and Overwatch publisher, many were shocked to read what it was in reference to: A 57-year-old former ActiBlizz exec alleged that he left the company because of ageism. According to the lawsuit, then-CEO Bobby Kotick said that the company’s problem was that there were “too many old white guys” working there.
Though race and gender traditionally get more attention in calls for a more diverse game industry—one where whiteness and maleness remain the norm—age discrimination is a hot-button issue as well. According to a 2019 survey from the International Game Developers Association, only 9% of game developers are 50 years old or older. As the people behind iconic, genre-defining games approach and surpass middle age, how do their peers treat them? Have they noticed a shift in the way developers work, or how games are made?
I sat down with Gears of War designer Cliff Bleszinksi on one call and Ultima Underworld creator Warren Spector, Apogee Software founder Scott Miller, and Nightdive Studios head of business development Larry Kuperman on another, to chat about navigating the game world after spending decades in it.
Photo: Mark Davis (Getty Images)
The demands of game development
“I’m gonna go on record saying I think I’m the oldest person who isn’t running stuff or on the business side,” Spector, who is 68, proclaims early on in the conversation. He’s referencing the phenomenon by which former developers transition to the business side of game dev, which many chalk up to the intense demands of video game development cycles.
Spector started in the board game world before moving to digital games in 1989, Miller (who pioneered gaming’s episodic release format) shipped his first in ‘85, Kuperman has been involved in games since 2001, and Bleszinski joined Epic Games in ‘92. Of the four, Spector is the only one solely working on the development side, while the rest are now mostly focused on the business end or, in Bleszinski’s case, out of games almost entirely.
I ask if the volatility and demands of the industry, which has seen more than 6,000 layoffs in the first month of 2024 alone, are why companies can’t or won’t retain older talent. “Some people find an ever-changing environment invigorating,” Spector suggests. “That’s one of the reasons I’ve lasted this long…things change so rapidly that you’re constantly acquiring not only new knowledge but new skills.”
But he acknowledges how competitive and tough the games industry can be. “The difficulty of the work, the low pay, drives even young developers away,” he points out while suggesting that, in his experience, the average “lifespan” of a programmer is about five to seven years due to the intense nature of their work.
“There’s a certain type of developer that’s a kind of self-flagellating monk that lives for that [intense] work ethic,” Bleszinski says during our conversation. “And then there’s a certain amount of peer pressure where you have deadlines and then someone goes home at six o’clock at night to their family, and then the other people are still at their desks—they don’t say it, but deep down they’re thinking, ‘I’m gonna be here until midnight, fuck that guy.’ A lot of that comes from the top…my producer on Gears, Rod Ferguson, I believe is one of the best in the business, but he lives for the work. He’s just an absolute workaholic.”
With crunch becoming an increasingly popular issue within the industry, and workers campaigning for union protections and a better work/life balance, can studios expect their developers to work the way they once did?
“The industry thrives on hungry game developers that are just happy to get an okay salary and free Mountain Dew and Doritos,” Bleszinski says. “If crunch is enforced, they’ll do it, but they’re gonna be very resentful towards the company…plus you get to a certain age where you hit the point where you’re like, ‘fuck you, pay me’.”
Image: Apogee Entertainment
The promise of indies, the problem of layoffs
Though Spector, Miller, and Kuperman don’t hesitate to disagree on the topics we cover (they playfully throw barbs about the validity of the games-as-a-service business model), they wholeheartedly agree on one thing: The nuts and bolts of game development have dramatically shifted since they started their careers, and much of that shift can be attributed to the availability and approachability of today’s game engines.
“We used to have to create engines from scratch, and that limited access,” Spector points out. “Now, youngsters right out of school, in their garage, can actually make games without learning Assembly, like Richard Garriot [the creator of the Ultima series] had to. So I think that’s a large reason why you don’t see as many older developers, because the youngsters are using those available tools.”
Miller, who is still “deeply involved” in making games, concurs: “We’re in the era now where two people can do what 20 people did back in the ‘90s.” He brings up last year’s action game, Turbo Overkill, which Apogee published. “95% of that game was made by one guy. We helped him up with the music and voiceover, but this is a game that would’ve taken 25 to 30 people back in the ‘90s. It’s just a remarkable piece of work.”
And for them, in today’s game economy, innovation like that can only be found at indie studios. “I like being at the indie level,” Miller says. “I think we can all agree on that,” Kuperman chimes in. “There’s just so much innovation going on at the indie level that you’re not seeing at the big boy level because it’s too costly to take a risk,” Miller suggests.
What about those “big boy” studios, and the thousands of layoffs they’ve doled out in the last month alone? How do industry mainstays feel about the layoffs, and the future of the industry? For Spector, there’s no fear in gaming’s future, just apprehension towards those leading it: “It sounds like [companies] just over-hired during the early days of the pandemic, and it’s bad management that’s resulting in overstaffing. That doesn’t mean there’s a fundamental flaw. It means we have some bad managers at the top of companies.”
Kuperman steps in, pointing out that “Scott [Miller] has been kinda leading the way in hiring back up people from kindred companies.” Miller reiterated Spector’s talking points, suggesting that “games suddenly were selling 30 to 50% better than normal” during covid, and studios went on a hiring spree.
The conversation circles back around, once again, to the promise and allure of indie studios in the modern financial climate. “I don’t have 150 or 200 employees to lay off…but the layoffs are coming at Mega Corp,” Kuperman says. “And in the meantime, there are lots of indie developers that are not only thriving, but are looking to scale up.”
Variety
Ageism and diversity in the video game industry
Though we laugh a bit about how we all came together—thanks to Bobby Kotick (himself a 61-year-old man) allegedly partaking in ageism—the tone does get somewhat serious when discussing the issue of age discrimination. Miller and Spector deny facing any sort of ageism during their decades in the industry, but Kuperman has a personal anecdote that’s stayed with him for years.
After working remotely for GameStop for two years as a business development manager, he was let go at 57 years old. “There I was, with a great resume, you know, successful in games, I had worked with every major company, my client list went from Activision to Zenimax…I sent out my resume, my applications to all of these companies that I had worked with—they all knew what I could do and my capabilities. And they all turned me down,” Kuperman recalls. “And the one that was the most offensive—I won’t say who it was—but they took the time to explain to me that I was not a ‘cultural fit.’ I got this explanation that I was not a cultural fit while I was working from home wearing a Ramones T-shirt. I knew what they meant, right? That I was not gonna fit in with their twenty- and thirty-somethings.”
Bleszinski believes older members of the industry are still in it either because they didn’t get “fuck you” money or because they genuinely love what they do—from our convo, it’s clear that his time churning out AAA games left him somewhat jaded. “Talking about ageism—once a person gets married and has kids and whatnot, you know, they’re going to put in their eight hours and they’re gonna go the fuck home,” Bleszinski says. “I tell people, get ‘fuck you’ money, and then get the fuck out.”
Spector, Miller, and Kuperman are all now indie darlings, so their experience is vastly different from Bleszinski’s, who had to be the face of a massive AAA franchise while still actively working on it. But all of them still agree that game development can often feel like a young person’s, well, game. Part of that has to do with the demands of the work, sure, but there’s an accessibility problem, as well.
“My twitch skills are not what they used to be,” Spector points out. “People don’t believe me that there are physical changes in your body as you get older. But there are, and I am physically not able to work the kinds of hours I used to. I am physically not able to keep up with 12-year-olds, 34-year-olds [referencing my age] playing games anymore. So I need to find a somewhat different role in development, and I’m lucky enough that I’ve been able to carve out a different role. But a lot of people might just say, ‘I don’t want to do that anymore’ and self-select out.”
Image: Naughty Dog
“The thing is, for me, my vision,” Kuperman says. He struggles with contrast in games, and can get frustrated when he can’t see important features like doors. “But I’m lucky because [my studio] NightDive is now part of Atari, so I now have support mechanisms that I didn’t have before.”
But how does the industry, as a whole, do when it comes to accessibility and diversity?
“It’s not just age and it’s not just physical—divergent thinking is not very well-supported,” Spector says. “Every way you can think about diversity, we do a bad job…we don’t get a lot of resumes from older developers or people who think differently or people of color…that’s an area where I think younger developers are going to have to lead the charge.”
He continues. “I’m only speaking for myself but, I like the past when I was able to work until three in the morning and sleep under my desk and drive home and have no idea how I got home. I kind of miss those days of comradery in the foxhole. Younger developers don’t wanna do that, and it’s a good thing ‘cause I can’t do it anymore. So it’s good that they’re thinking that way…the world has changed for the better.”
“His determination to overcome a horrific past and his pure will to reject the aid of a wheelchair was the point that sealed the deal.”
Sweet, friendly, and now full of energy, you’d never guess Lasagna had a traumatic, rough first year of life. As a young pup, Lasagna came to Austin Pets Alive! paralyzed, likely from a gunshot wound. He was unable to bring his back legs underneath him and could not bear weight. Stranger to houses, as he had never been in one, Lasagna simply wanted a home where he could live a fun, comfortable life that every dog deserves. What Lasagna didn’t know is that his soon-to-be foster dad would do everything in his power to find him just that.
Lasagna’s foster dad, Jeffrey, was not a marketing guru, but he did his best to ensure Lasagna got the life he deserved. What we really should be asking is, “What didn’t Jeffrey do?” Jeffrey posted regular Facebook updates, created an Instagram account, submitted photos for Lasanga’s APA! bio, taught himself how to use hashtags, had Lasagna featured in mobility-challenged pup marketing, had Lasagna in a workshop covered by KXAN, and even snuck Lasagna into a dog showoff sponsored by Tito’s! With rapid succession, Lasagna had 3 adoption inquiries in a short amount of time!
One potential adopter mentioned he liked how Lasagna “tossed his wheelchair aside and decided to push through learning to walk instead.” Lasagna continued to face adversity with 4 pressure ulcers on his hind leg and paws and contracting tapeworm, which led to starvation and a behavior shift. But he persevered, and grew into the nickname “Wags” because of how much he wagged his tail! Jeffrey and Lasagna faced the challenges head-on and Jeffrey noted that Lasagna “loves like no creature I’ve seen before.”
Enter Richard, a man who was ready to find his new best friend. After browsing several dog profiles, the behavior team at APA! recommended Lasagna to Richard. He LOVED Lasagna’s Instagram account. He recalls Lasagna’s story as “heartbreaking but even more so inspiring. This is how my granddaughter came to name him MAGNAR which translates to “survivor.”After a successful meet-and-greet with Lasagna, now Magnar, and foster Jeffrey, they were sold. Magnar has improved greatly as he is now able to clear a 12-step flight of stairs with no issue!
Strong and brave, Magnar — appropriately named — overcame his rocky start to life. He’s happy to finally have a place to call home. Fosters and adopters play such an important role in giving our medical animals at APA! a chance at life. Consider being a lifeline to a pet in need by becoming a foster today. It can really turn their life around — just look at Magnar.
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