Have I mentioned how much I adore Maureen Ryan? Because I adore Maureen Ryan a lot, and she makes a critical point about the representation of women in the television industry and the resulting content in her scathing review of I Hate My Teenage Daughter:

Before we all link arms and dance a jig of glee about the number of ladies in the realm of TV comedy, a few reminders are in order: First, this trend is long overdue, given that women have always been funny (yes, even before Tina Fey), and this fall’s uptick in female representation doesn’t erase the fact that, as I explored in this story, the overall number of female writers in the TV industry is shrinking.

Also, the sad fact is, women are as capable of writing a misogynist, soul-killing TV comedy as anyone else. Exhibit A: ‘I Hate My Teenage Daughter,’ a shrieky nightmare that premieres 9:30PM ET on Fox.

Sherry Bilsing-Graham and Ellen Plummer Kreamer are listed as the executive producers of this show, which takes as its premise that people will enjoy seeing two women relentlessly mocked and humiliated by everyone around them. In the unlikely event that that premise strikes you as funny, what’s on display here is so stale and mean-spirited that I urge you to avoid it at all costs.

The entertainment industry doesn’t need token ladies who will write things that conform to male perspectives. It needs a lot of women, some of whom will be one of the guys, some of whom will write stories that explore and illuminate female worlds, some of whom will work in established tropes, and some of whom will lay down new markers. Diversity isn’t about quotas. It’s about perspectives.

While I was up in New Haven this week, I swung by “Remembering 9/11,” an exhibit at the Yale University Art Gallery. The show’s a bit too crabbed for its name — this is hardly a comprehensive look at the way we recall an event that’s traumatic not just in and of itself but for what it inspired to do to ourselves and others afterward. But I appreciated a hall that had both photographs and text from Leo Rubinfien’s Wounded Cities, a multi-media exploration of what the attacks meant from the perspective of someone who moved into an apartment next door to the World Trade center a week before the attacks.

The photographs are big and solemn and gorgeous, portraits not of the devastation of terrorist attacks around the world but of people who live in cities that have been the site of attacks, and moved on. An observant Jewish boy in Israel holds an half-eaten ice cream bar — it stuck out at me that it was the kind with nuts in the chocolate. The breeze blows strands of hair across the face of a woman in Seoul. Experiencing terrorist attacks gave New Yorkers and Washingtonians in particular something in common with these ordinary people. It was our military response after the fact that reasserted our exceptionalism, at terrible cost.

But it was actually the text displayed alongside Rubinfien’s photographs that struck me most strongly, a literary and detailed explication of our reactions to tragedy. In the immediate aftermath of the September 11 attacks, a conversation between Rubinfien and a friend illustrates how big the emotions were: “A friend much worried about us asked me from Rio if I thought the attacks would mean the end of cities—if living in huge concentrations would be too dangerous now, and people would leave their Londons and Parises to wither.” Thank goodness we were resilient enough to resist that sort of apocalyptic scenario, which would have signaled a societal upheaval — and an al Qaeda-affirming rejection of modernity — even greater than two wars of choice. Rubinfien’s son Julian reacts on a smaller, more personal scale, asking his father, “But didn’t they know I’m good?” He’s convinced that Osama bin Laden wanted to kill him personally. There was logic and calculation in our response to September 11, but Rubinfien is trying to parse our emotional reactions. I’m not sure I agree with this: “Before Iraq, Henry Kissinger had said that the Americans would invade because Afghanistan hadn’t brought the relief they needed—their emotions were too big.” I don’t think our emotions propelled us into war on a national level, but I do think our emotions made us less inclined to resist the emotional and calculated drive towards the invasion by the Bush administration.

And I appreciate Rubinfien finding the beauty in the tragedy. “In the crevices on our roof,” he writes, “I found some history of the Kuomintang, several sections of Property Law, sheets and sheets of balances in yen. It was a lot of money; I couldn’t tell whose.” There’s something miraculous about the arrival of those things on his roof, the juxtaposition of them, even if there’s no question that the terrible thing that created that miracle is undeniably worse, undeniably not worth it. People freaked out in the immediate aftermath of the attacks when Elizabeth Wurtzel wrote that her aesthetic reaction overwhelmed her emotional or moral one to the sight of the Towers falling, saying: “I had not the slightest emotional reaction. I thought, ‘This is a really strange art project.’ It was the most amazing sight in terms of sheer elegance. It fell like water.” But I thought it was a useful illustration of the bigness of the September 11 that they crossed the wires in our heads, rendered us temporarily unable to react to scale. And it’s an important reminder that our aesthetic reactions don’t always reveal the truth.

It’s pretty unfortunate that Questlove’s getting bombarded with racist insults after making the equally unfortunate decision to choose “Lyin’ Ass Bitch” as Michele Bachmann’s intro music when she appeared on Jimmy Fallon. But I think his explanation of his reaction to the uproar is sort of revealing:

The musician revealed that the decision to play the 1985 track wasn’t mulled over for very long. “It wasn’t like a chess move where you have to think 12 steps ahead; you’re just, like, ‘Fuck, all right, I’m gonna do it,’ in a kamikaze-type way,” he admitted. “And I really didn’t think about how it could be perceived as a misogynist swipe — it didn’t hit me until my [Twitter] timeline started showing up that it was seen that way. I was like, Fuck, I forgot ‘Bitch’ is actually in the title.”

I mean, first there’s the fact that “bitch” isn’t just in the title. The song lyrics refer to the titular woman as a “little slut,” in addition to a “little lyin’ ass bitch.” It’s a song about a really horrible-sounding woman, and it doesn’t exactly go easy on her, whether accusing her of emotional manipulation or sexual infidelity (I tend to think Bachmann’s career is built around the former, but I don’t think she’s guilty of the latter). You have to try pretty hard to miss the language if you’re already choosing the song to be a stinging rebuke to the person who’s entering to it.

Second, I think there’s something really strange about the insistence that “bitch” is a neutral term, something you can just miss when picking out a song, that of the more serious profanities, it’s the one that networks can use without bleeping out. I don’t think the fact that the insult has sexist origins means that no one should use it ever. But I think denying those sexist origins (as some folks did when we last discussed profanity and entertainment here — I’m not saying Questlove did this) doesn’t makes a lot of sense. And there’s something decisively strange about the fact that a gendered insult that’s meant to degrade women by comparing them to animals or to degrade men by comparing them to women is considered less obscene than other profanities.

By now, I’m sure you’ve all seen the trailer for New Year’s Eve, the latest multi-track ensemble dramedy that is the benighted offspring of Love, Actually:

There are many things that drive me nuts about these kinds of movies, from the ridiculous salaries people get paid to mail in a couple minutes of work, to the emotionally-manipulative storytelling, to the treatment of holidays as the most critically important turning points ever. But it’s also irritating because I think ensemble movies where stories are moving on several parallel, not always related tracks, can be a really powerful form of storytelling. Here are five books that, if adapted, could show us why:

1. Underworld, Don DeLillo: Nuns! Conceptual artists! The director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation! Baseball games! It would be hard to corral DeLillo’s attempt at defining an age into a series of coherent narratives. But that doesn’t mean it wouldn’t provide a useful set of arresting images and emotional moments to set against each other. Eras can be defined by grand personalities, but they’ve also got their distinct tones. And who doesn’t want to see that baseball game sequence as a movie (or an episode of television) on its now, not even counting what comes after?

2. People of the Book, Geraldine Brooks: Brooks’ interwoven narrative of a book restorer who’s taking care of the Sarajevo Haggadah in preparation of its exhibition and Brooks’ fantasies about how the extraordinary book came together over the centuries and survived despite its exposure to everything from the Jewish expulsion from Spain to the censorship of the Inquisition is more of a short story collection than a novel. And it’s a remarkable testament to the power of art and to interfaith collaboration. The stories don’t have to be directly connected to each other for readers — or viewers — to see how they support those common themes.

3. The Sparrow and Children of God, Mary Doria Russell: These narratives are related, of course, but how awesome would it be to juxtapose a Catholic investigation on Earth, a Jewish-inspired uprising on an alien planet, and the flashbacks to how both the rebel and penitent got where they ended up? Plus, throw in a parallel social history of two alien species — Andy Serkis can totally play Supaari.

4. Song of Solomon, Toni Morrison: Hollywood should give us Song of Solomon anyway as an apology for The Help. And a fair number of these stories intersect. But these powerful, parallel tales, about the impact of faith and the strange, sometimes wonderful, sometimes terrible things that develop in our private lives, would be amazing to see spiral out on a big screen. And it would be awesome to see a big, prestige picture that would provide this many unusual, moving roles for black actors.

5. Canterbury Tales or The Decameron: Yes, I’m a ridiculous dork. But stories about the stories we tell ourselves under conditions of stress, or exploration, or extreme hope are revealing, moving, and as both of these collections reveal, often extremely funny. Plus, personal movies about ordinary and ordinary-ish people experiencing big events like plagues and pilgrimages would be a welcome break from all the Borgias and Tudors we’ve got running around.

This post contains spoilers through the Dec. 1 episode of Community.

Given the worst-case scenario that this is the second-to-last episode of Community that we’ll ever see, I want everything that we have before the end of the year to be perfect, both to go out on a glorious note and, in the case of cancellation, to mock NBC on the way out the door. It would have been hard for any episode of the show to follow up the last one, which I still believe will be a perfect coda of the series of it comes to that. And while this episode did one thing I liked, I don’t think it entirely worked.

People — including me — have expressed frustration about the way Shirley’s character has been portrayed this season, as she’s turned into an even more moralizing and judgmental character than she was previously, sacrificing the bits of interiority she’s been given as the show’s most perennially short-changed character. It’s tough because there have always been interesting things there. We know that Shirley was, at one point, if not an alcoholic, a drunk, and that she had tremendous anger issues over her divorce. Tonight’s episode was, however silly the engine of revelation, a valuable look at how far back that anger extends. Once, Shirley was a rejected, heavy little girl, and then she redefined herself as a wife and mother, only to have that identity smashed, too. Is it any wonder she clings to piety as a way to hold herself together and her pain and anger within as much as possible? When Shirley condemns things like foosball, or “Like out of town weddings with receptions that are in the same place in everybody’s rooms!” I have the sense that she’s speaking from experience. And if you’ve been some place really bad, “nice” might actually seem like a higher value.
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The bridge is yours.

-For the distinguished meth or television connoisseur in your life, Walter White sneakers.

-The cultural exchange that made the Tintin story The Blue Lotus so good.

-Watchmen 2 is a thing. Everything is terrible.

-Sounds like Valentine Wiggin’s going to have true grit.

-Are we on our way to usage-based billing?

This post contains spoilers through Chapter 25 of The Yiddish Policemen’s Union. For next Friday, let’s read through Chapter 35.

The theme of this week’s reading, entirely incidentally, turns out to be how different Jews — and by extension, different kinds of people — handle the brokenness of the world, the impossibility of perfect observance. The Law, it turns out, is not something you can game to get the perfect results: the rebbe’s diet doesn’t prevent him from turning into a human mountain, Mendle Shpilman’s arranged marriage cannot erase his homosexuality, and the Verbovers need the boundary maven to compromise for them so they can live with themselves. Inherent in observance is, as Landsman observed “a typical Jewish ritual dodge, a scam run on God, that controlling motherfucker.”

What makes Mendel Shpilman seem like the Messiah isn’t necessarily just his ability to confer blessing, but his ability to bridge the gap between desire and ability so smoothly: “Fear, doubt, lust, dishonesty, broken vows, murder and love, uncertainty about the intentions of God and men, little Mendel say all of that not only in the Aramaic abstract but when it appeared in his father’s study, clothed in the dark serge and juicy mother tongue of everyday life…He had the kind of mind that could hold and consider contradictory propositions without losing its balance.” Other people have other solutions. Bina has her miraculous purse — she may not be able to bridge the gaps in the human soul, but she’s able to make almost any other circumstances bearable: “If you go to a concert, Bina has opera glasses. If you need to sit on the grass, she whips out a towel. Ant traps, a corkscrew, candles and matches, a dog muzzle, a penknife, a tiny aerosol can of freon, a magnifying glass—Landsman has seen everything come out of that overstuffed cowhide at one time or another.”
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So, John Carter:

I haven’t read the books, and I’m not sure it would make a difference. But I find myself weirdly depressed by the idea of a movie where a character is magically transported from one vicious sectarian conflict (the Civil War) to another one, on another planet. Maybe there’s just no escape velocity from war and territorial violence. Or maybe the lessons of one world are meant to redeem another, a hope that seems vainly and permanently disproved — it’s too hard to see our errors coming at us from a distance to avoid them fully. Or maybe I’m overthinking this. But it does sort of put a damper on my enthusiasm about futurism and space travel to think that we’ll encounter the exact same problems all over again out there in the great beyond. I almost don’t care if there are bad things out there in our fiction if they’re new, and reveal something different about ourselves.

This post contains spoilers through the Dec. 1 episode of Parks and Recreation.

Earlier this season, we discussed an uncomfortable question to raise about television’s favorite insanely enthusiastic public servant: is Leslie Knope corrupt or unethical? I was glad to see Parks and Recreation take up at least a small aspect of that question, and even gladder to see it come in a surprisingly sweet episode that moved both Leslie and Ben forward. Also, my mother used to work for Bella Abzug, so any reference to her on any show ever automatically earns a piece of popular culture a half-grade bump from yours truly, even if no reference will ever be as awesomely surreal as the reality.

The thing that worked so nicely about this episode was that it allowed everyone to pay appropriate prices for their actions, while also moving them forward to better things. A lot of this season has been about Leslie acknowledging her limitations, whether she’s steamrolling Ben or reassessing her sense of her own history. Tonight, she had to face up to the fact that she’d done something wrong, not just in the fact of hiding her relationship with Ben, but in the process of it. Even if George’s wife “said my skin was luminous,” it wasn’t okay for Leslie to buy off another city employee to keep a secret that probably wouldn’t have been a problem if she’d just disclosed it in the first place. In typical Leslie fashion, she thinks she should get fired rather than get suspended for two weeks. And she probably will pay a price for it, electorally. But the self-knowledge is probably worth it.

And I also think it’s a good thing for Ben that he lost his job. The show’s acknowledged repeatedly that he’s not necessarily professionally fulfilled in Pawnee, a little town that would have been just another State of the Public Service cross for him as he attempts to rebuild his credibility. It’s good that he’s been shaken loose, whether because he can now manage her campaign openly, rebuilding a bit more of his credentials, or because he can do what I wish Parks and Recreation had done with Tom, and used him as a basis for expanding our sense of Pawnee, a necessary move to broaden and unify the world as Leslie moves out of the Parks department.
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I think it’s pretty clear that there was no intentionality behind the fact that Siri, the AI assistant on the iPhone 4s, turns out to be pretty good at directing users to anti-choice crisis pregnancy centers, but not to abortion clinics (though it seems to find Planned Parenthood very easily when searched for by name). Some of it may simply be that Apple relies heavily on external databases like Yelp to source answers to queries. And pursuant to that, I think Jill Filipovic nails it:

That data is often messy, and savvier companies will pay for the data about them to be accurate and to include the full range of their services. Abortion clinics and other women’s health facilities, obviously, are not dedicating tons of time to figure out how to optimize their search results. So the data is crappy to begin with. To fix that, programmers go in and add tens of thousands of little tweaks to a program like Siri to make it as accurate as possible, and also to include some jokes (like where to hide a dead body). But when programmers are mostly dudes, the lady-stuff just gets… ignored. So Siri knows 15 different ways to say “oral sex performed on a man” and can find a place to get it, but anything involving female sexuality at all leaves her clueless. Which doesn’t make it excusable. It’s pretty appalling that programmers thought far ahead enough to know where to send users who needed to remove rodents from their buttholes, but didn’t consider a medical procedure that 1 in 3 American women will have. I mean, they appear to have thought far ahead enough to have Siri respond to the boyfriend of the woman who is pregnant, but not to the woman herself.

On the first point, and sort of pursuant to the point I made earlier this fall about tech infrastructure for the feminist blogosphere, it would be very smart strategic giving for someone to set up a fund to optimize the hell out of progressive service providers’ sites. I’d be pretty concerned about attempts to politicize algorithms, because I think any step in that direction can have profound and dangerous consequences, but I think it’s important to make sure that progressive organizations have all the resources they need to game those algorithms as effectively as possible.

Second, making technology for women isn’t really a matter of color, or angles, or whether it fits in your purse. It’s about whether the snazzy, solves-all-your-problems technology (which is unquestionably the way Apple is marketing Siri, rather than as a Beta) actually serves that purpose for all of your customers. If your ability to think about the varied needs of your consumers only extends to thinking about the varied needs of men, you’re not actually as an expansive thinker as you believe yourself to be. Tech companies should be particularly attentive to female feedback on products like this not because our tiny girl brains will give them marketing ideas, but because artificial intelligence is about perspective, not just information.

When Cenk Uygur declined to renew his contract with MSNBC earlier this year, he said it was out of a desire not to toe an establishment line he felt was being laid down for him by the network. In September, Current TV announced that it had hired him to join fellow progressive firebrand Keith Olbermann, starting a new show that will premiere on Monday, December 5 at 7pm. I spoke to him about the creative freedom he says he’s found at Current, what he looks for in a guest and a panel, and the themes that run through his favorite movies and television shows.

When you left MSNBC, you talked about the limitations of the role the network seemed to want you to play. And your online show’s always seemed very liberating. How much freedom do you feel you have at Current to define your role and the tone of the show?

It appears that I have 100 percent freedom. There has been absolutely no restraint here whatsoever, God bless their hearts. No restraint stylistically. No restraint substantively. It’s been a blessing. It’s not a dig on MSNBC, they do what they do. You’ve got a system over there…the good hosts begin to stray from that and put their own stamp on that. Here we get to start fresh and create a whole different kind of show. I think people will look at and it say this isn’t a normal cable news show

What do you think Current’s learned from Keith Olbermann’s tenure? Has his experience made for a smoother transition for you? Taken together, how do you think you and Olbermann define Current’s brand?

They’ve created an outlet here on television that lets strong folks do strong programming. Nobody’s going to check Keith Olbermann. That reassured me that this was a place where I was going to get to create an independent program.

Did the fact that Current signed Olbermann make the network a more attractive destination for you?

Sure, yeah. That meant that they were making a significant investment in progressive programming and strong independent programming, and they were headed in the right direction.

You’ve talked about the importance of developing younger audiences. How do you plan to do that? Especially on a channel that may not be a regular part of younger viewers’ rotation?

I think we have a younger audience because we do things differently. It’s a much more conversational, relaxed, irreeverant show. It’s not stiff. The whole thing reeks of faith…I just read an article the other day where it says it turns out the younger generation is a little more skeptical. They’re looking for something genuine. So many of the other shows use the same, old, tired analysts. We’ve got different strong progressive analysts.

What do you think of moves like NBC’s hiring of Chelsea Clinton to do segments? Do younger viewers want to see themselves on screen? A certain kind of tone? A style of presenting content?

I’m always amused by how they try to fix real issues that they have by putting a facade on it. We hired a young person! We hired Chelsea Clinton! She’s a young person and she has a famous name! The problem is you don’t understand that you’re doing programming from 1955. So much of television is so fake. If you take a young person and insert it into a fake facade, it reinforces the idea that it’s a facade. You haven’t solved the problem at all…Meghan McCain, like her or dislike her, she has strong views, there’s value in her message. But you want to see someone who’s keeping it real. Wes Clark Jr. , we don’t have him as a co-host because he’s the son of the general. He ran in, what, 2004? It’s been a long time. We use him because that guy is passionate and the audience reacts to him. He reaches his audience at their gut level.
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An underlying theme of the Muppets has always been finding acceptance for everybody, even trying to reform their villains. Kermit was struggling with his racial identity way back in the first season of Sesame Street, and the new film, The Muppets — which is a fabulously heart-warming must-see — follows the new character Walter’s coming out as a Muppet (a “very manly Muppet”).  But the nebulous relationship between Kermit and Miss Piggy has served as a particularly compelling, albeit subtle, metaphor for couplings that are looked down upon in society.

Given conservatives regularly fear-monger that bestiality is inevitably down the slippery slope from same-sex marriage equality, it’s interesting that they have always given Kermit and Piggy’s interspecies love a pass. After all, being genital-less and felt-covered didn’t protect Tinky Winky from being called gay by Jerry Falwell, and he didn’t even have a love interest. Often by their own invitation, Kermit and Piggy have shouldered the burden of an “ick factor” as long as they’ve had a relationship, and more than ever it resonates as an allegory for the struggles of same-sex couples in a homophobic society.

The most obvious example of parallels with the LGBT community is in George Stroumboulopoulos’ recent interview with Kermit, in which Kermit talks about coming out about his attraction to mammals as a teenager. Stroumboulopoulos jokes there should be an “It Gets Better” campaign for amphibians, and Kermit quips back it would be called “It’s Getting Better Being Green”:

Piggy, meanwhile, has had to deal with many questions about her love life with Kermit. In a recent appearance on Chelsea Lately, she avoided probing questions from Chelsea Handler about what it’s like to have sex with Kermit, as if that kind of private detail is something she should share just because she’s a Muppet:

On other occasions, the couple has been more forthcoming about the complications of their relationship. In a promotional video for the new movie, Kermit and Piggy ponder whether they can produce offspring and consider perhaps adopting instead. Here also is a 2008 Morning Show with Mike and Juliet appearance in which the sheepish Kermit admits that they have engaged in some public displays of affection and Miss Piggy thanks him for “coming out like this”:

Lastly, flashback to 1993 when Kermit and Piggy sat down for an in-depth interview with Larry King. Piggy talks about the struggle of coming out to her fellow pig friends about loving Kermit. Some took it tough, but they said a frog was “better than an aardvark.” Kermit later denies his marriage to Piggy “for his fans,” hiding in a closet of his own. King also raises questions about potential offspring, and when he asks Piggy “what kind of child would it be?” she responds, “a loved one, Lawrence, a loved one.” She then defends interspecies love, saying, “If one has love in one’s heart, does it truly matter?”:

While Jim Henson might not have ever explicitly spoken out on LGBT issues, his legacy of promoting acceptance of others continues to grow and adjust to the challenges of every generation. Hopefully, the new Muppets film re-energizes the franchise and creates more opportunities for Kermit, Piggy, and their motley crew to fight bullying and stigma in their uniquely sweet way.

The bridge is yours.

-Should I give Work of Art a shot? An increasing number of my critic pals love it, but I’m curious as to your takes.

-I really hope the folks making Ender’s Game remember that Mazer Rackham isn’t white.

-Time to catch up on everyone’s favorite prematurely-canceled private detective show.

-Game of Thrones is going to start diverging from A Song of Ice and Fire.

-Yay Girl Talk!

Very smart talk from Gabe Newell of Valve Corporation:

In general, we think there is a fundamental misconception about piracy. Piracy is almost always a service problem and not a pricing problem. For example, if a pirate offers a product anywhere in the world, 24 x 7, purchasable from the convenience of your personal computer, and the legal provider says the product is region-locked, will come to your country 3 months after the US release, and can only be purchased at a brick and mortar store, then the pirate’s service is more valuable. Most DRM solutions diminish the value of the product by either directly restricting a customers use or by creating uncertainty.

Our goal is to create greater service value than pirates, and this has been successful enough for us that piracy is basically a non-issue for our company. For example, prior to entering the Russian market, we were told that Russia was a waste of time because everyone would pirate our products. Russia is now about to become our largest market in Europe.

I understand the entertainment industry’s antsiness about piracy, even if I don’t particularly agree with their approach. And I think that more companies and groups could take a lesson from this lens on the challenge. Even if you’re cracking down on “rogue sites” rather than on individual consumers, spending all your time talking about the evils of piracy sends the message to consumers that your focus is on limiting the way they get to the product, rather than on the product itself, or on improving methods of delivery. And even if I don’t think it’s the main reason people download content they don’t pay for, I think the idea that production companies have the interests of neither consumers nor artists in mind becomes a powerful part of the moral justification that people use to give themselves permission to do so. Focusing more of their public messaging on improving and diversifying delivery mechanisms — and actually doing so — seems like it would do much more to change the culture of consumption than talking about piracy will. And ultimately, it’s that cultural shift is what undid media companies and what they really need to change.

In case any of you are interested, here’s the text of my remarks to the Yale Political Union. It was a fun debate, which included a vigorous clash over the ethics of curation, the question of whether creation is a subject for criticism, and whether criticism is literature. I bet you can guess my answers to the last two questions. In any case, it was a nice chance to pull together my thinking over the last six months.

* * *

I’m here today to argue that we should evaluate art not merely on aesthetic grounds, but on political ones. To that end, I’d like to make four main points.

First, given that we spend so much of our time consuming art and popular culture, it would be unwise to ignore the assumptions that we absorb along with our vampires, detectives, space odysseys, and gallery shows.

Second, if our goal is to give art full credit for the power it’s capable of exerting, we should accord it the respect of engaging with its ideas—and give artists the respect of holding them responsibile for how they express those ideas.

Third, politics and political assumptions, because they’re subjects often invite didactic, lazy thought, are a leading indicator of artistic energy and consideration, particularly in narrative fiction.

And finally, I’d argue that at a moment when our standard venues for political and policy debate have become sclerotic, hyperbolic, and unproductive, politically engaged art can be a particularly important forum for playful thinking about our values, and our plans for the future.
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Once again, someone has realized that putting male superheroes in the same positions as women reveals how ridiculous and sexually reductive those poses are in the first place. We’ve been here before, and recently. And we’ve seen it in the superhero-themed Victoria’s Secret fashion show, which had a number of outfits that were actually less revealing and more practical than the outfits comics artists give female heroes who have to do things other than walk down runways in them. But sometimes I wonder if practicality, dignity, and logic are beside the point here. It’s hard to think of another art form that’s so impervious to the idea that women exist for something other than male enjoyment.

The word is grim: Credit Suisse revised its forecasts, and instead of expecting cable television subscriptions to increase by 250,000 next year, they’re now predicting that the number of subscribers will fall by 200,000. And it’s not just that families are cutting the cord because it’s expensive. The number will go down because of a larger cultural shift, younger consumers who have decided that cable isn’t worth the money at all and are declining to subscribe in the first place, so they won’t replace older ones who are exiting the subscriber universe. That should be a much scarier proposition for the cable industry, but it’s an intriguing one for networks.

I remain pretty convinced that even if it takes a very long time to unbundle cable, and even if a bunch of networks die in the process, a move towards a more flexible (if not entirely a la carte) multi-platform system is inevitable. The idea that choice is paying for precisely what you want, rather than getting an enormous number of things — some of which you want and some of which you’d gladly see die in a fire — for your money seems pretty well-entrenched in the music industry now, and has always been the case for books. If I were HBO, I’d be pondering a subscription option for HBO GO only: I’m pretty sure I’d pay the $9-odd dollars I pay for my HBO package now for HBO GO only if I didn’t have cable.

For networks that don’t have the same premium branding as HBO or Showtime baked into their business model, and thus would have more difficulty attracting a core of subscribers used to paying for them separately, it’ll be interesting to see what happens. I can see something like Bravo making the jump to premium-lite status not because the content is astonishingly good but because the brand is so clearly defined. And I wonder if other networks will retrench their content offerings to try to keep the subscribers they have, or innovate to try to bring resistent cord-nevers into the fold. It’d be easier to do the former, but for the survival of the industry, much more important to innovate with everything to do the latter.

I’ve mentioned that I’m on a hardcore Living Single kick (TVOne really needs to have a marathon so I won’t run through my DVR backlog every night), and it struck me that one of the reasons I love the show, in addition to its specificity on race and its Friends-without-the-dopiness vibe, is that Khadijah James reminds me a lot of Leslie Knope.

First, there’s their collective hyper-competence — and exasperation when other people aren’t as committed as they are or up to their exacting standards. I’ve always appreciated the way that Leslie’s collective enthusiasm spills over to her friends and colleagues, turning Ann Perkins from a concerned citizen into a committed government employee (even if she was super-bossy about that final transition); inspiring everyone to reach for new heights to honor Lil’ Sebastian; convincing Ron to save her job even though on principal he’d love to see enthusiastic people like her get out of government and to see government wither away behind them. She gets so much pleasure out of work done right that she’s genuinely uncomfortable when someone like Ann isn’t as excited for or anxious about a job interview as Leslie herself is, and she can’t resist jollying along someone as terminally apathetic as April. Leslie is the rare television character who runs the constant risk of being annoying, but because she’s enthusiastic, rather than wacky. And she redeems herself by painting a vision so compelling everyone else wants to go along with it. She’s the rare female television character her show doesn’t feel the need to humiliate or cut down in any way. Leslie is allowed to be Wonder Woman. Or Diaphina. Take your pick.

Khadijah’s less strange than Leslie — the entire universe of Living Single is more realistic and less hyper-real in the Parks and Recreation. But it’s cool to see her conquer the challenges of publishing (and it’s a nostalgic look back at the industry as it was more than a decade ago). In one episode, she’s working on a corruption story (Living Single has really nice, smart roots in local government with Max’s side gig as city councilwoman) when her parent company forces her to hire an arrogant but brilliant reporter who wants the story for himself. She puts up with him turning in notes to her on candy wrappers, rolling into the office late, and generally mouthing off to her employees, but when he concocts a complicated scheme to get himself arrested to get close to a key source, she shuts him down and reports the story herself. When a rival magazine starts ripping off Flavor, there’s a great screwball sequence of Khadijah getting in trouble for taking down literally every flyer the competitor’s posted in New York City — she only got busted when she stole an absolutely enormous sign and lugged it all the way home. Khadijah’s more stressed than Leslie, but she also has to hustle harder than her Pawnee counterpart, who’s had several seasons of making governing look effortless. And again, the show walks a fine line between showing those struggles and cutting her down to size: an episode where she seeks therapy is genuinely touching and funny.

Leslie and Khadijah are also not the most conventionally attractive women in the casts of the shows they’re on, but both shows are committed to the idea that they’re almost irresistibly sexy and romantically successful. It might have been easy to treat Leslie as Ann’s nerdier best friend in matters of the heart, but Leslie’s love life seems somewhat more successful than Ann’s does. And people tend to single her out as unusually attractive, whether it’s Jerry taking her as an accidental muse or Jean-Ralphio thanking his lucky stars he’s finally gotten a chance with her. Similarly, Khadijah could have ended up second fiddle to the romantic travails of Barbie-pretty Regine or skinnier Max (I appreciate the way she’s essentially a black female Jughead). Instead, men can’t resist her. Her reportorial rival at the Village Voice courts her even as she hustles past him to a blockbuster story. Grant Hill falls for her — and when she breaks his heart, Alonzo Mourning says he’d love to date her but hears she has a reputation for loving and leaving them. It’s just profoundly refreshing to have these shows see these very attractive, interesting women as they are, instead of assigning them pathetic places in the warped hierarchy that is Hollywood attractiveness. And it’s kind of depressing that across the media, female characters this complete and this undefeated are so rare.

In what appears to be a pattern of concern-trolling by players’ representatives in European soccer, the chief of the Italian players’ union, Damiano Tommasi, has advised against gay players coming out of the closet on the grounds that it would violate the sanctity of the locker room:

Homosexuality is still a taboo in football in the sense that there is a different kind of cohabitation to other professions. Expressing your personal sexuality is difficult in every professional environment and even more so for a footballer who shares a changing room with his team-mates, and hence also his intimacy with others. In our world it could cause embarrassment. In a sport in which you get undressed it could cause an extra difficulty in cohabitation. In other professions such as journalists or bank employees, this doesn’t happen.For them it’s easier to express themselves. But from a personal point of view, I think you can live without showing your own tendencies or you can do so in a discreet manner.

Let’s be clear: this isn’t about protecting gay players from having to feel strange and different. This is about protecting straight players from having to face their anxieties — and find out they might be false. This is about the false idea that locker rooms are already sexually neutral zones, because when it’s heterosexuality, it’s neutral and doesn’t make anyone uncomfortable, but if the specter of gayness creeps in everything is confused and weird and overwhelming. This is about the deeply illogical idea that if someone behaved in a dignified and professional fashion while they were in the closet, that they’ll suddenly become a sexual harasser upon coming out, an event that usually accords with people wanting to reassure their friends and family and coworkers that everything about them is still essentially the same.

This is the same kind of false expression of concern that happened back in August when Philipp Lahm, who captains the German national team, warned in his published autobiography that if gay players came out, they would be harassed into suicide. His only evidence for this, of course, as my colleague Zack Ford pointed out, was a teammate who killed himself over the fear that he would be arrested for sexual assault. And even if he’d had an actual example, this would be an argument about straight homophobes, not gay people living their lives openly and honestly.

In a way, this is a victory for gay people. There are no legitimate objections about the threat gay people pose to straight society. So homophobes have to find convoluted ways to pretend they care about the well-being of gay people instead. But it’s still kind of depressing.

Just a reminder, for next week, we’ll be watching Oz Season 2, Episode 3; Season 3, Episode 7; Season 4, Episode 4. The show is available through HBO GO.

So it turns out that Last Dance is about a party boy who finds his purpose working in the appeals office for a Southern state government, falls in love with a murderer played by Sharon Stone, and after she’s executed, takes an Annie Lennox-scored trip to the Taj Mahal in her memory and as a way to express that he’s finally really, seriously at peace with himself. In other words, it’s a pretty terrible movie, chock-full of sassy black death row inmates who call Stone’s sweet former-addict killer “girl” a lot, a weak-sauce and sentimental discussion of racial and economic disparities in the death penalty, and a lot of thick-accented callous Southern stereotypes. But it does a couple of things that I think are interesting, even if I don’t think it does them particularly well.

First is the way it addresses lingering discomfort with executing women. Sam, the head of the appeals office, treats feminism as if it’s a joke that women have played on themselves, suggesting that executions of women are up because of the “Women’s lobby. They all want equal treatment in the eyes of the law.” Rick, the young attorney who’s come to work for Sam while he figures out what he wants to do with his life, expresses bewilderment that a woman could commit the crime Cindy’s guilty of, bludgeoning two wealthy young people to death — Sam tells him, “Most of the time when a woman kills, it’s a crime of passion.” Later, the pompous, tough-on-crime governor informs Rick that “Her sex made no difference to her victims. It makes no difference to us under our legal system.” These are platitudes and stereotypes, but there’s a real issue here about how gender plays into our expectations about violent behavior, and our willingness to exert violence against women in the name of the state. If crimes against women, particularly white women, inspire moral outrage, violent crimes committed by women also challenge our conceptions of gendered behavior.

Second, there’s the question of how race and class interact in the death penalty, which is mostly addressed when Rick, told to stay away from Cindy’s case, visits a black inmate who’s earned a law degree and written a best-seller about his moral evolution on death row. He predicts, accurately as it turns out, that the narrative of his transformation will earn him a reprieve that Cindy is denied. “What’s the smart money saying? Who’s going to live, me or the white girl?” he asks Rick. “They will be diminished by my death because I represent everything they love and admire. How are they going to kill a man who’s been on the New York Times best-seller list?” I don’t know that it’s true that politicians are less afraid to appear classist than they are to appear racist, especially when it comes to black men and crime, but against, it’s an interesting proposition, one the movie floats and lets gets away before it can explore it further.
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