Dear Aaron Sorkin,

A quick observation: not all professionally successful ladies don’t have time for/are terrible at tending to their personal lives. If you want to make a striking and compelling television show again, you might want to think about that.

Cheers,
Alyssa

By Alyssa Rosenberg

First, Miley Cyrus’s “Party in the U.S.A.,”* one of Dr. Luke’s most successful earworms, became the anthem marking Osama bin Laden’s death because, as Vulture‘s Nitsuh Abebe put it “Most Americans want to party, and most Americans wanted Bin Laden to die of something other than renal failure.” Now, YouTube user UnknownYemeni is summoning Dr. Luke again to call for the ouster of President Ali Abdullah Saleh:

Now all we need to lock in the Arab Spring for good is for the good Dr. to hook up with Nancy Ajram:

*My arrival here means Matt has to share the Miley Cyrus beat.

I think my friend Seth is right that Australian pop singer Lenka is better for the slightly chilly, whispy influence of Robyn on this song:

It’s like she’s Happy Robyn crossed with Demure But Still Whacky Katy Perry.

By Alyssa Rosenberg

Thanks to the good folks at PostBourgie, I stumbled across this Wesley Morris article in which he argues that the Fast and the Furious movies are the most progressive franchise in the country. I’m all for movies and television in which characters hang out in mixed-race groups of friends, date, love, and marry of people of races not their own without comment, in which non-white characters have permission to be mendacious, malign, even downright annoying without the content of their character being commentary on the color of their skin. But I also like pop culture where characters can comment on race without being issue movies or shows—this is actually one of the reasons I love Community as much as I do, because of scenes like this:

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I actually think it’s less significant that the Archie Comics might be hinting at commentary on Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell with the origin story of its first out gay teenager, Kevin Keller, than the broader shift in the comics towards a more adult audience. Recently, a friend of mine was bemused to learn that I read Archie books addictively as a kid, and still occasionally buy the comics at the supermarket. Like NCIS, which nobody claims to watch even though 20 million-odd people turn in to watch the series every week, nobody seems to know who the Archie Comics audience is, though it’s clearly out there, and enough to keep the comics going for 70 years. But in between this and the Archie Gets Married storyline, I think there’s a conscious effort to shift the comics from stories-for-kids into the realm of Young Adult literature that’s mainly aimed at younger audiences, but that grown-ups can still enjoy. I think that’s a smart move, commercially. And if it works, maybe we’ll get ourselves a live-action Archie movie. I’d vote for one based on one of the crazy alternate universes in the comics, personally, but maybe that would work best as a sequel.