-Appifying songs.

-If Dwayne Johnson is so good at revitalizing series, why doesn’t he just get one of his own?

-I really need to restart my long-dormant series of posts on the Star Wars Extended Universe.

-The rise of fan as subject material for pop culture continues.

-And sometimes, the internet reads my mind:

(H/T my colleague Zack Ford)

My ThinkProgress colleague Scott Keyes has a fun piece in The Atlantic about why Settlers of Catan is poised to be the next Monopoly:

Where games like Monopoly fall short—with playing times that far outlast the players’ interest, particularly those who have little hope of victory—Settlers is designed to maintain close competition. Unlike games of Risk that can famously last for days, Settlers usually takes 90 minutes or less. And unlike many pastimes that quickly descend into cutthroat competitiveness, Settlers of Catan is not a zero-sum game. A single roll generally produces resources for multiple players, and trades are almost always mutually beneficial. Because Settlers is a unique game that rewards cooperation as much (if not more) as confrontation, Weisberg argues that it “brings out competitive spirits in a positive way.”

Scott quotes another analyst who argues that the game’s gotten popular because its challenges and constraints mirror ones that exist in the real world. If that’s really the key to its appeal, then Settlers is more in the model of Monopoly, which has its roots in “practical demonstration of the present system of land-grabbing with all its usual outcomes and consequences.” All of which makes Ridley Scott’s plans for his upcoming Monopoly movie, which is supposed to revolve around an evil, Donald Trump-like real estate developer, a lot more plausible and a lot less goofy. I’m not saying said movie is a good idea, just that it’s marginally less preposterous given the context.

Former Sen. Bob Graham has long been a vocal opponent of the war in Iraq, whether he was using his chairmanship of the Intelligence Committee as a bully pulpit, taking to the pages of the Washington Post to decry the dangers of going to war on flimsy intelligence, and publishing Intelligence Matters: The CIA, the FBI, Saudi Arabia and the Failure of America’s War on Terror in 2004. Now, he’s turned to a new medium. Graham’s first novel, Keys to the Kingdom, hits bookstores today. A political thriller informed by Graham’s extensive knowledge of intelligence bureaucracy, Keys to the Kingdom follows its Cuban-immigrant hero around the globe as he tries to figure out who killed his mentor—a former senator and governor of Florida—and what Osama bin Laden’s plotting from a surprisingly comfortable refuge. I spoke with Graham about what he could say in a novel that he couldn’t say in op-eds, what it’s like to kill off your fictional alter ego, and how America’s engagement with India and Pakistan will change after bin Laden’s death.

You’ve written serious policy books, an activist’s guide to the democratic process. Why write a novel?

Anger. I was very distressed at the way in which the 9/11 issue was handled by the [Bush] administration. In my opinion there were a number of important issues for which there was an answer, but where that answer was consciously and to date largely effectively been withheld and I wanted to tell that story.

Do you think fiction gives you a better shot of reaching more people than op-eds or policy books do?

That was part of it…While I was a senior fellow at the Kennedy School, Joe Nye, who had been a director of the Kennedy School and then was an assistant secretary of defense during the Clinton administration, told me a story that when he came back to Harvard, he had wanted to write a nonfiction academic book about his experiences in the Defense Department and make a series of recommendations. As he got into the book, he realized that in order to do that he would have to use classified information which was not going to be available to him. So he shifted from writing the book that he thought [he wanted to write] to writing The Power Game, which is a novel about his experiences in the Pentagon. I’ve indicated in [Keys to the Kingdom] that the report of the Congressional inquiry into 9/11 was fairly heavily censored, particularly as it related to the role of the Saudis. So I decided I would see if I could write this. I am a member of the external advisory board to Director Leon Panetta at the CIA. We have a fairly high security clearance and anything we write that touches on the agency, we’re required to submit it for prior approval. So at three or four occasions while I was working on this book over a period of 5 years, I submitted manuscripts to the review board and it always got a clean bill. I think I was able to tell the story without being restricted by censorship.
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I love Rachel Weisz as a crusader: she’s got those big, vulnerable, open features that can simultaneously express steel will and naivete—after she disappeared as an active presence from The Constant Gardener, you could see why Ralph Fiennes would chase after her ghost and her moral example:

And it looks like she’ll be quite good in The Whistleblower, which I would see even if it looked dreadful, to further the noble cause of getting more Benedict Cumberbatch on American screens large and small.

The thing, and this was what bothered me about the second season of The Wire, is that while it’s absolutely to address the supply problem in sex trafficking, you’re only telling part of the story if you make sex slavery a story about scary foreigners. The demand side of the story is an important one not just because it explains why this exists as a business, but because of what it reveals about American attitudes towards gender and sex. This is not a problem that only exists out there in the vague and scary beyond. When women are sold and shipped to the United States, they are forced to have sex with actual people here, and that’s a harder thing to face up to.

If someone hasn’t bought the rights to Amy Fine Collins’ excellent Vanity Fair piece about a major sex trafficking investigation and trial in Hartford, Conn., then Detective Deborah Scates is the kind of real person that some actress of middling years could really sink her teeth into. Done correctly, the evil and stupidity of the pimps she puts in jail would be less evidence of bumbling criminality than of our communal blindness and complicity, of how easy it is to do this to women. And it could really take a cold, hard look at what people who pay to have sex with unwilling prostitutes tell themselves about what they’re doing. Fine writes: “Most of the johns were startled to learn that the girls were not acting of their own free will—75 to 80 percent of prostitutes don’t. The men believed the ads, and the legend of the Happy Hooker. Each of them also assumed they were the one exception to the rule of the repulsive customer.” That’s worth putting on-screen and really dramatizing, even if viewers will have a hard time believing it.

The decision by FIFA officials to stop the Iranian women’s soccer team from playing in an Olympic qualifier because they wear close-fitting headscarves is truly unfortunate and casts an advance pall over next year’s games. It’s true that the Iranians were in violation of rules that have been in place since 2007. But by jumping on the headscarf ban bandwagon, the football association’s capitulating to bad, trendy public policy that, in this case, has the added ill effect of pushing women out of an arena where they can win respect and public support along with Olympic medals.

The question of whether banning headscarves in public schools and other public fora will force European Muslims into closer alliance with their neighbors of other faiths has been so thoroughly and exhaustively debated that it doesn’t really make sense to rehash it. But it’s worth revisiting this Foreign Policy piece from March on the strawman that’s haunting Europe as leaders across the continent blame multiculturalism for their national woes even as they fail to alter compelling visions for a society that’s worth buying into no matter your denomination.

FIFA rules declare that players “must not use equipment or wear anything that is dangerous to himself or another player (including any kind of jewellery).” That rule has applied to headscarves since 2007, and apparently applies to neckwarmers, too. When FIFA debated banning the latter, an official said “There may be a safety issue—if for example a player was running through on goal and an opponent grabbed his snood, that could pose a potential danger to his neck.” But a ban closer-fitting headscarves on safety grounds seems like fairly dramatic overstretch. This ain’t Quidditch; people aren’t going to be mysteriously attacked by their own well-designed equipment. It’s not as easy to get a handful of headscarf as it is of a chunky neckwarmer, and if another player uses a headscarf or a neckwarmer as a weapon of strangulation, the rules on fouls seem to cover that possibility rather handily and provide quite adequate protection for women players who choose to keep their hair and necks covered.

And if we’re really concerned with how women are perceived and treated in Muslim communities, it seems hugely counterproductive to adopt policies that force women to choose between abiding by the tenets of their faith and participating in activities that let them demonstrate their physical prowess and strategic intelligence. Sport is an imperfect and uneven engine of equality, but it’s a chance to embody regional or national pride, to force fans to weigh their love of winning against prejudices they may hold about race, gender, or sexual orientation. Iran hasn’t exactly dominated the Summer Games, and it would be interesting to see how the country reacted if women brought the country some glory on that stage. To be fair, the women’s soccer team is a work in progress, but it’s too bad they won’t get the chance to test themselves further against international competition, to get that chance to be a very 21st century Cinderella story.

Whether because he’s grown sick of being a spectacle or because he forgot, Charlie Sheen neglected to submit himself for Emmy consideration. This spares us the spectacle of camera pans to see if he’s behaving himself and the possibility of devoting even more airtime to a man who is at minimum wildly narcissistic and quite possibly very ill were he to give an acceptance speech or rush the stage, Kanye-like.

But the thing that kills me is that Sheen apparently missed the deadline to put himself in contention, and the Academy of Television Arts and Sciences gave the guy more time on the grounds that it’s a good idea to make sure “all eligible entrants” are in the running. They have the right to extend the deadline, but this is a case where discretion seems, well, less than entirely necessary or wise. This is a man whose network has declared that they don’t need him for their hit show. Charlie Sheen is not such a paragon of society or such an artistic treasure that he merits special consideration. The Academy might want the ratings that an addict who shot his fiancee, righteously pissed off his producer, and conned a bunch of Americans out of ticket money could bring into a broadcast, but there’s something distasteful about anything that even hints at an acknowledgement of that.

I think Megan McArdle has some interesting arguments in this post arguing that we should keep our politics and our art separate, but I think, taken cumulatively, it’s the equivalent of not just throwing the baby out with the bathwater but defenestrating it. I want to focus on a central section of Megan’s essay, because I’m less concerned with whether we should keep enjoying art by people once we learn dreadful things about either their personal lives or their political views (I think we should) than the role art plays in shaping our morality and politics. Megan writes:

Art isn’t very good stand-in for Sunday School teachers, for all that we repeatedly imbue it with the job of shaping morality–”poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the world”, said Shelley, and it’s a damn good thing he was wrong. Having a keen eye for detail, a a morose grasp of the tragedy of the human condition, and hypertrophied verbal mental muscles does not make you a good policy analyst. George Orwell, who was more of a gimlet-eyed realist than most ideological writers, nonetheless believed a fair amount of ludicrous nonsense, such as his assertions that collectivism was necessary because a capitalist society could never produce enough to win World War II…But when art-as-politics airbrushes out the dead people at the steel works, it can be very convincing, which is why advocates like it; Uncle Tom’s Cabin did more for the Abolitionist cause than a hundred thousand lectures. The problem is, it can convince of the bad as easily as the good–Gone With the Wind reached many more people than Uncle Tom’s Cabin, in part because–despite its ugly racial politics–it’s a much better book with richer characters and more believable action…Authors aren’t good policy architects. They’re also not good moral philosophers–they’re good at dramatizing moral conundrums, which is not the same thing as resolving them…I am not arguing that artists are generally bad people, but merely that we have no evidence that they’re better than us–all of them are at least as flawed as we are. And we’re pretty flawed.

But focusing on fiction as policy proscription is an awfully limited way to look at the political work fiction does, and what readers and watchers are supposed to take away from that art. To my mind, there are three broad categories of that work: to help us approach and understand our history and the conditions of our present; to frame positions in the debates of the day; and to provide space to play with policy and political ideas, an underlooked element in a rigidified political process that is deeply suspicious of error and evolution.

The Holocaust, for example, is an event of such terrible enormity that we cannot assimilate it in a single go, or through a single medium. I know I’ve needed The Diary of Anne Frank, and Victor Klemperer’s accounts of the rise of Nazi bureaucracy, Hannah Arendt’s clear-eyed reporting on Adolf Eichmann’s trial, Edwin Black’s IBM and the Holocaust. But I’ve also approached the systematic extermination of Jews, of gays, of the disabled, and of many other categories of people through Art Spiegelman’s Maus (also recommended: In The Shadow of No Towers, not least for its riffs on Little Nemo In Slumberland), through Christopher Isherwood’s The Berlin Stories, through Isaac Bachevis Singer’s Hanukkah stories set in the Warsaw Ghetto and under tsarist rule in Russia, through the repeated image of young Magneto tearing at the gates of a concentration camp, through Cryptonomicon, through The Debt, due out in August. Sometimes, our reconciliation with the truth of our politics and history comes both in stark confrontation with the facts. And sometimes we need to sidle up to those facts before we can face them, to circle back through multiple perspectives, to reach for scriptural language whether in testimony or in fiction, to help us grapple with the enormity of our glory and catastrophe. “Milton does more than drunk God can,” Ray Bradbury wrote, “To justify Man’s way toward Man.”
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I’m on a bit of a sprint to watch at least the core of Torchood so I can properly analyze Torchwood: Miracle Day when it premieres in July. Two things that are striking me about the show so far, other than the whole pansexual space pirate thing, which is the most obvious vector for analysis. First, both the Doctor Who and Torchwood universes do really nice work when they tell stories about fans. And second, Torchwood feels, at least in the early going, a little institutionally unmoored.

I’m not entirely caught up with the rebooted Doctor Who yet, but one of the episodes I’ve watched that touched me most was “Love & Monsters,” which is essentially about a fan-and-mild-conspiracies club of people who believe the Doctor exists, and what happens first when that belief becomes secondary to the members’ friendships, and then when they actually, desperately need him to be real. There is a monster, to be sure, but he’s not really the point. The episode’s a fairly tender story about how wonderful it is to discover you’re not alone in your interests and your passions, and how those interests can be a critically important icebreaker, particularly if you’re not great at the work of conventional socializing. In the first season of Torchwood, “Random Shoes” does takes a different approach to a similar theme. A young man who’s seen his early promise slip away, and who clings to an interest in and belief in aliens as the last thing that makes him special, finds that after his death, that love makes it possible for him to undertake one last heroic act. Obviously it makes sense for shows like these to write Valentines to their fans, but they’re a nice acknowledgement of the fact that it’s increasingly easy to have fandom as an organizing principal for your life, and as a result, it’s (at least anecdotally) increasingly common and increasingly important way to arrange your social life.

On a less positive note, though, one of the things I like least about Torchwood so far is the extent to which the organization is isolated. Obviously, Torchwood Three has some kind of relationship with the Cardiff police, which gets vexed with their supernatural counterparts. And there were multiple branches of Torchwood. But we don’t get a sense of any institutional tension between Torchwood and more conventional law enforcement: the team tends to be able to just waltz into crime scenes, and to turn human offenders like the murders in “Countrycide” over to the cops without any real need to conceal their existence. The relationship’s an irritant than a real constraint on Torchwood’s operations.

Similarly, the fact that Torchwood Three appears to be the only functional branch of the institute isn’t actually a good thing for the show. We don’t get a training montage that really introduced Gwen to Torchwood’s practices and traditions, which would be both a fun thing to do, a great way to introduce viewers to the world the creators are building, and a good way to establish the constraints Torchwood agents work under. Without constraints, it’s hard to know what it means to be a Torchwood agent. As is, they’re basically private dicks who know that aliens are out there. My understanding is that we get more context later for why Torchwood Three is what’s left. But even if, and especially if, they’re what remains of a tradition, that should be an interesting burden to carry out, a legacy to carry on, something that should be part of Gwen’s experience and ours.

I’m working on a piece about a new short film about Battlestar Galactica fandom and the line between humanity and artificial intelligence, so I was curious to see the teaser for Archetype via the good people at io9:

I’ve always found movies that alleged that no matter how transformed we were, whether by assimilation into the Borg or by viruses that turn us into zombies, our humanity will persist to be overly optimistic. Clearly, there’s a tipping point. But if we’re going to engineer robots that can communicate with and effectively serve human desires without necessarily developing their own, there’s going to have to be something recognizably human about them, in a way that causes all sorts of more intimate troubles than a bunch of bots tearing up a city. Humanity’s vanishing into chrome is interesting, but so are characters like Jane, a personification of the internet from Orson Scott Card’s Speaker for the Dead, new species that are other without being actively hostile.