-Yes, X-Men: First Class is an intentional gay allegory.

-Super 8 may be similar to District 9 in some ways, but I doubt it’ll have the same concerns with justice.

-Getting in HBO’s casting pool is good job insurance.

-Given how State of Play ends, it’s insanely creepy that Ben Affleck asked Anthony Weiner for advice on how to play the title role.

-If you don’t like the Grand Rapids “American Pie” video, you basically have no heart:

Herman Cain may say that he has an advantage over the rest of the Republican field because his race neutralizes a key Obama asset. Nominating Cain might give Republican candidates black-candidate parity, but judging by the available evidence, Cain still faces an unofficial campaign song gap:

I’ll get anxious when conservatives level up and produce a tense standoff with Young Jeezy:

I never got around to watching MTV’s remake of the acclaimed British series. I wouldn’t be surprised if the Parents Television Council claims the cancellation as a victory for decency. But my sense from friends who watched is that the show didn’t find a following not because it was uber-scandalous, but because the raciness wasn’t to any particular end.

It looks like Paul Greengrass’s plans to direct Memphis, a movie based on the sanitation workers’ strike Martin Luther King, Jr. was supporting when he was assassinated, are on hold so he can jump on the Navy SEAL bandwagon and helm a picture about Captain Richard Phillips and the Maersk Alabama. I’m glad that in the wake of Osama bin Laden’s death, the early movies taking advantage of a new appreciation for the SEALs have gone to thoughtful action directors like Greengrass and Kathryn Bigelow.

But I’m sorry to see Memphis get pushed back. We have a preference in our entertainment for international concerns over domestic ones, for ass-kicking rather than organizing as a means to justice. Martin Luther King, Jr.’s legend persists mostly because we focus on the work he did that doesn’t make us uncomfortable: we agree that segregation was rotten, but we’re uncomfortable with union organizing, so we focus on King’s work on the former rather than the latter. A movie that requires audiences to understand that King’s concerns with racial equality and economic justice sprung from the same well would be useful and powerful, and as commercially risky as asking audiences to relive the struggle for control of United 93 on Sept. 11. But the crack of a rifle that echoes down the ages apparently isn’t as exciting as a daring raid.

Battlestar Galactica is probably the last piece of pop culture I got too invested in, where thinking about the show and worrying about the characters got me shaky, got me anxious outside the window of the viewing hour to the point that I had to detatch myself from it. So I was interested to see We Are All Cylons, Ilana Rein’s documentary about fans who have kept the flame alive after the show’s finale. The movie’s very good at outlining why Battlestar Galactica resonated so deeply with so many people. Though the ending is controversial, the idea that we’ve all got a little machine in our DNA is a useful way to grapple with the idea that we may end up increasingly integrated with machinery, whether we’ve got artificial joints or end up with implants that connect our brains directly to the internet.

But I’m increasingly interested in the role of fandom as an organizing principal for communities, and so I called up Ilana to talk about what she thought the people she interviewed at the Shore Leave convention got out of their participation in Battlestar Galactica conventions and costuming — and what being a fan means to her. It turns out, this Ilana’s first dip into hardcore fandom.
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I think it’s kind of overstating the American Management Association’s article saying that the cultural intelligence quotient is the most sought-after trait in potential employees to suggest that being an art lover makes you more likely to get a job (any preaching of art as a panacea is likely to end in disappointment). Understanding culture is a matter of familiarity with custom as well as of specific artistic forms and products: having a sense of what to pay a moto driver for a lift into central Phnom Penh or having a sense of under what circumstances it’s okay to talk about the One Child policy while you’re in Beijing is as important an indicator of cultural intelligence and as useful to getting by as knowing about Cambodian Shadow Puppets or how Chinese porcelain artists used washes in different periods.

Similarly, this post by Gabriel Rossman is a good warning on the trickiness of figuring out how to capture cultural capital. We might admire opera-lovers in theory, but do we like them in practice? Is it better to be Diane Chambers or Carla Tortelli if you’re in a setting where knowledge of the Red Sox is more valuable than familiarity with Jung? One of the places cultural capital seems valuable is when it’s surprising, when two people doing a deal discover that, contrary to their expectations of each other, both love the same author, or a client finds out that the person who is responsible for entertaining them can talk knowledgeably about their favorite sports team. It’s the spontaneity of that mutual recognition that’s useful, and that’s hard to engineer or to hire strategically for.

On the occasion of adorable white-girl rapper Kreayshawn getting a million-dollar record deal, five tips on how to live your best life from lady MCs:

1. An over-reliance on immediately recognizable brands will just make your wardrobe look tacky:

2. Cherry lipgloss will make you feel legendary:

3. Avoid overheating while partying at all costs:

4. Own your success and pay attention to the bottom line:

5. And sleep when you’re dead:

Because even though The Sarah Silverman Program isn’t really my thing, it’s important, and he helped get it off the ground.

Because he sat down with the AV Club and gave a four-hour long interview that’s kind of about the second season of his television show, but really is about Life, the Universe, and Everything.

Because he’s interested in “bootstrapping versus blue-blooding and the issues that occur between self-made men and men that are born. There are good guys and bad guys in both lineages.” And says things like “I have class issues. I hate rich people so badly that I wanna become one really bad.”

Because people with big ideas about myth who choose to work in popular forms are kind of my heroes.

Because he can talk honestly about how frustrated he was when NBC told him to get more women in his writers’ room—and then acknowledge that it turned out to be fantastic and changed the way he thinks about comedy (even if I think he’s really wrong on race in the same paragraphs).

Because when fandom is the new Shriners, he’ll be hailed as a visionary, and people will understand that Community is the new Bowling Alone.

Given that every time a politician does something in his sex life that prompts hysteria about his political career we debate all over again whether the wisest course is to resign or stand firm, it’s about time we got a movie about Eleanor and Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s marriage. As many authors, both popular and academic, have written, their arrangements were remarkable both in what they entailed and what they allowed: the Roosevelts’ agreement that they’d stop being physically intimate after Eleanor discovered Franklin’s first sustained affair, and their apparently mutual acceptance that the other would have long-term emotional, if not definitively physical, attachments, allowed the two of them to forge a remarkably effective public and political partnership, even if their marriage wasn’t conventional in the way Eleanor initially hoped it would be. Sure, it was a different age with regard to the press’s deference to public figures’ right to private lives. But still, the audacity of pulling it all off makes the Edwards’ decisions about John’s second run for president given his affair with Rielle Hunter look sort of small-time.

I’m heartened by the news that Olivia Williams has apparently emerged as the front-runner to play Eleanor, though she’ll never capture the impact that Eleanor’s looks had on her personality (and equally psyched that Laura Linney will play Lucy Mercer, Franklin’s secretary and long-term paramour). But it’s too bad the movie’s mostly going to be about King George VI’s visit to the Roosevelt estate, with the domestic drama of Eleanor discovering the affair as backdrop, not just because there are huge chronology issues there. The story isn’t that Eleanor Roosevelt discovered that her husband had an affair and survived like any other fictional Hollywood wronged wife, though I would love to see that historically appropriate makeover scene and historically appropriate gay best friend. It’s what Franklin and Eleanor built together, and the life Eleanor built for herself afterwards, that’s truly the extraordinary story.

Ta-Nehisi Coates has been a friend to me, and to this blog, since my early days of professional pop culture writing. The news that he’ll be doing some work for the New York Times’ opinion pages this summer is great news, not least for nerddom. One of my hopes for Ross Douthat’s tenure at the Times, even though I disagree with his politics, was that he’s provide a sustained engagement with culture in the Op-Ed section, an affirmation that art matters up there with everything else. He’s written some culture columns, but they’ve been more occasional than not. In a sense, Ta-Nehisi’s presence on the page, however long the duration, updates not just Bob Herbert’s slot, but Frank Rich’s, given how far the latter had meandered from his theater-critic roots. And the first column is just incredible. I’m obviously a white lady rather than an African-American dude, but Ta-Nehisi’s presence makes me feel more represented in the pages of the Times.