-The Cryptonomicon apparently exists for real.

-The case for a dramedy category at awards shows.

-Occult detectives!

-Terry Pratchett wades into the assisted suicide debate.

-I probably would have enjoyed The Hunger Games more if Katniss had been sassier/more willing to consider keeping both Gale and Peeta around. I would pay these dudes to do Femme Fatale as a parody album about young adult novels, particularly if “How I Roll,” with its “Got nine lives like a kitty cat” chorus could be about Alanna of Trebond:

I agree with most of Ned Resnikoff’s post on what the DC Comics reboot means for the miserable, tortured lives of superheroes. There’s something odd about the fact that we like seeing superpowered people suffer dreadfully ad infinitum (though as a side note, I’d love to see Bane cripple Batman so we could have major tentpole picture engage with disability — that’s a possibility in a First Class sequel, too, but it looks like they might gloss over it a bit). But I think it actually illustrates a larger problem with our superhero stories: the stakes have gotten too high.

Y’all will probably get sick of me mentioning the Superhuman Law She-Hulk arc, for which I apologize in advance. But it gets a ton of milage out of fairly low-level conflicts. How do you handle a new superhero’s workman’s comp claim? What happens if Spider-Man sues J. Jonah Jameson for libel? What’s it like to go to bed with a guy as a green goddess and wake up a nerdy lawyer? In a world that’s actually nudging up against apocalypse fatigue, those stories feel creative and fresh. Similarly, one of the things I dug about The Unusuals, an extremely short-lived ABC cop show starring Jeremy Renner and Amber Tamblyn, was the fact that while the squad did investigate murders (often in strange comic circumstances), they also dealt with smaller-bore violations of the law, whether they were jewelry-store robberies or reports of a zombie that turn out to be an Alzheimer’s patient. These stories are interesting too, even if no one ends up dead, and they require different investigative techniques, result in different dynamics. Investigating cannibalistic method-acting fake cabbies for hotel bludgeoning deaths is not actually the bar you have to clear to snag an audience’s attention.

I think on television, we’re getting better explorations of the real dilemmas of superheroism, with things like the adaptations of Powers and SyFy‘s Alphas, of which I got screeners in the mail this week. But it would be good to step back from the assumption that angst and agony are the most powerful reader emotions to engage when we’re telling superhero stories, and on a larger scale, procedural stories. There’s more to life, and to making the world a better place.

Neil Lambert read my post on The Voice on Friday, and as good brothers will do, emailed me to suggest I hadn’t been entirely fair in my characterization of Adam Lambert’s coming-out story. He writes:

Adam clearly didn’t want to negatively impact his chances by turning the end of the competition into an indictment of his sexuality, but I think also because he didn’t want the story — if it did turn out to be him losing — to be about the Idol audience’s anti-gay bias. He’s proudly gay and I’m proud of him for it, but I’m prouder still that he thinks we’d all be better off the quicker our culture gets past gender and sexuality. I think an important aspect of achieving that goal is not allowing homophobia to make you the victim when things don’t go your way and doubly so if you’re in the spotlight.

You might be interested to know that behind the scenes, the Idol producers didn’t try to persuade him one way or the other when it came to answering the press once all those pictures began surfacing online. They were surprisingly supportive and told him they’d back him either way. This came as a surprise to me and suggests two possibilities: either they’ve come a long way from the gay prejudices they exhibited with Mr. Aiken, or (more likely, in my opinion) past gay contestants were far warier about their sexuality than Adam is and asked Idol to shield them from scrutiny.

Neil and I agree that the larger problem is Idol’s accumulated history and reputation. I wouldn’t really want to choose between the person who wins American Idol and the person who helps the program evolve beyond its early fears of a gay contestant—especially if you think winning could give you longer-term power to act as a role model and sell albums. The Voice has a clean slate in that regard, one that’s being put to good use, and I’ll be curious to see if gains a long-term edge over Idol because of it. But I also thought Neil’s email was an interesting reminder of the frustration of being any sort of first. There’s always going to be some very talented person whose talent is eclipsed by the barrier they broke down with the force of that same talent. I imagine Barack Obama has a keen sense of how he could have used every minute of mental energy he had to devote to speculation about his birth certificate, and that there’s a lot of catharsis packed into “For Your Entertainment.”

Fast Company‘s has a new riff on the question of FIFA’s headscarf ban: the question of whether designer Elham Seyed Javad’s “sports hijab,” which she’s submitted to the soccer body for consideration, might provide a solution that’s both acceptable to sports federations and to observant Muslim women. A head covering that tucks into a t-shirt seems like it would solve the problem of access to a player’s airway in an emergency and reduce any sort of choking hazard.

At the end of the day, it seems like playing covered would be a real competitive disadvantage, particularly in an outdoor, non-stop sport like soccer where it seems like a headscarf would make you get overheated that much faster. But if women want to accept that disadvantage and still compete (and obviously, choice is mitigated in countries like Iran) and they can do so safely, it seems that they ought to be able to make those calculations for themselves. And if good design can help minimize that problem, reconciling religious observance and participation in the wider world, that seems like a preferable solution to diving into a highly political debate in a way that gives Iran an opportunity to position itself as a champion of women’s rights. As many readers and friends have pointed out here, the problem is less that FIFA made this one decision to ban headscarves than that it’s a clumsily managed organization.

For folks fretting about whether HBO’s actually going to roll with a full seven seasons of Game of Thrones, I think you can probably relax. Over the weekend, The Hollywood Reporter broke the news that the network apparently has signed up Tom Hanks’ Playtone to do six seasons of its planned adaptation of Neil Gaiman’s novel American Gods, each at 10 to 12 episodes. Obviously, things could fall apart, and I’m not sure what the very sizable order will mean for how the story changes from page to screen: will they be lingering in the narrative? Throwing Anansi Boys in the mix, too? But the fact that the initial plan is for six seasons suggests huge hopes and huge ambitions — as well as sizable cojones — at HBO. And given that American Gods is a single novel, if the network’s willing to blow it out to 60-plus episodes of television, I imagine they’re ready to go the distance with the existing material of Game of Thrones.

I’m utterly fascinated by HBO’s decision that fantasy is the place for them to take a stand. I love it, of course. Even more than conquering the box office, the premium cable channel to end all premium cable channel’s decision to embrace genre fiction is a major mark of validation. But it also strikes me as a risky one. HBO has always relied on good reviews, on Emmys, on the sense that it’s doing something profoundly different and better than other networks, to get audiences to pony up the subscription fees that let them turn out highly unusual programming. The high priesthood of criticism hasn’t uniformly accepted fantasy as a serious genre, whether it’s Ginia Bellafante’s headache-inducing dismissal of Game of Thrones as a dudely fantasy, or the fact that (though the magazine did do a feature on the long-awaited A Dance With Dragons) the New Yorker has yet to review the show. By contrast, Nancy Franklin got to John From Cincinnati just two weeks after the show premiered in 2007. True Blood‘s always intentionally been treated as if it’s been froth, which is probably due in part to its origins in Charlaine Harris’s paranormal romances as well as in its embrace of its status as high-concept, good-looking, violent candy.

The Wire and The Sopranos were easy shows for critics to embrace, if only because they were morally challenging variations on familiar forms: the Dickensian social novel and the tragic American family novel. Championing them was a way to show your sophistication, as well as the quality of your education. That’s not to say that Game of Thrones hasn’t been reviewed, and reviewed very, very well, just that it hasn’t conquered everyone’s hearts yet, and I think part of that has to do with its genre. And certainly fandom has a critic-proof power.

Neil Gaiman has much more mainstream cred than George R. R. Martin does; to a certain extent, he has transcended the label of fantasy. And it may be that if American Gods succeeds, it’ll end up casting a backwards glow on Game of Thrones. But HBO has long relied on critical acclaim to attract audiences to shows they might otherwise find baffling or unattractive. It’ll be interesting to see what the long-term impact of the network’s investment is on where fantasy fits in the pantheon.

Obviously I’m on the record in favor of on political and politicized art. But I think part of that stance is accepting and understanding that sometimes art will go too far, and will have genuinely deleterious effects on political struggles. Such is the case with the “Gay Girl in Damascus” blog, which turns out to be a hoax written by dude in Edinburgh that began as a fictional project and that went badly wrong. As Tom MacMaster writes in his apology for perpetrating the belief that a lesbian blogger had been disappeared by the regime:

I betrayed the trust of a great many people, the friendship that was honestly and openly offered to me, and played with the emotions of others unfairly. I have distracted the world’s attention from important issues of real people in real places. I have potentially compromised the safety of real people. I have helped lend credence to the lies of the regimes. I am sorry.

I have hurt people with whom I share a side and a struggle. That matters. I have hurt causes I believe in sincerely. That is wrong.

Those are the lines in the post that will get the most attention, but I think it’s worth considering what comes after as part of a discussion about how to ethically practice and perfect the craft of fiction:

Ever since I was a child, I’ve wanted to write fiction but, when my first attempts met with universal rejection, I took a more serious look at my own work and I realized that I could not write conversation in a natural way nor could I convincingly write characters who weren’t me. I tried to get better and did various exercises (such as simply copying overheard conversations). Eventually, I would set up a number of profiles on dating sites with identities that were not my own as ways of interacting with real people in conversation but with a different personality than my own. [...] First, she was just a name. Amina Arraf. She commented on blogs and talkbacks on news-sites. Eventually, I set up an email for her. She joined the same lists I was already on and posted responses in her name. And, almost immediately, friendly and solicitous comments on mine appeared. It was intriguing. That likely would have been the end of it; I’d just keep her as a nearly anonymous handle for commenting on issues that mattered to me but…

Amina came alive. I could hear her ‘voice’ and that voice and personality were clear and strong. Amina was funny and smart and equal parts infuriating and flirtatious. She struggled with her religious beliefs and sexuality, wondered about living in America as an Arab; she wanted to find a way to balance her religion and her sexuality, her desire to be both a patriotic American and a patriotic Arab. Amina was clever and fun and had a story and a voice and I started writing it, almost as though she were dictating to me. Some of her details were mine, some were those of a dozen other friends borrowed liberally, others were purely ‘her’ from the get go.

So long before he created Gay Girl In Damascus, MacMaster was doing fairly obviously unethical things to improve his writing. Misleading people on dating sites in the name of honing his craft is the artistic equivalent of doing scientific experiments on people without their consent. And it seems like he enjoyed the feedback he got from pretending to be someone else as much as the actual writing, the actual improvement of his product.

Look, being a writer of any kind is hard work, especially the bits before you get an audience or a book contract. It’s solitary. It’s lonely. Writers’ block can make you feel like your whole life is a failure, like you’re just too narrow and small and limited to express the things you’re reaching for because you haven’t really lived properly. But the solution to that isn’t to fabricate a life—it’s to go out and actually have one. You don’t have a right to audience. You get what you earn, what you work for.

That’s not to say that immersive media itself is immoral—you can intend to entertain without intending to actively mislead. We live in a moment when it’s possible for stories to get bigger, to be delivered by more media, and more specifically, to live outside the forms that we identify as creations rather than part of the real world: characters live on Twitter, marketers build impressive viral virtual websites, graffiti pops up on streets. The possibilities make for very, very powerful story delivery. But with great power comes great responsibility. MacMaster probably could have used an intervention, maybe by someone like Andrea Phillips, whose presentation on the history of and how to ethically create “pervasive media” at SXSW is a really useful primer on the subject.

It’s hard out there for a Norwegian. At least, I guess that’s the conclusion it makes sense to draw from the amazing news that the country’s overseas missions get so many inquiries about Black Metal that they’re training diplomats in how to explain it. Maybe they just should keep the Bones episode “Mayhem on a Cross” (which I’m partial to, given my weakness for anything that treats fandoms as legitimate subcultures) looping in embassy waiting rooms? I’d love to know the most common questions American diplomats have to field about our cultural exports, the most popular of which don’t have the misfortune to be publicly associated with church-burnings or pretty intense murders no matter how far they’ve come in gaining mainstream acceptance.

Reason‘s Peter Suderman and I sat down on Friday to tape an episode of Bloggingheads that ranges from the political uses of X-Men to Super 8 as Steven Spielberg cover band. I didn’t get a chance to go this weekend, but I’d be curious to know what those of you who saw Super 8 think of Peter’s assessment:

Because of the critical nature of the events in tonight’s Game of Thrones, I’m sticking the whole discussion below the jump. If you’re going to spoil beyond the events of “Baelor,” though I imagine this one will keep us pretty busy, please label your comments as such.
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