-Has cable won the war to make television better, and lost its competitive advantage in the process?

-Relatedly, cable companies join the war on poverty.

-Rob Lowe will kill his wife. Er, fictionally, that is.

-Because what we really need is a Dane Cook-related teen romantic comedy apocalypse movie. With body switching and time travel. Are we sure this isn’t by those Scary Movie guys?

-Green Lantern just might have a marketing problem (language NSFW):

‘Green Lantern’ To Fulfill America’s Wish To See Lantern-Based Characters On Big Screen

GQ Editor Sarah Goldstein jumped in the comments on my post yesterday on the magazine’s Chris Evans profile to make two points, which I think are fair, though I don’t agree with them entirely. First, she says that women write things other than profiles of celebrities for the magazine. This is totally true! And it’s true of other men’s-oriented magazines, too. I, myself, wrote a snarky guide to getting your Cyrano on for Esquire‘s Valentine’s Day package, and got dandy editing, and had a fine old time.

And second, she says if I concede that women write a bunch of different things for the magazine, then my question, “If the only way for women to published in certain kinds of magazines is to take these kinds of cheesecake assignments, should we say yes, and dunk them and then insist on better for the next thing in the hopes that there will be a next thing?” is unfair. I’ve thought about this, and while yes, women may make it into GQ and its ilk in other ways, that doesn’t mean that assignments like these don’t pose a dilemma if a magazine like this comes to you and asks you to write a celebrity profile on the heels of a profile like Jessica Pressler’s camping trip like Channing Tatum.

The importance of magazines like GQ and Esquire to women writers comes in part from the fact that there simply isn’t an equivalent among magazines aimed at women. As I was thinking about this, I looked through the American Society of Magazine Editors’ database of National Magazine Award nominees and winners. If you count Vanity Fair as a general interest magazine rather than a women’s magazine, which I do, a women’s magazine hasn’t published a nominee for a Feature Writing prize in the last twenty years. Unless the interior design magazine Nest counts, no women’s magazine has ever produced a nominee for profile writing in the two categories that have existed to recognize that form. If we count Self, six Public Interest award nominees have come from women’s magazines in the last twenty years: two in that magazine, one in Golf for Women, one in Redbook, one in Glamour, one in Family Circle. Between 1991 and 2001, no women’s magazine has produced a winner or a nominee in the Reporting category.

It’s weird and hugely frustrating that women’s magazines have made such totally different choices. That’s not to say that all women’s magazines should be high-end bastions of literary journalism—certainly all men’s magazines aren’t that way—but certainly we should be able to support one or two publications that tell us about hot accessories and do groundbreaking, beautifully-written reporting. That kind of committment would both make women’s publications better, and provide material support for the kind of empowerment places like Marie Claire are ostensibly supposed to supply along with beauty advice. But they just don’t do it. And because there isn’t a parallel infrastructure for great reporting, profiles, and public service journalism among women’s magazines, access to assignments at the high-end men’s magazines, and to the amazing editing and resources that come with those assignments, and that produce major awards, is incredibly precious.

Sometimes those kinds of assignments don’t come with difficult choices, like deciding what physical risks you’re willing to face especially in circumstances where it might be more dangerous to be a woman, or whether you’re comfortable putting yourself out there in a One Crazy Night profile. But sometimes they do. Acknowledging that those kinds of choices exist and aren’t easy, especially when it seems like prestige magazines are expressing preferences for certain things, needs to be part of the conversation if we want more women writing more kinds of stories for more magazines.

The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences announced today that they’re backing off from having ten nominees for Best Picture and moving instead to a floating system that will allow for a minimum of five contenders but as many as ten. Movies will have to get at least five percent of the nominating pool’s votes to make it into contention. I get the arguments for this change: there aren’t necessarily ten top-tier movies in any given year, and the expanded pool wasn’t making it more likely for foreign or animated movies to walk away with the Best Picture trophy (though I think a Pixar movie will win the top prize at some point). But I do worry about the impact that this change will have on recognition of genre movies.

I realize this is a double-edged sword, that if science fiction movies or fantasy movies or comic-book noirs or whatever make it into an expanded Best Picture category, it might get treated as filler rather than as a serious contender. But even if that’s how something like District 9 makes it into contention, I think on the whole it’s better to have it, or Avatar, or Inglourious Basterds (2010 was a good year for genre diversity) up against more conventional nominees like An Education, which hits a certain sophisticated period sweet spot, or The Blind Side or Precious, that year’s issue movies. If folks keep seeing aliens next to British thespians on their ballots and their clip shows, at some point they’ll be forced to think about why those stories are powerful to people, and why genre fiction is a vehicle for powerful, beautiful, expressive storytelling.

I do think at some point, when we’ve finished a generational shift, the Academy will become dramatically more accommodating to genre movies as the people who have devoted substantial chunks of their careers to those kinds of stories come of age. But until that happens, we’re going to keep having conversations about the Academy’s preference for certain kinds of bland moral lessons in a way that diverges from audiences’ tastes.

It strikes me as incredibly smart that Hulu’s moving to pick up British series and distribute them. There’s an obvious and obsessive market for British content in America that’s only partially fulfilled by BBC America, which because it’s only one channel can’t air everything coming out of all the BBC’s stations, and Netflix. Prime Suspect, for example, isn’t streaming live on Netflix, and with the remake coming up on NBC this fall, I imagine there’s demand, and will be increasing demand, for streaming access to the original. If Hulu could strike a bunch of these deals, and of course the rights would be complicated or Netflix would be all set already, I imagine it would attract a new class of subscribers that maybe isn’t buying Hulu plus for the sitcoms, and work to expand a market that very much exists but is a bit under-served by current options.

The only circumstances in which I think I’d get behind a boycott of the Huffington Post is if the company had explicitly broken contracts it made with freelancers, and was denying them compensation they’d promised. In a sense, I feel sort of the same way about Huffington Post contributors that I feel about some of Roseanne Barr’s troubles during the first season of her shows—if you agree to something rotten that you later regret, that’s deeply unfortunate, and you can be upset when you’re treated badly, but you have to, at some level, accept that you made the bargain. The one part of it that I think Erik Loomis gets right, and that I sympathize with, is this bit of it:

The blogosphere was all about timing. Yglesias was right on that, much like Klein, Marcotte, Valenti, Kos, and many others. This site, in a lesser way, benefited from the same good timing. Nothing wrong with that. So that’s absolutely not meant as an attack. But a 22 year old today wanting to write about politics simply can’t become what Yglesias became. I don’t see the problem in just admitting that.

There’s no problem admitting it. What I do think Huffington Post promised, and what it generally seems to have delivered, was a blogging platform that unlike its competitors, offered some possibility of cross-promotion. Instead of promising a better wysiwyg editor or a smarter information architecture, HuffPo promised a marginally better chance of turning your hobby into a job, if that is what you were doing it for (I think this is a point that’s worth interrogating. I’d love to know a breakdown of what HuffPo contributors might have helped get out of the site.) That might have been enough to have launched some writers’ careers if, paradoxically, the site hadn’t been so good at attracting users. The chances of rising to the top were fairly small, and they became less meaningful as blogging became less an astonishingly rare talent that more a standard tool in the journalistic kit.

In that sense, deciding to blog on the Huffington Post is less like accepting a job that doesn’t pay in the hope that the person who employs you will have a change of heart, and more like making the early choices in setting up a small business. If you pick a bad corner and your business goes under because you didn’t get enough foot traffic, that’s too bad, but it’s one of the risks of starting a business! I can see why people would have given Huffington Post’s business proposal a shot, just as they might have decided to go with a certain advertising firm if they were starting a business. But it also seemed fairly clear fairly quickly that blogging for Huffington Post wasn’t leading many, if any, people to paid gigs either at HuffPo or elsewhere. At some point, if people were concerned about using it as a stepping stone to blogging or journalism jobs, it might have been a good bet to look elsewhere, just as you’d fire an ad firm that brought in no business.

I think it’s fantastic that so many people want to be in journalism, and want to write. Huffington Post, as it turns out, may have been a good way to validate that desire, but not to help people actualize it by getting them real jobs. I don’t think boycotting reading the publication is going to make it a good engine for creating hugely more journalism jobs—the barriers to that are baked into its business model. But part of wanting to make writing a career is treating it like a business. If Huffington Post is Cleveland, it’s time for its contributors to take their talents to South Beach.

You know, if Bruce Springsteen does do a guest appearance on Glee, all the songs should be from Born In The USA, also known as Bruce’s barely legal album, right? I don’t know how they’d pull off a scenario that makes the literal narrative of “Working on the Highway” plausible:

But “I’m On Fire,” other than the creepily-intoned (but no less awesome for it) “Hey, little girl, is your daddy home,” is pretty great angst fodder:

Also, I’d kind of love to see Naya Rivera sing “Dancing in the Dark.”

I really hate the idea of Bruce doing this and I hope he wouldn’t, but if he does and a bunch of kids end up discovering Bruce through Glee and Clarence Clemons through Lady Gaga, I guess I’ll take my victories where I can get them. And if it forces the show to acknowledge the class politics that have been an intermittent part of Glee over the last two seasons, it’ll do some good.

New York Magazine just signed on with an agency to represent the magazine as it tries to sell more of its story rights for movies. I think one of the things Adam Moss has done really well is find ways to use local stories to take on national issues, and a lot of those would make pretty excellent adaptations. Here are five recentish stories that have cinematic potential, in no particular order.

1. “I Did It,” Oct. 3, 2010. David Grann’s famous New Yorker piece about the execution of an innocent man is searing, but its villains are also pretty clear, so we can learn a lot about systems from it, but not really much about humanity. But why innocent people confess to doing things they did not do, even convince themselves that they did things they did not do, is complicated and frightening and indict both our institutions for producing false confessions and the nature of what we understand to be true.

2. Rachel Uchitel Is Not a Madam, April 4, 2010. Once, I might have said that “The $2,000 an-Hour Woman” would be a better pitch. But Stephen Soderbergh made it and it’s not that great. Besides, prostitution’s the oldest profession. The story of bottle girls, so-called “half hookers,” of whales, and guys who wish they were whales, has a lot to say about class, and gender. And the story of a woman who lost her fiance on Sept. 11 and ended up as a sex scandal is interesting and uncomfortable in a way that doesn’t quite fit our national narrative.

3. “Sex and the City: The Horror Movie,” Nov. 27, 2005. Because someone needs to make a really great, rich, glossy, insane movie that reminds people that nobody actually lives like Sex and the City, and if they do, something’s very wrong at the heart of it. Because it’s a fantastic story about male obsession. And the cultural references are great.

4. “Everybody Sucks,” Oct. 14, 2007. It’s not really that anyone should make this article into a movie in particular as there should be a Gawker Media (not Gawker-the-website specific) movie that’s a Bright Lights, Big City for a new generation. Sure, Gawker turned snark into the holy grail, but more importantly, by building out news, sports, women, and consumer pages, while adding science fiction and a porn site, Nick Denton (who should be played by Jude Law, right?) reinvented the newspaper for a new generation.

5. “Conspiracy of Two,” Aug. 19, 2007. This story of two artists who got convinced that Scientology was after them and killed themselves would make for a great twitchy, paranoid mystery. Plus, it’s a good art-and-video-game-world business story, if someone took a harder look at the couple’s professional failures and aspirations than Julian Schnabel did in Basquiat (which I saw recently and thought was really not good).