I’ve long been a fan of Anna North‘s work, so I was excited to read her debut novel, America Pacifica. It’s an unnerving novel, based on the idea that as life on the continental United States becomes unlivable, a few surviving humans fled to a tropical island, counting on the idea that they’d be able to build it out on landfill and set up a viable alternative society. And it raises an interesting question that I think more works of science fiction might usefully consider: what if we only start working on solutions to climate change and other environmental problems after we’re past the point of no return?

The interesting thing about America Pacifica is its pessimism. A lot of futurist literature involves a heroic effort, undertaken in a time of great duress for the human race, but it’s also frequently invested in arguing that wrenching societal change may be painful, but that it’s critically important. That optimism makes sense. It’s pretty difficult to convince people that they should move to a totally new energy source, or settle Mars, or establish a colony on an isolated and under-resourced island, without the promise that it’s going to pay off pretty big. There are science fiction authors who are profound pessimists of course, among them China Mieville, but I think they tend to write about worlds that are already in dire straights rather than examining the crucial periods and key decisions that made life unlivable.

North’s novel makes clear that humanity had to do something in order to continue existing. But they made a decision about what to do after humanity had been so winnowed down that weak people could become leaders, and the ranks were so thinned that ideas didn’t get questioned and tested the way they should have been. Instead of a grand dream, Pacifica turns into a nightmare world, a land that’s hideously stratified by class, dominated by a few large businesses that blacklist workers, where the only social services are provided by a few religious charities, the school system doesn’t lift anyone up, food is synthetic, and the ground is literally collapsing. The novel follows a moment when sentiment shifts on the island from a general acceptance that even if humanity’s now deeply stratified, the move to Pacifica was worth it, to a profound skepticism of Pacifica’s leaders that culminates in a coup. And even then, North has a whiff of Mieville’s Marxist skepticism about whether changing regimes actually changes life for most people ruled by them. What people really need is a completely different approach to humanity’s survival, not new leadership on an island that is at risk of actually sinking. But only a few people can make a break that radical.

And that’s a scary message, especially for a book on global warming. I don’t know that we’re going to end up with a scenario where a few hundred thousand remaining humans are living on a hugely polluted island in the Pacific Ocean. But I do think we might get to a point where we just accept huge asthma and lung cancer rates and the radical degradation of even protected spaces before we mobilize to really change anything.

Political humor, if it cares about being insightful, should avoid the abundantly obvious and the exhaustively over-exposed. Portraying Bill Clinton as totally unable to resist the siren song of hamburgers doesn’t count as clever. Neither does depicting Marcus Bachmann is a lisping, effeminate closeted gay man:

One of the funnier inversions of this trope I’ve seen was in Friends With Money where everyone assumed Frances McDormand’s husband was gay even though he wasn’t. Turning stereotypes back on the people who hold them is almost universally funny than confirming them. Things like this won’t win the battle against Rep. Michele Bachmann as a viable national political figure and help delay victory in the larger war over gay rights.

It’s been years since I visited the Watts Towers (which blew my mind, they’re incredible, and I wish I could find the t-shirt with a picture of them ironed on to it that I bought out of a guy’s house next door), so things may have changed since then, but it was definitely my sense that they could make a fantastic linchpin for further artistic development if that was something the neighborhood and city thought would be valuable. And I’m definitely in favor of things that make it easier for folks to find their way to great public art, particularly if it brings more art to people where they live, so I’m excited to hear that there’s a National Endowment for the Arts Our Town grant headed to the area that will, among other things, create an arts trail from a historic train station to the Towers site.

A trickier question is whether to support a skate park that’s supposed to go in right next door to the towers. On one hand, it would definitely be obnoxious if the only development around the Watts Towers were geared at tourists who will make at most occasional excursions into the neighborhood. On the other, there are perhaps community projects that would be less likely to impact a fragile piece of folk art that even with seismic stabilization, can be damaged by bad windstorms. I don’t think teenagers are inherently bad or responsible people, but people have been known to act like fools in groups and accidents can happen. A more stringent review of the project that asks questions about how to make sure the Towers stay safe and plans for remediation if they’re damaged seems fairly reasonable. Hopefully, a comprehensive plan for the neighborhood will be able to balance benefits to art-lovers and neighborhood residents.

I haven’t been insanely excited about the prospect of a Jerry Bruckheimer-helmed, Johnny-Depp-plays-a-Native-American The Lone Ranger movie. But now that Ruth Wilson’s apparently going to play the female lead, I feel sort of obligated to be at least moderately optimistic about it.

I didn’t give Wilson nearly enough love in my paean to Luther, but she’s one of the best parts of an extremely strong show. She plays Alice Morgan, a serial killer with an extremely strong internal code who, after tangling with John Luther when he investigates her murder of her parents, gets very attached both to him and to the idea of his relationship with his wife. Alice is a stylized, controlled character, but not a cold one, and a real departure from the hysterical female killers we usually get in pop culture. There’s no question that she’s crazy, but she’s a very distinct kind of crazy. And it’s fascinating to watch her relationship with Luther develop: it’s a very functional back-and-forth that serves the interests of two wildly dysfunctional people, and it’s a very satisfying friendship between a man and a woman, something we see on screen all too rarely.

In any case, Wilson, who looks like an evil version of Emma Stone, deserves to be richly remunerated for her excellent work, and I’d love to see her more on this side of the pond. I just hope between this and Noomi Rapace’s (she played Lisbeth in the original Girl With the Dragon Tattoo movies) role in the next Sherlock Holmes movie, which looks…not good, we don’t develop a habit of importing hugely compelling and unique European artists and then using them in totally boring ways. It’s a real risk, and an unfortunate one.

Punchline Magazine wants to know if it’s good for women in comedies if Mila Kunis scored the cover of GQ’s comedy issue, a first for a woman, if she’s scantily clad on the cover.

Out of curiosity, I went back to 2000 in GQ’s cover archive to confirm the suspicion that I had that Kunis’ shoot is completely typical. In all that time, Angelina Jolie is the only woman who landed a cover and who got to wear an outfit for the shoot that she could have worn out in public to some place other than a beach. Her closest runners-up were Charlize Theron in hot pants and a top that shows she’s clearly not wearing a bra, Anna Kournikova in a crop top, Jamie King in a see-through top, and Eva Mendez in a mesh dress. Jennifer Anniston memorably posed topless in a jeans skirt when she was named the magazine’s first Woman of the Year. And Sacha Baron Cohen reciprocated a little when he posed naked for the comedy issue in 2009. In this context, where men generally wear full outfits and women wear very little, the treatment of Kunis isn’t out of line with GQ’s practices, where the men are role models and the women are objects of worship. It’s a pretty boring decision for a cover shot, but I don’t think it’s sexist. Given that male comedians who get the cover for this issue usually end up looking silly or not particularly attractive on it Kunis may actually be one up on them.

And if the pictures get guys who skipped Tad Friend’s Anna Faris profile to read a piece that touches substantially on sexism and comedy, I’m okay with that. We do not live in a perfect age. I think it’s very smart that Kunis called out Lucille Ball, Sarah Silverman, and Tina Fey, all women with substantial creative control over their shows (I’ve always loved that Lucille bought out Desilu after her divorce so she could own her own production company outright — this seems like a substantially overlooked issue when we talk about representation in pop culture, period) as role models. And frankly, I really respect her for agreeing with the interviewer that Tina Fey’s ongoing efforts to act as though Liz Lemon isn’t that attractive are getting tired. Kunis apparently told GQ “You want the attention to go to the joke itself rather than be distracted by who’s delivering it…But look at Bridesmaids. That movie’s full of beautiful women who are hysterical. I’m so proud of those ladies.” Comics, be they ladies or dudes, are stronger when they can execute humor on more than one track.

At the end of the day, I would be sort of sad if magazines aimed at heterosexual men weren’t able to acknowledge that women are attractive. That doesn’t feel like any sort of feminist victory to me.

-This would be better news if it was an announcement of a show about how Sam Malone turned Cheers into a detective agency. Norm and Cliff as partners, Carla as the tough interrogator who prefers to work alone, Diane as a brilliant but annoying lab tech…

-USA Network execs discuss their show-design jujitsu.

-A first-hand account of what it was like to work at News of the World.

-How to fix the All-Star game.

-Table-flipping and weave-pulling for Jesus:

So we all jumped the gun a few days ago when News Corporation backed off one of the conditions of its proposal for taking over BSkyB. But what we thought had happened then has happened now: News Corporation, which has lost $7 billion in market value over the past four days the market has been open, has withdrawn from its efforts to take over the largest pay broadcaster in the U.K. The decision came after David Cameron declared during Prime Minister’s Question Time: “There needs to be root and branch change at this entire organization…What has happened at this company is disgraceful and it’s got to be addressed at every level, and they should stop thinking about mergers when they’ve got to sort out the mess they’ve created.” A friend who covers British journalism suspects that Murdoch will be back for BSkyB at some point, but for now, the bid is dead.

The interesting question is whether sorting “out the mess they’ve created” will include selling off News International, eliminating the division from which the scandal emerged and diffusing charges of media monopoly. It’s hard to imagine who the buyer would be, and it’s hard to imagine any sale wouldn’t mean shedding an enormous number of jobs from Murdoch’s papers. In any case, it’s going to be a long time before the new shape of the media landscape in the U.K. is clear. And I’m curious to see if the debate over media ethics and practices stays confined to the U.K. (My colleagues at ThinkProgress are petitioning the Justice Department to investigate whether News Corporation used similar practices on this side of the pond.) or to phone hacking. Obviously the phone hacking scandal involves the normalization of wily aberrant behavior. But there’s a useful wider conversation to be had about what people want out of their journalism, and what they think the media’s obligations to consumers are.

With arts and public broadcast issues percolating on the edge of the race for the 2012 presidential race, I thought it made sense to look at where the declared and prospective candidates for president have stood on arts issues throughout their careers. Their views on everything from arts education to intellectual property rights to support for local artistic traditions say a lot about how they value culture — but also about how they think about the role of government.

Former New Mexico Gov. Gary Johnson isn’t a typical Republican—or a viable contender for the Republican nomination, given his support for marijuana legalization and open distaste for the anti-gay policies some of his opponents endorse. Arts policy, however, is an area where Johnson isn’t particularly out of step with his conservative colleagues, though neither is he an extremely outlier. He was careful about state arts funding, though because he wasn’t faced with recessions the way some of his competitors were, he didn’t aim to cut arts budgets to balance budgets. And he hasn’t been particularly vocal about intellectual property issues either. But there are a few interesting tidbits in the record, including his taste in movies:

1996: Johnson and his wife were spotted at a screening of Female Perversions, Susan Streitfeld’s feminist sex drama, at the Taos Talking Picture Festival. This isn’t a particularly key point, but it does suggest that Johnson might have actual non-focus tested cultural preferences, which is moderately refreshing.

That year, he also appointed Louis LeRoy, the director of the ethnic arts-focused Association of American Cultures to run New Mexico Arts. Like Sarah Palin’s support for special labeling for Native Alaskan art, this is probably more a gesture to a key constituency than a real prioritization of ethnic art.

1999: Under Johnson’s administration, the New Mexico Arts Commission received an increase in the funding it was able to disperse in the form of grants. But he also vetoed $2 million in funding for a pilot program to stand up and study the efficacy of 20 performance and visual arts education.

2001: Johnson signed a bill that gave New Mexico ownership over inventions and other intellectual property that state employees invented in the course of their duties. But the bill also required New Mexico to split profits or royalties from those inventions or intellectual property evenly with the employees who were responsible for their creation.

That year, Johnson also hired a company to help New Mexico expand broadband access. Gov. Bill Richardson’s administration terminated the contract two years later over concerns about some of the financing.

2002: Johnson signed a bill that expanded state funding for museums, though this legislation probably shouldn’t be interpreted as a strong sign of support for states art funding. The legislation’s supporters got it attached to a bill that provided funding for police radios.

If Johnson was as delightfully idiosyncratic on the arts and media innovation issues as he is on other issues—at least in the context of the Republican field—he might be a more intriguing candidate on these grounds. As it stands, however, he’s merely mainstream.

Last month at Netroots, I had the great pleasure to spend some time talking to David Roberts from Grist, who mentioned an interview he’d done with an outfit called Hollywood, Health, and Society that’s a free informational resource for folks who are producing health- and climate-related pop culture who want to make sure they get their facts right. HHS director Sandra de Castro Buffington told him why she thinks their model works:

We hold panel discussions at the Writers Guild of America West on a regular basis. I have a climate change panel discussion coming up on March 9, so I’m going to bring together a small group of experts, a keynote speaker, and some writers and/or producers who have successfully portrayed climate issues in television or film. They can talk about how they did it, why they did it, what were some of the challenges, what are some of the opportunities. We get about 75 to 100 writers at these events.

We have long-standing, trusting relationships with the writers, so if I have an expert in town, I’ll call them and say, look, I’ve got this amazing person who has real stories I’m sure you’ve never heard before. Can we have one hour on Friday? Now, why do the writers trust us? They have every special interest group in the world hitting on them every day, but they don’t want someone else’s agenda being pushed on them. The reason they trust us is that we never push an agenda. We’re simply a free resource. We will get them an expert on any topic they want.

This strikes me as such an insanely smart model that I’m not sure why more folks aren’t doing it. Being a connector to experts and vetted information is a relatively cheap thing for foundations to support: it doesn’t require a huge staff, and it’s in the interests of a lot of organizations to make their experts available. Not every organization’s going to be able to pull this off—Focus on the Family, for example, is probably going to have a pretty hard time just putting themselves out there as objective efforts and convincing people to come to them. Anyone who tries to do this is going to have to be patient enough to put story ahead of their agenda, and to recognize that sometimes policy information or a policy agenda won’t fit neatly into the conventions of narrative. And for some folks, that may not be worth it, if they end up with compromised stories. But as this interview suggests, the increasing accuracy of health information in pop culture suggests that narrative drama and facts can coexist. And basic facts shape our expectations of what’s possible and what’s right.