There are massive spoilers for all five of George R.R. Martin’s A Song of Ice and Fire novels, including the recently-published A Dance With Dragons, in this post. Don’t say I didn’t warn you.

I’ve long been a defender of the idea that George R.R. Martin will definitely finish A Song of Ice and Fire, less on the grounds that I have faith in the man himself, and more on the rationale that capitalism is powerful, and HBO doesn’t mess around. But while I though certain parts of A Dance With Dragons were profoundly moving and very effectively structured, the novel as a whole left me with grave concerns that Martin has a coherent master plan to bring the story to a manageable conclusion. I’d expected that this would be the point in the series when events—if not Martin’s world as a whole—would start to contract and gain momentum as the story moves towards a central conflict.

I was wrong. Instead of focusing, the story adds points of view and conflicts. Now, instead of one surviving Targaryen, we’ve got two—Aegon, Rheager’s son, is apparently alive and well and bumming around with Rheager’s childhood best friend, Jon Connington. Davos Seaworth is off on a mad quest to find Rickon Stark, one of the most invisible characters in the entire series. Mance Rayder is alive and well and living, if not in Paris, at least in Westeros. The Horn of Winter is apparently still out there, maybe on Victarion’s ship, maybe in Sam’s cache of dragonglass. We’re tangled up in a comparative anthropology of sellsword companies. It’s exhausting. And I think the only way to continue reading the novels is to focus your emotional energies on a couple of key storylines and characters. So while these thoughts are by no means complete, they’re the things that grabbed me most strongly on a first read of A Dance With Dragons.

I. The Nation-Builders

George R.R. Martin’s always been a cynic about the possibility of ruling justly in Westeros or across the narrow sea, but there’s still something agonizing about watching Jon and Dany, who take diverging approaches to governing, meeting with bitter failures.
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I hadn’t listened to the Evita cast recording for a while, so I’d forgotten how great “And the Money Kept Rolling In” is at laying out the case that badly managed private philanthropy is no substitute for a durable social safety net:

Now I sort of want Andrew Lloyd Webber to write a musical about how Che Guevara took the lessons of the Perón regime way too much to heart, though it would probably be pretty depressing and there’d be less fun ’40s fashion porn.

Since I picked the last book, let’s do this one by vote. I’ll leave this post up as an open thread for nominations until noon on Monday, then I’ll set up a poll to let everybody vote. If you’ve mentioned a possibility in another thread or to me by email another time, please toss it into comments here anyway, both so I can have a reminder and so everyone else can see what’s in the mix. And so we don’t get overwhelmed, please just nominate one book in this thread. We have a lot of these book clubs to do together. I’m looking forward to see what you guys come up with!

It’s true that the recession’s popped up with increasing frequency in pop culture, whether it’s the never-foreclose-on-a-gypsy horror of Drag Me to Hell, the recession-hits-the-freshly-minted-adult romcom Post-Grad, or the recession drama of Company Men. But for whatever reason, the investment bankers who helped trash the economy haven’t emerged as a major category of Big Bads in pop culture. That looks like it’s about to change.

First, there’s the casting call for a wives of Wall Street reality show, which should lay to rest any debates about whether reality television starring wealthy, empty women is aspirational or a vehicle for audiences to judge the self-appointed upper classes. There is something kind of perverse about the narratives that emerge in Too Big to Fail, among other places, that the avarice of investment bankers’ wives motivated them do progressively more aggressive things to jack up profits and fund their lifestyles. It’s not like these dudes were monks who married harpies. But that narrative should make for some awesome television schadenfreude.

Second and more interesting, Business Insider suggests that the next big thing, acting-wise, is Brit Marling, an ex-Goldman Sachs intern with an economics degree in Georgetown — and she’s starring in a movie that is a dramatization of the financial crisis. Richard Gere is playing an unscrupulous hedge funder trying to conceal how bad his books are as he sells his fund to a big bank. I have no idea if Marling had any input on the script, but she co-wrote and produced two other big movies, including the awesome-looking sci-fi moral parable Another Earth, so if those and her movie with Gere do well, she might be in a position to shape more stories. Given that she’s apparently descried her experience studying economics as “more about indoctrination than exploration,” it would be cool if she brings some of her finance world experience to bear. It’s true that Hollywood writers’ pools aren’t that diverse along race, gender, and class lines, but it’s important to get folks with different kinds of life and work experience in there, especially when it comes to these kinds of complex political and business stories.

Spoilers through the first seven parts of Kim Stanley Robinson’s Red Mars in this post; if you want to spoil beyond that with references to any of the subsequent novels, please label your comments accordingly. I’ll post information about the next book club later today.

It’s incredibly easy to see Ann Clayborn as an extremist, someone with severe psychological problems (I’m always annoyed that Michel reveals that she was abused as a child, because it seems so incredibly simplistic and reductionist), someone who refuses to face reality. But I think Kim Stanley Robinson does something wise in ending Red Mars with the one person who can most genuinely mourn not just the people killed in Mars’ first war, but can grieve for Mars itself, for lost possibilities, for beauty that’s going to vanish. Terraforming is inevitable, but that doesn’t mean it doesn’t have costs that are worth acknowledging.

The way Robinson makes this work is to show us that Ann knows who she is, what others think of her. “Some mistakes you can never make good,” Ann thinks after Coyote and Kasei save her little remaining band of the First Hundred after they become fugitivies. “Her mistake had been in coming to Mars in the first place, and then falling in love with it. Falling in love with a place everyone else wanted to destroy. Outside the rover, the planet was being changed forever.” But it’s not just that Ann knows that she’s alone, that she knows that in this specific situation, with her vision of her planet dying and her son potentially dead, she’s behaving like a zombie. It’s that Robinson puts her grief in context, especially when Frank dies, in part because Ann falls asleep at the wheel. Whereas Ann’s initially withdrawn, immobile, unable to speak, Maya is, typically, volcanic in her reaction to her lover’s death: “Sax went over and dug into the medicine chest, and walked over to her and crouched by her side. ‘Here, Maya, do you want a sedative?’ And she uncoiled and dashed the pills from his hand, ‘No!’ she screamed, ‘they’re my feelings, they’re my men, do you think I’m a coward, do you think I would want to be a zombie like you!’ She collapsed into helpless, involuntary, racking sobs.” Ann’s grieving for a whole planet, not a single person, but Robinson forces her to keep moving, to keep loving Mars: he won’t let her, or her perspective, succuumb.
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-Brunch goes apocalyptic.

-NBC is more positively perceived than it was in 2010, but that does mean folks are going to turn in for its awesome, low-rated programming?

-If you game, you’ll give two years of your life to playing.

-Sad monsters.

-I’m not sure John Carter will be good (or has accurate Martian geography), but it does look awesome.

I loved this piece by Molly Backes about how to turn your kid into a writer, particularly this admonition: “Let her have long afternoons with absolutely nothing to do. Limit her TV-watching time and her internet-playing time and take away her cell phone. Give her a whole summer of lazy mornings and dreamy afternoons.” And I like Ta-Nehisi’s refrain about parenting and writing that “failure and boredom are underrated forces for good in this world.” One question that interests me though, especially in the world of the Internet as yet another form of media kids can spend their time on, is how much television the parents in the audience let their kids watch.

As I’ve mentioned, I didn’t have a television for much of my childhood. Later, when we did have one, the only shows I watched regularly growing up where Ghostwriter, Where in the World is Carmen Sandiego, and later, Early Edition. And while I don’t necessarily wish that I’d watched a lot more television, I do wish I’d stumbled into, say My So-Called Life when it actually aired. Obviously no medium is inherently evil, but I’d be curious about what y’all think is a good balance between television, books, movies, music, and the Internet. And more importantly, how do you make sure that if your kids are going to watch television, they watch good stuff, not just in terms of making sure they’re not being exposed to things they’re not ready for, but in terms of making sure they’re getting hooked up with good stories?

J.K. Rowling’s Harry Potter novels and the movies based on them have been the most important ongoing pop culture event in the world for the last decade and a half. As I wrote in the Atlantic, I think the reason they’re a permanent part of the canon is that Rowling achieved something really unusual in writing a moral novel that feels particularly applicable to contemporary politics, but that is timeless not just by dint of quality but by design.

1. Torture is wrong. J.K. Rowling’s adamant that torture and indefinite detention are morally wrong and counterproductive. Barty Crouch, Jr. is a nut, but he’s clearly radicalized and made even crazier by his experience undergoing psychological torture at Azkaban. Sirius Black is imprisoned there without a trial — can you imagine what the punitive damages would be in a wrongful imprisonment case if there were dementors involved? Bellatrix Lestrange’s addiction to torture warps her morally — and she doesn’t get any useful information out of Hermione when she tortures the younger woman at Malfoy Manor. Harry tries torturing people several times, but can’t do it, and in the end, his preference for less coercive tactics helps him beat Voldemort.

2. Universal health care is pretty much a necessity. Can you imagine what Neville Longbottom’s financial future would be like if he had to pay for his parents’ long-term care at St. Mungo’s? Magic’s an incredibly dangerous business, and whether you’re getting all the bones accidentally removed from your arm or getting bitten by a giant snake, it’s lucky that St. Mungo’s Hospital for Magical Maladies and Injuries appears to operate along the same lines as the National Health Service.

3. Bureaucrats are heroes. Whether it’s Mr. Wealsey’s unheralded service in the Misuse of Muggle Artifacts Office, or the lessons of Kingsley Shacklebolt’s time as an auror that made him a strong leader of the Order of the Phoenix, and later, Minister of Magic, bureaucrats are often heroes in Rowling’s universe. When the bureaucracy’s corrupted by people like Dolores Umbridge under Voldemort’s rule, it’s a genuine tragedy.

4. Rita Skeeter is Rebekah Brooks. How much easier would it have been for News of the World to carry out its phone hacking scheme on a grand scale if it had just employed a bunch of Anamagi with low morals. In between the Quibbler, which doesn’t have enough credibility to carry the day when it’s right, and the Daily Prophet, which is badly in need of a public editor, the Harry Potter universe needs a magical equivalent of the New York Times.

5. Good intelligence makes good policy. Cornelius Fudge’s dithering as Voldemort rose is one of the most profound political failures of the novels. His distrust of good intelligence, suspicion of people who operate in good faith, and failure to act once he’s convinced of the truth directly enable Voldemort’s rise. If Fudge had been willing to act, he might have had to do ugly things to forestall Voldemort’s rise, like arresting Death Eaters on flimsy charges (and even then, Azkaban might not have held) until he could have built more substantive cases against them, denying Voldemort key allies. But at minimum, Fudge could have gotten the wizarding world ready to defend themselves.

6. Inherited wealth can be corrupting. Clearly, the obnoxiousness of the Malfoys is crying out for a good, hard progressive taxing. On the other hand, can you imagine Voldemort at a Tea Party?

7. Good domestic policy can be protection against and invasion. Hermione’s lonely quest to get people to treat house elves like the sentient beings that they are turns out to be mighty handy when Hogwarts comes under attack. Who know that treating tremendously powerful magical beings like something other than bony little punching bags might win their loyalty so they’ll fight on your side when their former masters show up, determined to destroy you.

8. Albus Dumbledore is a wizarding George Washington. Okay, so he never took the Minister of Magic post in the first place. But knowing when to walk away from power when you could hold on to it is one of the only things that preserve democratic governments. Dumbledore’s self-knowledge and self-control turns out to be one of the more admirable things in the novels.

A programming note: the Louie thread will be up later this afternoon. I had some scheduling complications last night.

I doubt that Michael’s actually over his obsession with the people who burned him, even after Max promises him, “We broke them into people. We ground them into dust. It’s over.” But it’s interesting this week to see Michael take his dilemma, his halfway home status with the CIA, and his ongoing attraction to working with Sam and Fiona, and to solve that problem, at least this time, by luring Max into working with him. When Michael gets asked to look into the antics of a singularly nasty hacker, Michael calls on Max to help him get into her phone lines. “If I get busted using NSA resources to help a burned spy with an unproven mission, I’ll get shipped off to Siberia,” Max complains. “And my wife hates the snow.” But he does it anyway — and pays a high and unexpected price.

Michael isn’t a typical charismatic leader — he can be tense, obsessive, and focused on his own problems to the exclusion of other people’s desires. But his being burned, and the needs that resulted out of that, created circumstances in which other people could pursue their own goals and interests. It’s a different kind of leadership. If that function ever comes to an end, it remains to be seen if Sam and Fiona can stay in Michael’s life in the same way, or if Jesse or someone else will supplant Michael in their lives and in Miami. But now, with Max dead and Michael framed, it looks like we’re back to the same old game, which is too bad. Burn Notice needs to make a transition, and if they’re going to back away from that, it’s unfortunate.

Beyond those larger questions, one thing I think is a bit odd about this episode is the stock evil hackeress villain. The whole hackers are “all about using their brains to dominate and control” thing strikes me as partially true. And maybe that resonates with folks who are freaked out by the antics of Anonymous, or who are annoyed by the Sony shutdown but otherwise don’t know much about hacker culture, or whatever. There are, of course, hackers who do really bad, malevolent things. But treating them as criminals who happen to have a lot of technological skills, missing the clever, playful sides of hacking strikes me as a weirdly old-school characterization. As does portraying them as folks who do IRL things like kidnapping petty criminals with aspirations, which is a really easy way to get yourself traced and treated to the full wrath of law enforcement. In a world with things like the Sony hack or Adrian Lamo’s role in Wikileaks, this storyline feels like it’s an inverse of over-the-top action storylines: it’s actually thinking too small.