I may be overreading the language of finality in the trailer for The Dark Knight Rises, but it sure does look like Chris Nolan is leading up to having Bane break Batman’s back and leave him a paraplegic, doesn’t it?

If Nolan does go there, I don’t think he deserves infinite credit — he would, after all, just be replicating the original storyline — but he’d be smarter than past interpreters of Bane. And I think it would be of a piece with Nolan’s extreme skepticism about the long-term viability of the whole superhero project. Ra’s al Ghul isn’t an entirely unsympathetic character in Batman Begins — he’s right that Gotham keeps breeding new and major governance and corruption problems, and neither his genocidal solution nor Batman’s proposal of constant struggle seems terribly appealing. In The Dark Knight, that ongoing struggle isn’t viable unless Batman makes certain ethical compromises that cost him allies — and even then, goodness from unexpected sources helps save the day. And maybe The Dark Knight Rises will be about the fact that no matter how much cool technology you buy, or no matter how far you venture into your own personal heart of darkness, if your strategy for fighting evil is to put yourself between your city and the people who threaten it, you become the target, and someone will come along who can break you. If you just have to flip Harvey Dent, if you just have to put Commissioner Gordon in the hospital, if you just have to put Batman in a wheelchair, that’s a fairly easy goal to concentrate a lot of super-villainous energy towards solving.

As a side note, I’m fascinated by the role that paraplegia’s playing in a bunch of our big action movies. Whether it’s Jake Sully escaping into an alternative body after he lost the use of his legs in the Marines in Avatar, the badly-aimed bullet that hits Charles Xavier at the deeply moving end to X-Men: First Class, and now this, we’ve got an lot of heroes with disabilities. While Sully gets a do-over, and Xavier seems to accept the limitations to his abilities — I think it’s useful that we see Sully do things like moving in and out of his wheelchair, where Charles is never presented as physically awkward, even though he’s limited — I wonder if Batman will rage against what’s happened to him. People with disabilities shouldn’t be required to be saintly to be represented on screen.

It goes without saying that Israel is a divided society. The conflict between Jews and Arabs is evident throughout Israel, complete with discrimination, double-standards, and regular violence.

Yet like in many areas of conflict around the world, sports have been a bridge for multicultural understanding in Israel. One need look no further than Abbas Suan, an Israeli-Arab who became a national hero in 2006 when he scored a last-minute tying goal against Ireland during a World Cup qualifying match.

But even as most Israelis embraced their newfound hero, regardless of his ethnic background, one group remained notably defiant: supporters of the Israeli soccer club Beitar Jerusalem F.C. When Suan’s club team, Bnei Sakhnin, played Beitar Jerusalem in an Israeli Premier League match, Beitar fans welcomed him to the stadium by holding up a large sign with the words, “You do not represent us.” Beitar fans’ racism is not an isolated incident — instead, it’s an established part of their cheering culture. In games against Sakhnin, Beitar fans regularly chant “Death to the Arabs” and “Muhammad is a homosexual.” Supporters booed during a moment of silence for slain Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin, who was assassinated after signing the Oslo Accords. Beitar has never had an Arab player. And while the team’s done things like wear jerseys with “Stop Racism” emblazoned on them, those gestures towards reconciliation are generally considered attempts to avoid or minimize league penalties rather than to actually change fan culture.

So why did two liberal Americans just buy this right-wing Israeli soccer club that’s defined by its distate for Arabs? The first is Dan Adler, an investor with a long history in Hollywood whose projects include Causes.com, a site that encourages activism and philanthropy. Adler recently ran in California’s 36th congressional district special election where his candidacy was best known for an ad highlighting his Jewish background and marriage to a Korean woman, with the message “minorities should stick together”:

Adler is also on the board of directors of the Israeli Policy Forum, a left-of-center American Jewish organization working towards a two-state solution.

The second is Maroon 5 frontman Adam Levine. Levine isn’t notably political — his biggest cause is testicular cancer research, though he did perform at a White House Christmas tree lighting last year — nor is he particularly observantly Jewish. But there’s nothing in his record to suggest he’d be comfortable with a racist fan base. So why did Adler and Levine decide to purchase a team antithetical with values that seem far from their own? Surely they were aware of the team’s culture. Either they turned a blind eye to Beitar’s racism, or they have plans to clean house and reform the team’s culture.

Sensible minds would hope for the latter. Using soccer as a vehicle for social change is not without precedent. Following Abbas Suan’s heroics in 2006, for example, a Jewish ultranationalist fan of Beitar gave an interview in which he declared that he “wouldn’t mind if Abbas married his daughter.” Adler and Levine could, and should, make a quick and strong statement about a new direction for Beitar by trying to sign up Suan when his contract’s up, or signing another Israeli-Arab star to the team. But if they’re going to reckon with their new purchase, it’ll take more than a single gesture and a single player.

The Advocate asked DC Comics’ co-publisher Dan Didio why they’re making Batwoman an integral part of Batman’s universe, rather than promoting her as a major character alongside one of the other big heroes in the DC roster. According to him:

There’s a lot more characters that inhabit Batman’s world. We knew we were interested in reintroducing the Batwoman character to his mythology and we also wanted to show a [different] point of view…because some of those characters without superpowers come from the same sense of grief in their past. Establishing [Batwoman] as a lesbian early on it givers her a different sensibility, a different point of view, and it also allows us to tell stories from a different angle that sets her apart from the other characters in Batman’s world.

Kate Kane did lose her twin and her mother as a 12 year old, which makes her fit that grief narrative pretty neatly. I have no real quibble with the idea that two characters who are linked by iconography and narrative should appear in the same universe together. At the same time, it’s an interesting acknowledgement that the Batman universe is seen as more diverse within DC, and thus a place where it’s okay to add even more diverse characters. I’d be really interested to know more about the extent to which diversity in culture is a draw for consumers who aren’t members of minority groups. Any group in pop culture that’s made up only of white, straight people doesn’t really look like my life, so I find it somewhat less compelling. But I don’t know if that’s a widespread phenomenon that matches up with younger people’s support for things like equal marriage rights.

Mild spoilers for George R.R. Martin’s A Dance With Dragons.

So, A Dance With Dragons was obviously hugely delayed, and obviously folks are hugely vexed about that. I totally understand, except that the timing means that the novel came out at the perfect moment to illuminate our debt ceiling debate. As I write as part of a much larger essay for Foreign Policy about international relations and A Song of Ice and Fire:

Issues of international trade loom large in A Song of Ice and Fire, particularly as they intertwine with ethics. Dany, the dragon-hatching exiled heir of the ancient kings of Westeros, has an ethical campaign: She wants to end the slave trade in the countries she controls across the sea. But while it gains her followers, she’s unable to support them because the city she takes over has no viable trade goods other than slaves. Conquering land and holding it is one thing — but if you really want a society to change, you’ve got to set it up with a viable economic base that’s an alternative to destructive old options, whether it’s the trade in human flesh in Slaver’s Bay or poppies in Afghanistan.

Similarly, national debt becomes an issue for the Lannisters. Cersei Lannister forces the regime to stop making its payments to the Iron Bank of Braavos, a move that leads the Braavosi bankers to start colluding with her rivals. It’s as if China intervened on the debt-ceiling debate, but the risks of default included not just a lowered credit rating but magically aided assassination

So whatever else happens in August, I think we can be reasonably confident that the Faceless Men are not going to come for President Obama. Small mercies, people.

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I’ve been meaning to do this for a while, but I finally started playing Portal over the weekend, got through level nine, and enough cannot be said about how charming the game is. Because I haven’t played video games or been around gamers in any substantive way in a decade, I wasn’t as struck as Becky Chambers was by the opportunity to play as a woman (though Chambers’ piece is excellent). Instead, what struck me is the way the game’s sense of humor dovetails with larger trends in entertainment, particularly comedies set in corporations.

The minute GLaDOS declared in her menacingly chipper way: “Remember,’Take Your Daughter to Work Day’ is a great opportunity to have her tested,” I immediately thought of Veronica Palmer, the hilariously amoral executive from Better Off Ted. Veronica’s the kind of person who is perfectly comfortable freezing a man for science only to be annoyed when he emerges from the experience with a tendency to shriek unexpectedly; who when Ted, the senior vice president who works for for her, brings his daughter Rose to work and asks Veronica to look after the little girl, teaches Rose how to lay people off; who works with Ted to fake a major company initiative when rumor accidentally spreads that they’re on to something awesome. In other words, she is beyond the realms of usual corporate malfeasance into the realm of the hilariously evil. If she were Jack Donaghy, she’d be turning children orange and selling dangerously defective grills to North Korea. If she were Michael Scott, she’d run an office so depressing and No Exit-y that day-to-day life would become a comedy of the absurd. GLaDOS offers chipper warnings that various force fields might yank out Chell’s fillings, and that under certain circumstances, you’ll die and get a note in your permanent record (and I understand that worse is yet to come).

This mismatch between tone and content feels like an important hallmark of our corporate comedy to me. The things all these characters are doing are wildly malfeasant, but they’re not actually so malfeasant as to be unrealistic—in fact, sometimes, reality is worse than what we can imagine. Even Veronica Palmer would quail at Don Blakenship. But I think most Americans don’t really think we’ll do without corporations, or that we’ll radically change their role in American life. I’d like to believe that’s different. But until it is, joking about corporate power helps us reconcile ourselves to big companies’ role in our day-to-day lives, whether they’re employing us or building the world around us. It is to cry, but day-to-day, it helps to laugh.

-Adam Serwer on Harry Potter‘s goblins and Jewish stereotypes.

-Karen O is going to write an opera.

-We may be getting crazy amounts of Game of Thrones and America Gods adaptations, but Hollywood apparently draws the line at a multi-platform Dark Tower project.

-I’m always down for Big Idea Sci-Fi.

-The new Spider-Man: same as the old Spider-Man

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.

Of all the lawmakers I’ve looked at in this series, far and away the biggest surprise to me has been the record of Pennsylvania’s former Republican Senator Rick Santorum. I never would have expected that Santorum would be a fan of the arts, much less one of the Republicans who bucked attacks on the National Endowment for the Arts and went out of his way to seek federal financial support for the arts in Pennsylvania. But he is. Though Santorum’s more conservative on issues of copyright and intellectual property, and he’s supported various federal decency efforts, that perspective on the arts remains a surprise, and compared to some of his competitors in the Republican primary, frankly a welcome one:

1991: Santorum voted with House Republicans to ban the National Endowment for the Arts from supporting projects that could be considered obscene.

1995: During fights over funding for the National Endowment for the Arts, arts advocates lobbied Santorum, who was generally opposed to the idea that a few pieces of controversial art were grounds for dismantling the agency. He defended public broadcasting programs, even as he insisted that government support wasn’t critical to their survival, saying, “I have my share of ‘Shining Time Station’ puzzles for my 4-year-old and my 2-year-old…I have a bunch of this stuff – Mr. Rogers, a wonderful man…who does a tremendous show.” He supported cuts to the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, but not in direct funding to local broadcasters.

1997: Santorum publicly backed NEA funding, saying, ”The arts foster a strong sense of community and bring new ideas and cultures to many individuals and families all over the nation. Elimination of such programs would create a cultural vacuum that could not be easily filled.”

1998: As the fights over the NEA’s existence faded, Santorum’s spokeswoman said he was unlikely to support measures to axe the agency or make further deep cuts in its budget. That won him criticism from conservatives, though his problem in Pennsylvania was generally being regarded as too conservative rather than too moderate. At the 2000 Republican convention, Pennyslvania Republican activist and former RNC member Elsie Hillman actually cited Santorum’s stances on the arts as proof that he was a moderate, rather than a hardcore conservative, something that was hurting Santorum’s reelection prospects. That same year, though, he voted against a Clinton budget that would have provided $1.75 million for an arts and science education center in Pennsylvania.

2000: Santorum tried, and failed, to bring forward legislation that would have created a universal ratings system across the entertainment industry, rather than the varying and voluntary systems that existed at the time and that exist now (interestingly, the GAO study I cited earlier in the day suggested that most parents assume there is a universal ratings system rather than a patchwork of codes). He’d bring up the issue of ratings again in 2004, publicly supporting an industry-backed effort to designate an Entertainment Ratings and Labeling Awareness Month.

2002: Santorum weighed in on copyright issues, suggesting that it was a mistake to change patent law to let generic drugs get to the market more quickly on the grounds that it would stifle innovation. He also called for investigations into peer-to-peer networks on the grounds that they made it easier for minors to access pornography.

2003: Santorum cosigned a letter along with a number of his Republican colleagues encouraging the administration to seek stricter enforcement of World Trade Organization rules on China to curb, among other things, software and content piracy. (In more contemporary news, he doesn’t appear to have a position on the PROTECT IP act.)

2005: The arts may not have been enough of a priority for Santorum to get him to vote for an overall budget, but he wasn’t above accepting funding for projects in his state when he thought they’d support the economy as well as the arts. When the Department of Housing and Urban Development allocated $4.3 million to convert an eyeglasses factory into an arts and education center, Santorum said, “This loan guarantee will provide resources needed to make capital improvements to the building and strengthen the local economy. The projects that are benefiting from this funding will ensure that Reading remains a great place to live and do business.” The following year, he and Sen. Arlen Specter secured $300,000 in federal funding towards a $35.9 million capital campaign to fund a August Wilson Center for African American Culture.

2006: Santorum was a cosponsor of the Broadcast Decency Enforcement Act, which jacked Federal Communications Commissions fines from $32,500 for each violation to $325,000, with a cap of $3 million in fines for a single broadcast day.

Given that Santorum’s been out of office for some time, and competitors like Michele Bachmann have staked out positions to the right of him on social issues like equal marriage rights as well as federal arts funding issues, it might be worth asking if Santorum still holds to his old support for the NEA, and to figure out where he stands on PROTECT IP. If you get the opportunity to pose those questions, feel free to steal them — just report back here.

I get that there’s an inclination to view Rupert Murdoch as a dark prince of journalism and the right. But as the News of the World scandal continues to unfold, it’s at least as important to understand the journalistic cultures created by Murdoch’s lieutenants as it is to understand the man himself if you want a firm grasp on what happened to make the phone hacking scandal possible. To do that, it’s well worth reading two very different books that follow Murdoch’s papers on either side of the pond: Tina Brown’s The Diana Chronicles and Jonathan Mahler’s The Bronx Is Burning.

The Diana Chronicles is as much media criticism as it is royal gossip, and it charts how Fleet Street became increasingly evasive and disdainful on traditional rules about the royals’ privacy throughout Princess Diana’s ascension and fall (among other things, her gym owner rigged up a secret camera in some of her exercise equipment and sold the resulting crotch shots to the Daily Mirror). But the money section, in relation to phone hacking and today’s scandal, is the section on Squidygate. For those unfamiliar with the subject, somehow (it remains unclear how), one of Princess Diana’s mushy phone calls with one of her lovers, James Gilbey, ended up getting broadcast over non-commercial radio frequencies, taped by amateur radio enthusiasts, and sold to the Sun, a News Corporation paper, which turned around and made them available through a pay phone line. For 36p a minute, you could listen to the whole thing. There are significant suspicions that the call was tapped and rebroadcast so it would find its way to the press by untraceable means, so the wrongdoing isn’t only the Sun’s. But while the News of the World hacking may have been shockingly widespread, it’s not as if Murdoch papers have ever regarded other people’s private phone calls with exceptional deference.

Mahler’s The Bronx is Burning is a more wideranging book, but it recounts Murdoch’s splashy arrival in America, via his purchase of the the New York Post and his hostile takeover of New York Magazine (which he sold in 1991). But the stuff on how the Post covered the Son of Sam case is quite revealing. Steve Dunleavy, the Post reporter on the case, actually dressed up as a bereavement counselor to get to the parents of Stacy Moskowitz, one of the victims, and published a story based on his conversations with them. The paper suggested, among other things, that the Mafia had a bounty out for the killer, serialized a novel he was supposed to have read, and when David Berkowitz asked for the Post in prison, they made a headline out of that too. As Mahler puts it, “Not since the days of Hearst, Pulitzer, and the Daily Mirror had New York’s newspapers pandered so shamelessly to the city’s id.”

In any case, both books are very good. Rupert Murdoch may quit running his company today. But felling the tree doesn’t mean you’ve yanked up the roots. As both Brown and Mahler demonstrate, News Corporation’s culture runs deep.

Most of the debates about government involvement in the arts center around funding questions. But there are, of course, other ways that government can influence what art gets created and what it looks like other than providing funding for it. Among them is the Children’s Television Act of 1990, which says that if broadcasters provide three hours of educational and informational programming for children every week, they can get their license renewal applications expedited when they come up for review. And according to a new Government Accountability Office report, some parents’ groups have tried to use that regulatory incentive to push stations to change their programming:

In a still pending case from 2004, a group filed a petition to deny the license renewal of a broadcast station operating in the Washington, D.C., area. In the petition to deny, the group cited a children’s media expert’s analysis of a program shown on the broadcast station. The expert noted that the program, designated as core children’s programming, had “no palpable message, lessons, or curriculum at even the most modest level of depth that would contribute to a child’s positive development in any sense.

Some child advocacy groups have raised concerns regarding the quality of core children’s programming content, generally stating that the content of these programs is neither educational nor informational. For example, one group reviewed 90 episodes of core children’s programming and used a variety of criteria—including the clarity of the lesson presented and its applicability to the real world—to determine the quality of those episodes. According to the study, the group determined that the vast majority of the episodes it reviewed (86 percent) were either minimally or moderately educational; only 13 percent were deemed highly educational. The same study noted that the percentage of core children’s programs that it considers to be highly educational fell over a 10-year period (from the 1997-1998 season to the 2007-2008 season), from 29 percent of core children’s programs to 13 percent of core children’s programs. Another study examining the quality of children’s television programs, which used a different set of criteria to judge program quality, determined about 60 percent of programs were of moderate or low quality, with the remaining roughly 40 percent being of high quality…Parents in our focus groups believed that there should be independent standards or oversight and that station involvement in designating core children’s programming represented a conflict of interest.

If we’ve already reached the point where we’ve decided that children’s television with a minimum of advertising is enough of a public good that we provide regulatory incentives for its production to make up for turning it into a less productive enterprise, I guess it’s hard to say that quality concerns shouldn’t be part of the consideration. But it’s not particularly clear that figuring out what makes for good television programming is something the federal government’s exceptionally good at. You could set standards similar to the ones about the amount of advertising that can air in an hour that say a certain percentage of any given show has to be dedicated to straightforward instruction on math and reading skills (or whatever core curriculum elements seem age-appropriate).

But then you get into questions of efficacy: are kids actually going to be engaged and end up learning things if they’re stuck in front of a screen getting what’s essentially classroom instruction, even if the classroom instructor is a friendly aardvark? How applicable to the real world does a lesson have to be? Would a fantasy series that also happened to teach kids about, I don’t know, monetary policy, like Tamora Pierce’s Provost’s Dog series apply if it teaches that lesson in a world where criminals have ready access to the monetary supply? There are a million wormholes for us to jump down here. And there may be market failures. The report notes that “parents in many of our focus groups perceived a gap in the programming available for children of certain ages. Our trend analysis showed that children’s programming is available for a wide range of age groups, but parents in eight of the 10 focus groups we conducted raised the issue of a lack of programming appropriate for school-aged children,” especially since PBS focuses on children under the age of 10. But if the regulations we have already aren’t producing the kind of programming parents want for their children, I’m not actually sure more extensive application of regulatory authority will help.