The Mary Sue considers the question of whether anime conventions should do criminal background checks to prevent situations like one where a man in his 30s plead guilty to sexually coercing a 13-year-old girl he met at Katsucon. I think the post conflates attendance at cons with job applications that require you to disclose whether you’ve been arrested or convicted of a crime in a way that’s problematic, but I do, of course, agree that “men and women alike should be able to enjoy a molestation-free time at any anime convention they desire.”

One of the best ways to do this would be not criminal background checks, but strong anti-harassment policies and good training for convention staff and volunteers about how to enforce them and to balance the difficult task of supporting victims while showing respect for the principal that people are innocent until proven guilty. The database kept by the awesome folks at the Con Anti-Harassment Project doesn’t show a harassment policy for Katsucon or for the biggest Con of them all, San Diego Comic Con. And that’s just nuts. This is a basic thing you can do that doesn’t infringe on anyone’s privacy or civil liberties, that would help combat bad press-inducing incidents and would make everyone more comfortable coming. It’s a win-win scenario.

As things like the racialized reactions to the announcement of a mixed-race Spider-Man or a black man as a Norse God, or the treatment of people who ask about diversity in employment and characters at DC Comics demonstrate, being a self-described nerd or geek is no guarantee that you’ll be sympathetic to the concerns of minority groups who face actual systematic oppression. And in some cases, the norms of geekdom or nerddom can be employed in defense of the status quo as a way to avoid charges of racism or sexism. It would be nice if we could that we’d keep each other safe, but in any large group, that’s probably overly optimistic. Harassment policies at cons are a must. It’s an embarrassment that any convention wouldn’t have one.

Some folks have gotten together a petition on Change.org calling on Sesame Street to have Bert and Ernie get married or for the show to add a transgender character. I’m not sure I have an opinion on the latter, but I’m pretty firmly against the idea that New York’s two most famous roommates should tie the knot.

If Bert and Ernie were gay, I would be all for them bopping down to City Hall and getting hitched. But the characters aren’t gay. People may want them to be gay, but the Sesame Workshop has repeatedly denied that either character is homosexual and that they are a couple, and I’m pretty firmly in favor of creators’ rights to determine basic facts about their characters. We can debate the specifics of the characters’ portrayal, but if Sesame Street says the pair isn’t gay, it would be a bit odd to force them to get married because we want some role models. Archie Comics’ approach, adding and firmly establishing a new gay characters, makes much more sense than this kind of justice-oriented retcon.

And more to the point, I think it’s actively unhelpful to gay and straight men alike to perpetuate the idea that all same-sex roommates, be they puppet or human, must necessarily be a gay couple. Having close, affectionate friendships with another man doesn’t mean that you two are sleeping together, just as liking fashion doesn’t automatically flip a switch on your sexual orientation and make you only interested in dudes. Such assumptions narrow the aperture of what we understand as heterosexual masculinity in a really strange way. As much as I write about how narrow depictions of women can be in pop culture, depictions of men may end up being more positive, but that doesn’t mean they’re less limiting.

Maura Judkis, who works in the Style section at the Washington Post, raises a provocative question, and offers one potential answer:

It might seem, then, that Millennials have no appetite for arts journalism, but that’s not the case: Younger readers want to read and share stories more than ever. They just want to have a say in what’s being read and shared. They want to be the critics. So where do arts journalists fit in?

There is an abundance of opinion on the Internet, but bringing reporting into criticism is what will set the professional arts journalists apart from the amateur. Reporting on process—the behind-the-scenes stories that enable readers to identify with artists—will attract audiences who might otherwise overlook an arts journalist in favor of their best friend’s Tumblr…Just as this generation is many things—social, savvy, sub in any web 2.0 catchphrase here—it is a generation that derives more value from the arts when they feel like insiders, or can relate to the participants. Look at the TV we watch: American Idol and Top Chef have hooked audiences by showing them the way the sausage is made (quite literally, for the latter), and allowing them to potentially have a say in the outcome. This is not to equate these shows with higher art forms; it’s to demonstrate that our interest in process over product is transferable to other art forms, high and low.

I think this is definitely true: it’s one of the reasons casting and production news plays such a big role in so many pop culture publications in particular. Though even that sort of information’s gotten more democratized. It’s relatively easy to get on press calls and press lists these days — the threshold for what counts as publication has gotten lower, and I think that’s a good thing.

But I think more to the point is the idea that telling people whether they should watch something or not is not the only, or the most important, form of criticism. I write whether I think things are good or not, but that’s a tiny percentage of the things that I write, and many of the things that I think are most interesting (though by no means all of them) don’t qualify as high art, or even in the top tier of popular art. Some of them are outright bad, but that doesn’t mean that they’re not important.

Criticism has always been a kind of service journalism, and the service used to be that someone like me would tell you what to watch. Now, that doesn’t seem to be a service that people need at the same level or in the same way any more. Instead, the service readers want instead is criticism that sets the stage for interesting discussions of which they can be a part. In my case, the discussions about politics, and representation rather than about camera angles. Criticism will survive: critics just have to figure out what their market is.

(Relatedly, see this very good, research-oriented post on recaps, cultural consumption, and strong and weak social ties by Gabriel Rossman.)

This post contains spoilers through the Aug. 4 episode of Louie.

I think Marc Hirsch is overstating the case slightly in this otherwise excellent piece on Louie to say that the character “exists outside of continuity,” because I do think events in the series resonate from one episode to the next even if they’re not followed up on directly. But I think he is absolutely correct that “C. K. is, in many ways, the preeminent short-story writer currently working in the television medium.” So there’s something fitting about the fact that this week’s episode is commentary on Louie’s diversion from the traditional sitcom format, and a short story that O. Henry might have written if he had kids and they wanted Lady Gaga tickets.

It was also a nicely feminist episode. Louis C.K. often goes to places that I’m uncomfortable with when women are on screen, but I’m generally uncomfortable, as I was in the episode where he ends up spanking a crying PTA parent, because of the things that are happening are true, not because they’re sexist. So there was something wonderful about seeing C.K. on a sitcom set, complete with a laugh track, treating the actress playing his wife badly, and unable to go through with a scene where he lies to her, admits it, and gets told “I love you.” “Why would you say that? I just did a really dick thing. Why would you say ‘I love you’?” he asks her, genuinely bewildered. And he just can’t get back into the groove and pull the sitcom, and by extension, a more stable life for his own real family, together. “This woman is trying to raise two kids and her husband keeps shitting all over her, chipping away at her furniture with his bad attitude. Are you folks seriously buying this shit?” he tells the director. “We’re making all the same mistakes, the wife that’s too hot for the dude, and the friend who I would never hang out with.”

This is the kind of thing that makes Louis C.K. such a favorite for those of us who think about comedy a lot, and have to watch the same thing over and over, and why he can get Dane Cook on camera and directly address the vote-stealing controversy between them—his work both implicitly and explicitly acts as a critique and as a remedy to our current state of comedy.

The reason that Louis and Cook end up in the same room is that, having disappointed her years ago by failing to pull off the sitcom, apologizing to infant her that “Sorry, baby, your dad is a comedian. It’s your tough luck. Okay. Let’s put you to sleep,” he’s now trying to make it up to her. Confident he’s nailed the perfect birthday present for her, Louis jokes around with her at a diner, telling her an envelope is “for the little old lady who lives in your nose” when she asks if the present is for her. But it turns out the joke is on him — his daughter’s moved on to Lady Gaga, a move that has Louis decidedly dismayed. “I want you to grow up to like yourself and have a job and be strong and think about who you are,” he tells her. “I don’t want you to think it’s all about your looks, and glamor, and stuff.” But she’s a good little fourth wave feminist, and asks him “Can’t I grow up like that and still like Lady Gaga?” Being a comedian may not make you an ideal parent, but as Louis proves time and time again on his show, it’s possible to make up for that.

-Feeling meh on Anne Hathaway as Selina Kyle/Catwoman.

-We’re probably safe from super-intelligent ape takeover for a while.

-The sympathy for the celebrities pitch is going precisely nowhere, with no one, as far as I can tell.

-Bob Dylan and Jack White paying tribute to Hank Williams.

-I’m amazed it took a developing country this long to cash in on nerd tourism.

This post contains spoilers through the first nine chapters of Neil Gaiman’s American Gods. If you want to spoil beyond that, feel free, just label your comment as such. For next week, let’s read through chapter 12.

This section’s a beautiful explication of the idea of America, but reading through Mr. Wednesday’s speech to the Gods, it struck me that there’s part of Gaiman’s set-up of this universe that doesn’t quite make sense:

When the people came to America they brought us with them. They brought me, and Loki and Thor, Anansi and the Lion-God, Leprechauns and Kobols and Banchsees, Kubera, and Frau Holle and Ashtaroth, and they brought you. We rode here in their minds, and we took root. We traveled with the settlers to the new lands across the ocean. The land is vast. Soon enough, our people abandoned us, remembered us only as creatures of the old land, as things that had not come with them to the new. Our true believers passed on, or stopped believing, and we were left, lost and scared and dispossessed, only what little smidgens of worship or belief we could find. And to get by as best we could. So that’s what we’ve done, gotten by, out on the edges of things, where no one was watching us too closely. We have, let us face it and admit it, little influence. We prey on them, and we take from them, and we get by; we strip and we whore and we drink too much; we pump gas and we steal and we cheat and we exist in the cracks at the edges of society. Old gods, here in this new land without gods.

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Watch Pushing Tin. Unlike Breaking Bad, which uses air traffic control as a super-dramatic way of illustrating the wages of other people’s sins without giving us any sense of what being an air traffic controller is actually like, Pushing Tin actually gets at the pressures of the job and what it’s like to hang out with a bunch of controllers (something I’ve had the pleasure of experiencing):

It’s also worth marking this anniversary by noting that the Federal Aviation Administration had more than 4,000 employees on furlough because House Republicans wouldn’t back a bill reauthorizing the agency without including a provision in that bill that would create new obstacles for people who work in the airline and railroad industries to unionize. The people who were temporarily out of a job didn’t include controllers, but did include safety inspectors. Presumably, we place a pretty high value on people who are flying to their destinations getting there safely. It’s worth acknowledging how hard and stressful that work of keeping people safe is. They are, and should be, well-compensated for that work given the value we place on it. And theirs is a job where peace of mind, mental health care, and a positive work environment are not just some nice extras that their union gets for them — they’re integral to everyone else’s safety.

This post contains spoilers through the August 4 episode of Burn Notice.

If Burn Notice were a more self-aware show, it might use the occasion of Michael, Sam and Fiona bringing down an anti-government militia as an excuse to consider the position, moral and otherwise, of their nifty little paramilitary operation.

I actually would have liked a bit of reflection if the episode wasn’t going to substantially move forward Michael’s investigation into his burning. That half of the story mostly involves finding the man who impersonated Michael, Sam handing him over to Fiona, who he describes, accurately and hilariously as “a tiny little woman in a Hyundai who’s going to protect you.” Instead, things heat up when Michael, who’s agreed to look into a child custody dispute involving another former veteran, finds out that the man has been behaving erratically because he’s a member of a what Michael describes as “a fringe militia with some very anti-government views.”

What’s funny is that, except for the fact that their operation is smaller, and that Michael, Sam, and Fiona’s views about government are more complex than just being anti-, the two organizations that square off against each other are relatively similar. They have a well-developed internal culture, access to a lot of weaponry, and they’re able to operate with essential impunity in the unincorporated areas in Dade County. And there are two potential analogues for Michael within it—the fellow veteran gone down the wrong path (who of course ultimately redeems himself through love of his son), and the militia’s leader. The episode doesn’t spend much time with the veteran, since disempowered, deluded men tend to be less interesting than messianic wildmen to television programmers. But it would be interesting to see what pressures lead him into the militia, to see how he and Michael went in different directions.

The miltia’s leader may be a heavy, sweaty slob with crazy views, but when he and Michael square off over the question of whether you’re validated by government service or not, given Michael’s experience since he’s been burned, the guy has a point. Michael questions the leader’s patriotism, telling him “Correct me if I’m wrong, you never served in the U.S. military. I didn’t think so. A real veteran…I didn’t run around in the woods acting like a soldier with my beer buddies.” It doesn’t shame the man like Michael expects it will. “You think having served somehow makes you a man?” he tells Michael. “Well it does not. You are not a man. A man questions what he is told. A man does not willingly accept the lies that are shoved down his throat by government. You are of the blind, the ignorant.” It’s a perfect summation of this entire season, of Michael’s single-minded pursuit of reinstatement at the CIA no matter how the agency’s treated him and his friends, and no matter how little-suited he might be for the organization he once so revered.

When the militia leader declares “I am the hand of god. I am his righteous soldier,” he sounds ridiculous. But that’s essentially the thing that Michael believes about himself. There is apparently no functional child services system or SWAT teams or government agencies of any sort in Miami who could possibly get productively involved when a child custody situation leads investigators to a militia—and in the logic of the show, why would you want bureaucrats involved when you could have Michael, Sam, and Fiona instead? Michael may not be convinced of his infallibility, but he does seem relatively sure of his inability to commit moral error, to pick the wrong side. The militia leaders on his bad side may have taken that sentiment to a whole different level, but it’s a question of degrees rather than of alternative worldviews.