David Liss, whose Benjamin Weaver novels are favorites of mine both as introductions to economics and stories about badass Jews in London, has a wonderful meditation up at io9 about how magic became elite and inaccessible, at least in fiction:

In the past, people generally believed they could acquire magic in two ways: through learning the craft, either from another practitioner or from books; or through obtaining magic from a powerful being-think Faust or the classic, demonized witch, both of whom get their mojo from Satan. Anyone could learn magic as long as he or she had access to the knowledge or could make a connection with the right supernatural entity. The important point is that in theory, the gates of magic were open to everyone, and what I find most interesting is how that has changed in popular culture. [...]

Magic has gone from being an open system to a closed one. Their massive popularity make the Harry Potter novels and films the most glaring example, but it’s everywhere, and has been for decades now: TV shows like Charmed and Wizards of Waverly Place, books like those of Laurell K. Hamilton and Charlaine Harris. More often than not, magical practitioners are born, not made. Magic is an exclusive club. You can watch and be envious, but you can’t join.

I wonder if a sense of biological magic also correlates to a sense of unease about how much power we have to impact our lives and to change the world. Believing that you can put the evil eye on someone, or that you can summon the devil, means believing in your own capacity to learn, hold, and wield power. Biological conceptions of magic are a way of explaining your own powerlessness. We can’t change our lives — but we’re also not responsible for changing the world — because we’re not Harry Potter, or the Slayer, or the Halliwell sisters. And as entrancing as our magical worlds are, we also tend to put our magical elites through a lot: both Harry and Buffy die and are resurrected, lose parents, and have to give up their first loves in the name of perfecting the world. The Halliwells die, marry the Source of All Evil and become Queen of the Underworld, give birth to demon babies, and experience various other misfortunes. Better to be ordinary — and safe. There’s something conservative in that acceptance of our own powerlessness, but I think it speaks to very real anxieties especially in an age defined by terrorism and recession.

One of the things that’s fascinating about this embryonic society in Deadwood is the way that class works in multiple directions. Brom Garret’s wealth and pretensions labeled him a tenderfoot and a potential victim, someone whose rigidities about honor and general impracticality were laughable rather than honorable. His widow, Alma, has some of the weaknesses, and in these couple of episodes, we see her overcome them as she shakes off both laudanum and the restrictions she’s placed on herself in the name of propriety. “I had better manners before I began to abstain,” she tells Bullock. But as she defies expectations, she also begins to gain admirers in the camp for sticking it out. “I’d have bet a month’s wages that burial would be taking place in New York City,” Jane says of Alma. “That is, if I had a fucking paying job.”

That doesn’t mean she doesn’t make errors — Alma’s not entirely a frontier woman yet. When she offers to send Trixie to New York City with a recommendation that would get her work as long as she’ll take care of Flora, Alma misunderstands how vulnerable that prospect makes Trixie feel. “I got no people anywhere,” Trixie snaps at her. “What the fuck? What would keep you here? Do you want to fuck this man? Then fuck him…I know my place, you rich cunt. And I’m going back to it.” Despite that toughness, Trixie’s got her own kind of vulnerability. She may be able to tell Al why she’s helped Alma get clean even as he’s sexually assaulting her: “Her being high wasn’t going to have nothing to do with whether she sold you the claim. And she wanted to get off the dope. And that little one needs someone to care for her, and maybe get her the fuck out of here, and I knew it wasn’t going to be me.” But she still tries to overdose, telling Alma, who’s apologizing for her emotional distress that “I don’t remember you being the one who made me a whore Mrs. Garret.” Life for women in Deadwood is a constant negotiation between the kind of sensitivity that can induce Sofia Metz to speak her own name for the first time and the kind of fortitude that will let you stand up to both of your employers and survives.
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The video for “You and I” is far from Lady Gaga’s most original, and it’s interesting that she made the video with the so-called “Country Road” version of the song. This being Gaga, she’s in drag as her male alter-ego Jo Calderone (which I’d actually like to see more of), people are keeping mermaids out in the barn, and androids are meandering down the backroads:

I actually kind of dig that last bit of it. In a weird—but good—way, it reminds me of the car chase scene that introduced us to what a punk James T. Kirk was as a kid in J.J. Abrams 2009 Star Trek movie:

I think we often assume that the future’s going to look totally different than it is today, when actually a lot of it might look the same, but with tweaks. We’ll still have corn fields, it’ll just be robot cops who police them—and android hitchhikers who meander down them.

Or it could just be a riff on Lady Gaga’s collaboration with Farmville:

Either way, she seems pretty determined to conquer the heartland.

No matter how silly you think the Real Housewives franchise is, this is incredibly sad: Russell Armstrong, the soon-to-be-ex-husband of one of the Beverly Hills housewives, has apparently committed suicide. The Beverly Hills installment of the show was notable for both its financial excesses and its rawness: Taylor Armstrong spent $60,000 on a birthday party for her daughter with Russell, while two of the sisters on the show fought bitterly about one of their struggles with alcoholism. The Armstrongs’ were the unlucky couple who, according to the format of the show, saw their marriage dissolve during filming. Taylor accused Russell of spousal abuse in her petition for divorce.

Being reality-television famous can be modestly lucrative, but even if you think you might end up a mini-mogul like Bethenny Frankel, the price you can pay seem awfully high. The contract you have to sign if you’re going to appear on The Real World says you have to absolve MTV of responsibility if you’re raped or sexually assaulted. If your wife decides she wants to humiliate you on national television for the sake of juicing her nascent Q score, you can’t really prevent her from doing it once you’ve stepped over the line and agreed to be on the show. The incentives here are for perpetual disaster: there’s no reward for self-protection here. People have the right to do whatever they like with their lives, of course, but we’re an awfully risk-averse country except when it comes to fame. Then, we’re willing to stake everything in pursuit of it.

I just finished reading Robert Venditti and Mike Huddleston’s The Homeland Directive, which chronicles a dark plot that originates in the Department of Homeland Security and the employees of other agencies who come together to fight it. Without saying too much, The Homeland Directive feels like an exceptionally good graphic novel for the moment in its nervousness about everything from our obsession with security to our financial system. And it’s got a sophisticated sense of how government works that’s often missing from fiction, science-fiction or otherwise. Robert was kind enough to answer some of my questions about the novel, and what our obsession with homeland security’s done to America.

I spent three years covering federal bureaucracy, so the nerd in me was delighted to see a plot that involves interagency rivalries and a government divided against itself. I’d be curious where that part of the story, often something pop culture misses, came from. Were there specific stories that inspired you? Research that you did?

It was an aesthetic choice. For me, a government conspiracy story wouldn’t be believable without opposing factions. As much as government is maligned in the news and in popular entertainment, it’s still comprised of people. And I’m one of those pie-eyed optimists who believe that people, for the most part, are good. If there really were a conspiracy as vast and deadly as the one portrayed in The Homeland Directive, then surely there would be those within government who would seek to derail it. At least I like to think so.

I was also interested in the tension within the administration itself, with a fairly weak president and a Homeland Security secretary carried over from a previous administration who is working not just to undermine him but to engineer cataclysm. Is that a reflection on Robert Gates, who Obama kept on as Defense secretary from the Bush administration? On the risk of a highly empowered Homeland Security Department in general?

Because of where we are in history, the natural reaction is to assume the President in the story is Obama, but the entire book was written before Obama was ever a serious candidate for the Oval Office. That isn’t to say the President in the story is George W. Bush, either. From the beginning, I didn’t want the perception to be that the book was rooted in any one administration, and Mike Huddleston’s idea to keep the President’s face always in shadow was a great way of visually communicating that.

I also decided early on that I didn’t want the book’s conspiracy to reach all the way up to the Presidency, because I felt that would be interpreted as too much of an indictment of government as a whole. Making Secretary Keene, fictional head of the story’s Department of Homeland Security, a holdover from the prior administration added an extra level of separation between himself and his boss. At first, I was a little worried this story element — the President retaining a high-level Cabinet appointment from another administration — would seem impractical. But then Obama chose to keep Robert Gates onboard, and I wasn’t so worried about it anymore.

My hope is that the reader would see Secretary Keene as a sympathetic villain. He truly believes in his heart that what he’s doing is right, and he takes no joy in it. He merely recognizes the contradictory nature of the American population. We ask our government to protect us absolutely from the terrorist threat, but if they try to do so in a way we feel is intrusive, we rebel against it. If we were to be attacked again, though, the first thing we would do is look for someone in government to blame. We’re also contradictory in the sense that the very same freedoms we fight for in the face of government encroachment, we often trade voluntarily for the sake of convenience. These are the paradoxes Secretary Keene finds himself coming up against. I’m not assessing blame or holding myself up as any less contradictory than the next guy. I’m merely suggesting we can’t always have it both ways.
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-For interested parties, I like bourbon neat and walks in Meridian Hill Park.

-Tom Morello on the class politics of sci-fi.

-Julianne Moore is going to be a ’50s private eye.

-Reasons Jason Bateman is awesome: he lobbies for parts written for men to be played by women.

-Little Monster Christmas, coming to Barney’s this winter.

-As someone who’s just watching Cheers now, seeing Ted Danson old is disconcerting, but not disconcerting enough to make me less excited about more Bored to Death:

Ezra Klein’s asked me to weigh in on some thoughts he has about Louie, continuity, and sitcom v. standup formats:

Sitcoms tend to have one defined plot that stretches through 22 minutes of show. Stand up, of course, doesn’t. An act consists of jokes and observations that may or may not be connected to one another, and each one gets exactly as long as the comic thinks is optimal. Here’s two minutes for how black people and white people are different, here’s one minute on the uselessness of bookmarks, here’s five minutes on the trauma and tribulations of marriage. The connecting thread isn’t a single storyline, but the comic’s unique point of view.

Louie CK’s original sitcom, Lucky Louie, was, well, like a sitcom. His current show, Louie, isn’t. It’s broken up by stand-up bits that are thematically, but not specifically, related to the narrative pieces, and even the narrative pieces often feel disconnected from one another. A recent episode, Bummer/Blueberries, included two storylines that were almost completely disconnected from one another. A more traditional sitcom would have made each into its own episode, and that would have meant padding them out. Louie CK clearly judged the material better at shorter length, and so that’s the length he used it at. Like a stand-up comic would.

I’d note that sitcoms are actually more broken up than this — B and C storylines may take up less time than A stories, but the 22 minutes of a sitcom episode are parceled out across a couple of different topics. But I do think there’s something radical about what pairing that parceling out of time with throwing out continuity has let Louis C.K. do. It’s not just that he allots time to bits based on how far he thinks he can reasonably stretch out the material. It’s that the allots time based on what he thinks the audience can bear.

I’ve written before that I sometimes feel like Louie is the closest I get to seeing the world as a (very specific) man might see it. And much of the critical praise for the show is based on how self-lacerating it is. In a world where we don’t have a lot of portraits of wounded masculinity, Louie almost single-handedly fills that quota.

There’s something categorically different about, say, 30 Rock‘s depiction of Liz Lemon’s inability to get and keep a man and the agony of Louis’ confession of love for Pamela. Liz’s misadventures are blunted by the fact that they’re somewhat implausible. It’s not painful to watch Liz have romantic trouble when it’s impossible to believe that someone that attractive will be alone forever, and when we know Liz Lemon is happily settled. We can watch her get embarrassed by dating a much younger guy whose mother turns out to look exactly like her or deal with dating Jon Hamm, because neither of those scenarios are actually wildly humiliating or particularly plausible. On the other hand, something like Pamela’s rejection of Louis is the kind of thing it’s painful to look at for too long, painful to revisit again and again precisely because it’s so initially affecting, so acutely observed. Looking at the sources of some of our worst emotional pain is like staring at the sun for too long: at some point, you just have to look away, to lock away the deepest hurts in your heart and not speak of them again.

And while there isn’t necessarily direct plot continuity, there are clear continuities in Louis’ behavior and emotions. The way he lunges in to plant one on Joan Rivers is the same way he lunges in on the abstinence advocate from last week’s episode. His daughters’ repeated slights to him, whether they’re directly saying they like staying at their mother’s more, or they’re reacting skeptically to his insistence that their visit to their great-aunt is a good idea, give us a sense of the weight of their disappointment and the pain they unintentionally inflict on him. There are some emotions, and life, that don’t actually take place or develop in particularly linear or predictable way. Louie‘s format lets it get at emotional truths that other sitcoms skirt. But I don’t think that the format alone would make the show revolutionary without Louis’ commitment to looking his own discomforts square in the face.

I try not to ask for things very often. But if you would like to see me, Yglesias, Ezra Klein, Adam Serwer, and Dave Weigel, among other people, together on a panel at South by Southwest and talking about the intersection between the policy nerd blogosphere and the culture nerd blogosphere, I hope you might consider voting for our panel.

I’m still working my way through Roseanne in between everything else (your suggestions are proving insanely addictive), and so I’ve been thinking about what lessons from that show Barr should apply to the new sitcom she’s sold to Fox.

I just loved “Radio Days,” the first season episode where Dan enters a songwriting contest. As the station counts down the winners, Dan and Roseanne hope they won’t get second or third, because they need the $100 first prize much more than a night out, however enjoyable that night out might be. I think part of what worked for me about it was the specificity of that desire: without telling you what Dan or Roseanne makes, that figure gives you a sense of exactly where they stand financially. The intensity of their desire, and their (ultimately self-deluding) certainty that they’ll win is just beautifully acted.

Given that the show is about downward mobility, rather than the upward scramble that was the subject of Roseanne, I think the sitcom will have to strike a particular balance between showing us the pain of giving things and experiences up without being relentlessly depressing, or without making the characters look self-indulgent. It’s one thing for a Manhattan heiress to have to give up her horse, and entirely another one for a family business to have to let a long-term employee go. I also think it’ll be a measure of how fast the transition happens. Will the transition be a death by a thousand little financial cuts? A Beverly Hillbillies in reverse? All of the details are going to have to be just right to bring the emotional impact of the show home. Barr came up working class — her first sitcom came out of her own experience. But I don’t know that she’s moved down a class status, and her latest project based on her life sounds distinctly terrible. Being a genius about television more than a decade ago doesn’t guarantee you’ll strike gold again. But I hope this is good. We need something like it.