The news, via Wired, that NASA is partnering with Tor-Forge on a series of novels is intriguing. The arrangement will pair NASA employees with expertise in engineering, math, science and technology with writers in the Tor stable with the goal of creating stories that will engage young readers on those topics. Projects like this always run the risk of producing spinach rather than dessert with nutrition value, but another project Wired points out, the stories Intel commissioned from a group of writers to explore how science and technology might shape the future, actually provide a pretty good template for how to make the Tor-NASA collaborations engaging rather than dull.

The Intel stories are collected in a volume called The Morrow project, and while a couple of the stories feel like failures, at least one is an unqualified success. “The Mercy Dash,” about a couple racing to provide a blood transfusion for the young woman’s mother while quibbling over the fact that the man’s made his artificial intelligence sound a little too much like his girlfriend, gets lost in gee-whiz descriptions of the technology that lets you do things like convince cops not to give you a speeding ticket because you can show them how much damage has been done to your mother’s spine. “The Last Day of Work” takes a cooler overall concept — a world where increasingly sophisticated robotics have eliminated scarcity and the need for work, as seen from the perspective of the last man with a job on his last day at the office — and again spends too much time explaining how it happened instead of playing with what it means. It’s the kind of thing I’d love to see fleshed out in longer form.

But “The Drop,” by Scarlett Thomas, who I hadn’t known about before but I will look out for now, is just fantastic. Set in a world where everyone lifecasts and makes money off it, where less successful lifecasters have to produce supplemental electricity, and where gameplay’s become a key mode of commerce, the story follows a couple of days in the life of a 33-year-old as she trains for a race and, spurred on by a message from a mysterious man, learns to use a new communications technology she’s been resisting. The story isn’t heavy on scientific explanation — it shows us the implications of new technologies, not their design schema, and we learn about tools along with the character, rather than having the characters stop the action to give us lectures. And it’s set at a moment when the world is different from the one we live in, but not unrecognizable from it. You can see the bridge from now to then. And if you want to get readers engaged in the fields that are involved in a story, that seems critical — they should be inspired to build their way to that world, or to build alternatives to it.

I wrote last week when they were released that while the release of the three men from West Memphis who were jailed for allegedly murdering three eight-year-olds in a Satanic ritual was good for them, it wasn’t a sign that the American justice system works — in fact, precisely the opposite. It would be good if the sudden spate of projects centered around those three men keeps that in mind.

Just as the death of Osama bin Laden spotlighted extant film projects and inspired several more, a West Memphis Three cottage industry is suddenly highly visible. Atom Egoyan is directing a feature film about the case, which, much like Kathryn Bigelow’s Kill Bin Laden, will have an updated ending. HBO is premiering a third documentary about the case in September, and Sheila Nevins, who heads the documentary division at HBO (which, by the way, should get credit for an astonishingly good slate of movies this summer) has said she could see a fourth movie because “If you’re guilty, how can you be innocent? Something’s wrong with the system. They have to be free because they are innocent. We have to prove that, and I don’t know how we do that. We’ll have to really work on that.”

I really, profoundly hope that if folks are going to turn the West Memphis Three into the focal point for a wide range of stories about criminal justice, that they temper the triumph of their release of a clear-eyed look at what it took to make it happen, and how extraordinarily rare it is. These absolutely have to be systemic stories rather than individual ones. And it would be much more useful to leverage the attention the West Memphis Three got to build interest in other cases, and in broad-based reforms. Winning this case and building a just, workable criminal justice system are not the same things, but it’ll be very, very easy for movies to leave viewers with that impression if they aren’t careful.

It’s hard to tell much about what Luc Besson’s Aung San Suu Kyi biopic is going to be like from this brief teaser trailer, but it certainly is visually attractive, and my understanding is that the script is based on fairly extensive reporting, so I’m optimistic:

I’m sorry, though, that it looks like this won’t be in theaters until March 2012. As much as I love Meryl Streep and I’m sure she’ll be wonderful as Margaret Thatcher, I’d really like to see a biopic about a political figure who isn’t British or American treated as if it’s a serious contender for major awards, particularly when it’s about a struggle that is still urgent and ongoing, rather than safely and quaintly in the past. Plus, Michelle Yeoh is a marvel and, as she proved with the $128 million box office for Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon 11 years ago, can be a real commodity stateside. She deserves to be loved here as more than a voice actress in kids’ movies where Jack Black plays a rotund panda or as a geisha.

I like this Bitch Magazine encomium to girl detectives as competent, entrepreneurial role models, but I’m sorry to see the author make the common mistake of leaving out my personal favorite and frequently underlooked teen detective, Trixie Belden.

It may be that I have ties to, and thus a fondness for, the Hudson Valley in New York, Trixie’s home base. And certainly, it’s one reason I could relate to the 13-year-old tomboy detective better than any of her peers. While I had an active interior life as a child, I wasn’t as outrageously alienated as Harriet the Spy, and I couldn’t fathom many of the things that made up her upper-middle class New York City upbringing. Alternatively, Nancy Drew was a little too swish and cool for me, with her blue convertible and her college boyfriend, things that seemed impossibly far away for me as a young reader. But 13-year-old Trixie was perfect: she had short hair like mine, and like me, the regrettable tendency to get snappish with a younger sibling. Being a tomboy didn’t keep her from getting an identity bracelet from a boy, but that triumph was almost an afterthought in an adventure, if I remember correctly, that involved doping racehorses at Saratoga and being marooned some impossible-to-walk number of miles outside of town by the villains doing the doping who had apparently never heard of hitching a lift.

But it was more that Trixie was a beautifully-fitting, not particularly aspirationally-oriented, fiction suit for the kind of little girl I was when I read her novels. Though they’re certainly limited by the perspectives of the time in which they were written, the Trixie Belden books do a very nice job of bringing together characters of different backgrounds together in a way that bridged both class divides and two generations of young adult novels. The child of farmers, Trixie becomes friends with the wealthy Honey Wheeler, helping her become closer to the parents who shipped her off to boarding school for much of her life, and brings into her social group an abused orphan and a reform school kid, as well as her siblings. Some of her friends’ privations are throwbacks to another era — I suppose in retrospect they always collectively reminded me of the crew Jo March brings together in Jo’s Boys. And some of the novel’s moral dichotomies, like the idea that the rich are emotionally cold, can be a bit too on-the-nose.

But this is also a thoroughly modern world where boys and girls can be friends without complications and where girls can be leaders, a world defined but not consumed by the rise of computing and the allure of global superstars like Elizabeth Taylor. In some respects, the Trixie Belden books, like the Nancy Drew series, are the direct predecessor of books like the Gossip Girl series and other products of book packagers like Alloy Entertainment, the result of multiple authors picking up after one left off to keep a popular franchise alive. But Trixie’s storytelling and characterization roots lie in an earlier era when storytelling was meant to bring different kinds of children and young teenagers together around shared goals and values, even if those values were a little square.

Ian’s annoyed that the women on the Supreme Court have been tossed off the Forbes influence list in favor of the likes of Sarah Palin, Gisele Bündchen, Greta Van Susteren, and Lady GaGa. I think there’s some justification to his annoyance: Bündchen and Van Susteren do have influence, but it’s not necessarily substantive or lasting and it’s limited to a couple of realms. Palin has influence in that she’s able to drive news cycles, but there’s no evidence that she will get votes, can influence the passage or failure of legislation, or that she is herself terribly convincing (all the television shows and media projects she’s been involved with have dramatically underperformed). Compared to these three women, the influence of the women on the Supreme Court is less immediately visible — we don’t, after all, see the conversations the justices have in chambers—but it’s certainly more important.

But I’m prepared to defend the idea that Lady Gaga may be more influential than a Supreme Court justice. She’s a major commercial and artistic force who has also managed to turn her fans into a political base when she wants to, and her influence is international as well as domestic. I tend to think the influence of celebrities is generally overstated, but in this case, I think Gaga isn’t a ridiculous choice.

I’ll be on WUNC at 12:40 talking divorce and pop culture. Tune in here if you’re interested.

-The Rock is producing a show about the rise of professional wrestling? Count me in.

-Anxiety at Marvel in advance of The Avengers?

-If you ever wanted to know about the soul-sucking agony of writing a flop, this should answer all your questions.

-Are the networks really surprised that people don’t want to wait eight days to see shows on alternate media?

-I may be totally stuck on and frustrated by Portal, but I would still love to see this movie in theaters:

Because I like subjecting myself to terrible things for your amusement, I spent a bunch of yesterday watching the first dozen episodes of Entourage in an attempt to figure out what the deal is, or was, and because we’ve been talking about female fantasies a lot lately, so I figured I’d drop in on a male one.

The thing that mostly strikes me is how mundane and repetitive so much of the lifestyle nonsense is — and by extension how much of the main characters’ lives are. Sex and the City works, I think, because the show has stuff happening all the time. All four of the main characters have different jobs that they care a lot about and that fuel numerous plots, whether Carrie’s interviewing a subject, Charlotte’s getting involved with new artists and patrons through the gallery, or Samantha and Miranda are dealing with clients. They sometimes have activities, whether Samantha’s getting herself in trouble trying to get involved with a charity function or Carrie’s doing fundraisers for the NYPD. And they have large and variegated social circles we drop into from time to time. The world is big, and we’re just dropping in on some of it. By contrast, the guys from Entourage do essentially the same things over and over again, looping the eternal mobius strip between the Coffee Bean, Ari’s office, Vince’s house, and various identical-looking parties. This is their whole world, airless and airbrushed.

Secondly, Eric’s the actual hero of the show, right? He’s as close as there is to a sympathetic character among the main four. Unlike Ari, who knows all, E has actual things to learn. Unlike Vince and Johnny, his career isn’t time-limited. Unlike Turtle, he has actual sense. That’s not saying much. When I joked about starting watching the show, Ta-Nehisi warned me that I’d regret it: “What an awful, condescending reflection of male identity.” And maybe E resonates with me because his ambition makes him feel more like a Sex and the City character who has places to go and people to see, than he does like Turtle hustling store credits so he can buy cashmere pajamas.Entourage looks more like a vacation than a fantasy to me: fun for a couple of weeks, but ultimately pretty deadly if you have to do it year after year.

Reading Fables put me in a fairy-tale minded mood, so I finally sat down and caught up with both Tangled and The Frog Princess.

I thought Tangled was fine, if not entirely remarkable, particularly in its condemnation of beauty obsession. “I see a strong, confident, beautiful young lady,” coos the witch who’s kidnapped Rapunzel and given her an extreme case of Stockholm Syndrome. “Oh, you’re here too!” It’s interesting to see the idea that people will go through extreme things to make themselves beautiful externalized. Rather than subjecting herself to surgery or extreme dieting, the witch hurts someone else. And the ending’s interesting: in a sense, it’s a reverse of the pretty-ugly girl takes off her glasses and everything changes moment. In cutting off Rapunzel’s hair, Eugene frees her from the thing that makes her valued for her looks rather than herself. But he also eliminates a source of strength and adventure for her. Presumably, she doesn’t need hair that she can rappel down now that she’s living in a palace, but the end of the movie did strike me as domesticating our heroine a bit.

By contrast, Tiana in The Princess and the Frog wants something other than to get married, or to get a man, and she doesn’t have to give it up, even to the businessmen who tell her, “A little woman of your…background would have had her hands full trying to run a big business.” By the end of the movie, the worthless Prince Naveen’s been transformed and galvanized by the force of Tiana’s dream, not just for her restaurant, but for life. When she snaps at him that “the only way to get what you want in this world is through hard work…I’m not a princess, I’m a waitress,” it reads as honest, not like she’s a scold — being a handsome gadabout hasn’t worked out particularly well for him. And ultimately, they build the restaurant together.

Someday, I think we’ll see princesses without the prince as the prize that’s waiting at the finish line. If there was one part of The Help, I liked it was that Skeeter’s dreams are totally independent of her useless oil-drilling boyfriend and she doesn’t have a moment of doubt (in the movie) about which is more important. And it sounds like with Brave Pixar’s giving us a movie where the princes are even more of a distraction. I’m not saying we have to do away with love stories, but that doesn’t mean that falling in love is the only thing princesses can do. And until we get a long-overdue Dealing With Dragons adaptation, I’ll settle for this.

It’s always lovely to be vindicated, particularly when that vindication comes in the form of deleted scenes of James McAvoy imagining Michael Fassbender in drag hitting the internet.