Great, great piece by Benjy Sarlin about two of his high school classmates at Stuyvesant, Jukay Hsu and Himanshu Suri, who went from organizing the student body of the high school traumatized in the wake of the attacks to careers setting up media organizations in Iraq and as half of Das Racist, respectively:

Ten years later, neither is completely sure how 9/11 affected him. “I can’t afford therapy,” Suri jokes. The connections are clearer in his case: he credits the attacks with planting the seeds of racial consciousness that would eventually define his rap aesthetic. “It was the first time there was a feeling of pan-people-of-color for all the South Asian people, the Pakistani kids, the Indian kids,” he said of that period. “It was the first time we made jokes about it amongst each other, referring to ourselves as brown, in order to cope.”…

From the outside, it’s hard not to read into Hsu’s career choice as well — Army officers with both a Stuyvesant diploma and Harvard degree aren’t exactly a dime a dozen — but he downplays the connection to 9/11. He developed a passion for development as an undergraduate, but ultimately decided to enter the Army over pursuing a Ph.D. in economics. In 2008, he was shipped to Iraq to lead a rifle platoon in the Sunni triangle. After a few months of patrols and raids, his battalion commander took note of his interest in local government and tasked him with leading development projects for an area roughly the size of Delaware. His proudest achievement was helping launch the region’s first local radio station.

It’s interesting to me that, in their own ways, both Hsu and Suri went into communications. It would be fascinating to see some sort of data about what careers college and high-school students on September 11 thought they were going into before the attacks and what they actually ended up doing for a living. Of course, everyone’s plans change along the way, but I’d love to know if the arc ended up bending towards public service or inter-cultural understanding in the way we like to think it did.

I’m behind on my Deadwood watching, but rather than leave you bereft on a Thursday, I wanted to think a bit about how the show fits into a framework Amanda Marcotte lays out in a provocative, and I think largely convincing, essay arguing that the defining feature of our current golden age of television is an examination of uneasy and untenable ideas about masculinity.

There’s no question that many of the great shows have put men squarely in the center of the frame, and featured women making critical, brittle decisions around them and in relation to them. Carmela Soprano and Skyler White are fascinating tragic figures, women, and most importantly wives, who have contemplated betraying their husbands, shedding that mantle of matrimony and becoming independent, morally integrated people, but who ultimately declined to act. The most arresting image of this season of Breaking Bad, for me at least, has been the sight of Skyler flipping coins at the Four Corners to determine if she should leave her increasingly monstrous husband and, resisting her own fate, pushing the coin back to New Mexico every time. Examining how men embrace, or run from, or reform their own masculinity is a first-order question for feminists in part because it determines what women have to react to, the space left for us to form our own identities, the things we will inevitably have to deal with and resolve as we continue our quest for equality.

But Deadwood shows us a world where the men at the center of the frame — and the show has a less rigid main character than the other shows on Amanda’s list — spend a lot of time tailoring their expressions of masculinity to the presence of women, and women struggle with the opportunities to redefine themselves that, if not exactly expansive, are broader on the frontier than they were at home. I’m not done with the show, and obviously there are falls to come. But watching Alma Garrett kick her drug addiction, put off her widow’s mourning, make love to Seth Bullock, plot revenge with Whitney Ellworth, and curse E.B. Farnum, claiming the territory of masculine crudeness and dark thinking for her own, is glorious. Trixie may be my favorite female character in the age of prestige television, vulnerable and striving, cautious of liberation, aware that there is always a price to be paid and suspicious of Sol Star, a man who wants to subvert the economy of desire. And Calamity Jane is Brienne of Tarth, more wedded to conceptions of honor than anyone around her, even if she can’t live up to her astronomically high standards.

Unlike all of the other television shows that define the golden era, programs in which the rules of business and of life are fixed, sometimes constricting to the point of physical and psychic death, Deadwood is about the creation of those rules in gender, and law, and business, the moments when we succeed and fail to make our own revolutions. It’s critical that we contemplate our cages, both the ones we’ve made ourselves and the ones designated for us. But the stories about what we do or don’t do in the moments when everything could be different are just as powerful.

I love football, and I’ve come to love it even more over the years as the increasing demands of work and my life outside of it have made it the one sport I feel like I can follow in anything close to a comprehensive way. Football’s brought me closer to a lot of great men, and this year, playing fantasy for the first time (I wrote about that, and The League, for Salon today), I’m as excited for the season to start tonight as I’ve ever been. But I’ve also come to love the game at a time that coincides quite precisely with the beginning of Alan Schwarz’s masterful reporting on football and brain injury for the New York Times, my understanding and ability to appreciate football deepening simultaneously with the realization that to care for the game as it exists may require accepting that men are selling their future mental function for my entertainment.

As someone who is professionally both a progressive and a fan, as someone who cares about occupational safety and the ability of employees to reach agreements with their employers that make their work livable, football is not an easy game to love. The National Football League is perhaps the one area of sport where players would benefit from a dramatically stronger union than they’re ever likely to achieve. Some high, heavily conditional salaries serve to disguise the short average careers and the financial and emotional costs of giving up your body and brain to the game. The bodies and brains we pay to see battered in pursuit of glory are disproportionately African-American: 67 percent of the league was black in 2010.

I have a hard time with the idea that players don’t have the right to put themselves on the market, knowing all the risks. Troy Polamalu isn’t a stupid man, and seems determined to keep making tough hits no matter how much it costs him financially or physically. But, as Ta-Nehisi wrote last season, “In some measure, pro football is quite beautiful because it gives us human beings willingly giving up themselves for something they love. I don’t have any real way to relate to that…This is a separate question from the responsibility of the viewer. There’s no real reason why I have to sit and watch Hines Ward destroy his body.” I’m not quite at the point where I’m ready to stop buying. But I would like a way to be a more active, and activist, consumer, to demonstrate that I’d rather spend my money on a game that is consistently regulated and substantively dedicated to making itself safer. I’d happily, for example, pay a $1 per-ticket fee to donate to brain injury and helmet improvement research, or kick in some money through my fantasy league for the same cause. I’d like to purchase part of a solution as well as the status quo. And I’ll watch football this season as a way of reminding myself of my progressive values, rather than as a way to set them aside for an afternoon.

And as a side note, this may be the best parody of the disturbingness of football commentating that I have ever seen:

Ben Roethlisberger Close To Completing Offseason Without Committing Sex Crime

The Internet’s gone nuts over Soulja Boy’s latest, “Let’s Be Real,” in which he rhymes “fuck the FBI and fuck all the Army troops”

More than most people, I think it’s worth paying careful attention to what values artists promulgate in their work, but this nigh-unintelligible verse in a song so dreadful that even Soulja Boy’s incessant social media flacking wouldn’t have made it take off is probably one that we could have all taken a pass on. If I’m going to resent Soulja Boy for anything, it’s for not passing the Vistoso Bosses off to someone who could have made them take off:

In all seriousness, though, this is probably a controversy precisely because of its actual minorness. Soulja Boy isn’t an artist it costs anyone to take on. And he doesn’t remotely have a record of social activism that would let him pass this sentiment off as a provoked backlash to discriminatory authority the way the Black Eyed Peas reputation as conscious rappers and Justin Timberlake’s involvement let them slide on comparing the CIA to the Klan and the Bloods and the Crips in “Where Is the Love” when it came out in 2003:

It’s also probably a matter of hierarchies and timing. Culturally, we’re pretty comfortable bashing the CIA in part because we expect the agency to do less than admirable things in our service, and in part because if you don’t live in Washington, you probably don’t know anyone who works for an intelligence agency so they’re less personified for us. By contrast, we hold our armed forces sacrosanct, at the top of the hierarchy of people who need to be protected from insult or harm once they’re at home. And in June 2003, before our ill-fated invasion of Iraq had gone entirely to hell, I’d guess we weren’t as concerned with protecting our public servants from ill-considered words to excuse our failure to protect them from more substantive hurts.

I’ll admit that I probably root for NBC’s turnaround efforts to work in part because I want to reward a network that gave me the first two seasons of 30 Rock, Community, and Parks and Recreation, and has ordered a female-heavy rotation of new shows for the television season that kicks off later this month. But I think no matter the network, I’d be pretty excited to hear about the fact that someone is working on the unfortunately-titled My Best Friend is a Lesbo, a buddy comedy featuring two female roommates, one gay, one straight, who do things other than make out for men’s entertainment in bars or their own edification in private.

Lesbians are so few and far between on television. Probably the best thing Glee did last year, and I’ll defend this even over the Kurt storyline, was its portrayal of Brittany and Santana’s fraught relationship, which was tremendously honest about the pressure the characters put themselves under and specific in its tenderness. But other than that on shows currently airing, we’ve got Eleanor O’Hara on Nurse Jackie, a small-audience cabler, Diana Berrigan on White Collar and her girlfriend, and not very much else. I don’t begrudge gay men their media presence, in part because the sassy gay best friend has been a useful archetype for opening up American audiences to the idea of seeing, and even expecting, gay characters in their entertainment. But if we never push the door open further than the crack created by the thin edge of the wedge, we’re doing something wrong. We need parity between gay men and lesbians, we need more balanced depictions of gay men and women be it in the mix of professions or styles of presentation, and we need bisexual characters who aren’t jokes or treated as if they’re terminally confused.

And we also need for gay characters to be more than accessories to straight ones, to be seen from their own perspectives, to be at the center of their own stories. We don’t just need audiences to want to see gay characters; we need a world where straight audiences are comfortable seeing the world through a gay lens. If we’re going to fix that framing problem while experimenting with titles for this show that have no chance of making it on air, may I propose an alternative? How about My Best Friend Is a Breeder?

Up early today because Yglesias and I (and a bunch of other smart people) are talking about Millenials and 9/11 RIGHT NOW and you can watch us do it!

-You know, Marvel comics might want to think seriously about whether it’s tasteful to let Orson Scott Card rewrite Hamlet so the dead king is a bad ruler because he’s gay and a serial molester. Not. Winning. The. Future.

-Also tacky: setting up Bill O’Reilly and Sean Hannity as zombies to be killed in a video game.

-Do we need a national film commission?

-America has a surplus of independently wealthy detectives.

As a September 11 song, it’s definitely not as corny as it could have been, even if it buys into the idea that everything changed after the attacks, and it’s got some genuinely evocative imagery in service of its anti-war message:

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Still, Bruce Springsteen’s “Reason to Believe” is both more broadly applicable—you don’t have to have lost someone in the September 11 attacks or the subsequent wars to be included in the lyrics—and a bit more pointed about economics:

Then there’s Rod Stewart’s totally apolitical version, which is a great hopeless love song:

Unfortunately, it’s not available in an embeddable version, but John McCutcheon mashes up Bruce and Rod’s versions in a cover he calls “Reasons to Believe.”

Amazon has apparently reached a deal with the state of California where the company will drop a proposed ballot initiative that would protect it from collecting sales tax on its transactions and in return, won’t start having to collect those taxes until next September.

I wrote in July that I thought Amazon had shifted the market enough that charging sales tax wouldn’t actually put it at a disadvantage with competing retailers, online or off—it has better stock than brick and mortar stores, and volume and corresponding price advantages over other online stores. And I wonder if the largely positive news that’s greeted reports of Amazon’s planned tablet launch, whether it’s TechCrunch’s declaration that it’ll be “huge, potentially,” or Tim Carmody’s explanation of how Amazon is fulfilling Steve Jobs’ vision in a way even Apple can’t, has made the company feel more confident.

Either way, collecting sales tax is the right thing for Amazon to do, no matter how secure the company feels about its market position. We’ll see where Amazon is as a company in 14 months when it starts collecting sales tax on that large market.

Well, this is charming. Republican Rep. Marsha Blackburn is bringing Henry Juszkiewicz, the chief executive of Gibson Guitars, as her plus-one to President Obama’s jobs’ address tonight. In the absence of controversy, it might be an entertainingly quirky choice of a small businessman. But Gibson got raided on suspicion of illegally importing rosewood and ivory, and was raided in 2009 (the case hasn’t produced charges yet, but it’s ongoing), and Juszkiewicz has insisted that he’s the victim of an “outrageous abuse of federal power,” parlaying his business problems into a round of talk-radio appearances. Overregulation, as my esteemed colleage regularly points out, can be a problem. But I think super-restrictive occupational licensing, or say, zoning restrictions may restrict the American economy more than Henry Juszkiewicz’s desire to manufacture rosewood fretboards.