I don’t normally tell personal stories on the blog, but I told this one yesterday at the panel yesterday, so I thought I’d repeat it here.

Ten years ago, I was a senior in high school, and more relevantly, preparing for my final year as a nationally competitive policy debater. The topic for the year was weapons of mass destruction, so I’d spent my summer reading journal articles about proliferation and clipping wild-eyed rhetoric from sketchy Asian newspapers in preparation for the twenty trips I’d take around the country to tournaments. On September 10, I won a practice debate round by convincing the judge that the risk of a major terrorist attack on the United States was not significant enough to be considered in a risk calculus.

On September 11, when someone told me that a plane had crashed into the World Trade Center, I told them it must have been a hoax. I didn’t believe it until my English teacher came into class, panicked because she couldn’t reach her husband, who was on a Los Angeles-bound flight out of Logan in the same window as the hijacked planes. She eventually reached him. I spent the afternoon sitting next to one of my favorite teachers, who was trying to reach his brother, who worked in the World Trade Center. He turned out to be all right, but other people who worked at my high school lost friends and family on the planes, something we wouldn’t find out until later.

Less than two weeks later, I got on a plane out of Logan to fly to one of those debate tournaments. The serviceman stationed at the check-in gate made me call my doctor to fax the prescription for my Epi-Pen to the airport to prove that I actually needed to be carrying the medicine that could save my life in case of an allergy attack—everything could have been a weapon. The Boston Globe‘s astonishing piece about the Logan workers who checked in the hijackers, who opened their luggage when it didn’t make the planes and discovered a terrible surprise, who live as little-discussed witnesses to the beginning of our national tragedy rather than its fiery conclusion, brought me to my knees as no other anniversary piece on September 11 has because this is how I experienced it, on the edge of the crisis, but not unaffected by it.

Michiko Kakutani asked, in a lead-up to this anniversary, whether our culture had changed. And thinking back to the time, I think one of the things that came as a blessed relief to me was that culture didn’t feel different, that we didn’t succumb to the notion that the end of irony would be a good thing. Has The Onion ever been better than in the weeks following September 11, 2001 when it provided a sad, irreverent commentary on the attacks? Modern Humorist’s “Kandahar Har Har” and monologues by fake Taliban stand-up Jai al-Leno were part of my rush to start thinking about Afghanistan as something other than an outline on a map—I read them along with Ahmed Rashid. On September 11, 2001 I had no notion that I would ever be a culture critic. But those reminders that culture mattered stuck with me, as did the power of being part of a mass event, no matter how terrible and involuntary, no matter how marginal my participation.

This post contains spoilers through the first two sections of Neuromancer. For next week, we’ll read section three.

When Conan O’Brien spoke at Harvard’s commencement in 2000, he joked about a number of predictions he’d made in a (presumably fake) high school graduation speech 15 years earlier:

I would like to make several predictions about what the future will hold: “I believe that one day a simple Governor from a small Southern state will rise to the highest office in the land. He will lack political skill, but will lead on the sheer strength of his moral authority. I believe that Justice will prevail and, one day, the Berlin Wall will crumble, uniting East and West Berlin forever under Communist rule. I believe that one day, a high speed network of interconnected computers will spring up world-wide, so enriching people that they will lose their interest in idle chit chat and pornography.

I start our discussion of William Gibson’s Neuromancer because it’s impossible to read this novel, published the year I was born, without thinking about what he thought the internet might look like and what it actually does—for most of us, anyway. I’m intrigued by the novel’s description of the internet as like”

Cyberspace. A consensual hallucination experienced daily by billions of legitimate operators, in every nation, by children being taught mathematical concepts . . . A graphic representation of data abstracted from the banks of every computer in the human system. Unthinkable complexity. Lines of light ranged in the nonspace of the mind, clusters and constellations of data. Like city lights, receding. . . .

I think for some people, that’s true. But I think for most folks, the internet just makes their world a little bigger instead of a lot larger, it makes their world easier to handle rather than turning it surreal. On the other hand, most of us aren’t actually innovators, we’re not plugged in actively testing the limits of what our enabling technologies can do and what societal rules suggest we ought to want to do. Our personal geography is not like Ninsei, where, as Case tells us, “burgeoning technologies require outlaw zones, that Night City wasn’t there for its inhabitants, but as a deliberately unsupervised playground for technology itself.” Reading a novel’s a form of tourism.
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Apparently, in addition to the 10 million Snow White projects under development, we’re also getting a new Cinderella movie. I have absolutely no hope that this will happen, but it would be pretty awesome if the writers considered the example of Ever After. Not only does it do a good job of thinking about fairy-tale settings — there’s Leonardo Da Vinci and sharply drawn class distinctions — but it’s an awesome story about protagonists who fall in love because they have shared political interests. I don’t actually mind a lot of fairy-tale tropes, be they deserving poor girls or rewarded morality, but love at first sight is silly and not that interesting. Even if they can’t pull off political consciousness, I’d settle for a story where Cinderella and the prince actually get to know each other, or where love at first sight doesn’t work out.

Contagion Steven Soderbergh’s stylish and beautifully-acted ensemble horror movie has as its main villain a virus, but in a larger sense, it’s a perfect September 11 movie. Even as the characters scramble to address an untraceable global threat that transcends state borders and agency jurisdictions and marginal figures get rich spewing hate, the movie reaffirms a strong faith in human decency and innovation.

The movie’s villain is Jude Law at his creepy best as a conspiracy-oriented blogger who is anointed as a prophet when his paranoia hits pay dirt — he’s one of the first people outside of government to notice a pattern of illnesses that signals an epidemic. But he parlays that fame into huge profits by declaring forsythia a miracle cure, garnering a windfall for the pharmaceutical companies that manufacture it, and urging his readers not to take a vaccine when one becomes available. It’s a sickening portrait of vaccine denialism — a phenomenon that’s already causing spikes in childhood illnesses in the United States, and that could be catastrophic in a global pandemic. He’s also an illustration of the power of the blogosphere, one I wish had been tempered by a more reasonable figure. “Print media is dying, Lorraine,” he hollers at an editor who refuses to print his initial story about the epidemic, “I’ll save you a seat on the bus.” But even if I feel optimistic about the blogosphere, it’s undeniable that conspiracy theories widely disseminated can damage our national life, whether they make us sick or perpetuate lies about the causes of the September 11 attacks.
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This post contains spoilers through the Sept. 8 episode of Louie.

This episode began with an expression of the world’s miraculousness, as Louis C.K. explains why his daughters wake him up so early in the morning “I get it, they want to share with me. ‘Daddy, look, it’s all still here!’” But as the rest of the show explains, sometimes life is not that mysterious and delightful. And sometimes the things you feel most sharply and clearly are shattering rather than elevating.

First, Louis succumbs to the temptation to hang out after a successful gig on the testimony of, quite literally, a random guy on the street who tells him he has a moral obligation to hang around and reap the sexual benefits of his funniness. Almost immediately, it becomes too complicated to be fun. “Can I get a shot?” he asks the bartender, who asks him what kind, and when he says whiskey, demands that he specify a brand. “Just, please, brown liquid that makes people feel differently than if they didn’t drink it,” he asks plaintively. The sheer number of signaling preferences you’re supposed to have as an adult makes the fact that you can legally do things like drink alcohol less funny and breezy than they ought to be.

Of course, Louis goes from that simple setup a hugely complicated one, ending up stranded in Jersey after walking away from a threesome. Though when Chris Rock is your emergency pickup (even if his wife is declaring in the background, “I told you to stop being friends when you got divorced. You can’t trust divorced people.”), life can’t be that bad. Still, Rock lectures Louie, reminding him of the folly of the latter half of his evening. “I’m not taking you to the city at 2 o’clock in the morning because you had to look at some crazy woman’s vagina,” he reminds his friend. “That’s not how I plan my life.” Part of being an adult is the moment when you stop telling yourself that certain things are fun.

Among those things? Unrequited love. Louis’ already confessed his love to Pamela, but he revisits that same futile well when he drives her to the airport only to find out that her ticket to Paris is one way, because as she tells him “I’m going to Paris to make it work with my kid’s dad, and I’m not coming back…I’m not attracted to you. Why do you keep making me say mean things to you.” But hope springs eternal, and there’s something powerfully understandable about watching Louis watch her walk away and be lifted up when he mishears her instruction to wave to her as Pamela asking him to wait for her. Our willful self-delusions can be powerfully sustaining if we’re not forced to confront them too harshly. Or maybe it’s just that it’s not a great idea to get into a car with a random woman, no matter how much you want a peek at her lady-bits, a lesson that the women in Louis’ audience have long known, even if it’s sadly funny to watch him learn it for himself.

The bridge is yours.

-Awesome women in fantasy.

-Lieutenant Uhura, space program champion.

-Odd Future gets an Adult Swim show.

-Who owns modern mythological figures?

-Say what you will about Mel Gibson, the man is persistent.

Maureen Ryan’s piece on the structural reasons women aren’t getting and keeping more television writing jobs has been getting a lot of attention, and deservedly so. It’s terrifying to think that studios are still sticking by the idea that it’s better to hire a man because he’ll support a family or the assumptions that women can’t write male characters, and it’s depressing to see yet another arena where being a team player and supporting a creator’s vision doesn’t get you credit, it just makes you invisible. And I think in the context of our discussion yesterday about prestige television’s preoccupation with masculinity, this part of the piece is particularly important:

Women are perceived as being more appropriate for the staffs of “soapier,” ensemble-driven shows, but that’s not where TV is headed right now. “The trend in the industry has been away from that kind of [soapy] TV, toward shows that are either more episodic or more big-event shows,” said Writer B. “And in those areas, the perception — and I’m not saying I agree with this — is that they are more the province of male writers.” (Here’s a bit of advice for aspiring women writers from that showrunner, whose last few potential female hires got better offers from other shows: “If you’re a woman who writes kick-ass action, the employment picture is a lot better.”)

Comedy’s comeback could be a factor as well; networks have been bulking up on half-hour programs ever since ‘Modern Family’ became a breakthrough hit. Though late-night shows typically have very few or zero women on staff (that’s true even now, despite last year’s controversy over the overall lack of women in late-night writers’ rooms), finding a prime-time comedy in which more than a third of the writing credits come from women isn’t all that easy. Though ‘Parks and Recreation’ has many women on staff (40 percent of its Season 3 writing credits went to women), that’s not necessarily typical — of the 17 credited writers for ‘Modern Family’s’ first two seasons, five are women.

These biases are just so strange. Do we think there won’t be women in the future, or that all gender issues will have been solved by science, so women won’t have anything to say about science fiction? Women are present at big events in the real world all the time, like September 11, and in the White House during the raid on Osama bin Laden’s compound earlier this year, and our ovaries don’t tend to prevent us from recognizing the momentousness of occasions or thinking big thoughts about them, so it stands to reason that we might be able to translates those thoughts to fiction.

But more than that, as commenter Katie pointed out in the prestige television thread, “I also think it’s telling that the crop of female driven shows on Showtime are regulated to some kind of weird, semi-fake ‘comedy’ bracket.” There seem to be semi-contradictory tropes that suggest that women can’t write comedy but our lives and stories are sort of inherently light, not worthy of the introspective, anti-heroic treatment that the Tony Sopranos and Walter Whites of the world get. There’s about as much logic to this assumption as there is to any of the other ideas that keep women out of writers’ rooms, but it’s still disturbing.

A lot of folks were appalled when the audience at Wednesday’s Republican primary debate applauded Rick Perry’s executions record as governor. I suppose I was with Ta-Nehisi, and not particularly surprised. But I think it did clarify for me some of my reaction to Alex’s review of Werner Herzog’s death row documentary. He didn’t particularly like it, and a number of you said that it would be disappointing if Herzog had turned in a conventional anti-death penalty movie. And I wonder how comfortable I would be with a contemplative, apolitical movie about the death penalty.

That said, I think it’s very much in the interests of folks who are uncomfortable seeing people applaud the death penalty to get this movie about the execution of Cameron Todd Willingham in front of as many audiences as possible:

INCENDIARY the willingham case (2011 SILVERDOCS U.S. Sterling Feature Competition) from Joe Bailey, Jr. on Vimeo.

As much as I oppose the death penalty no matter if the person to be executed is guilty or innocent, I think the fear of killing an innocent person is the most potent argument opponents have for a mass audience. As much as I think David Grann’s “Trial By Fire” is a remarkable read and should be pushed as hard and as often as possible, there really is something about seeing Rick Perry say the things he says about Willingham’s execution for yourself. I hope this movie will make it to Washington and beyond. If it does, maybe we can organize a field trip.

This post contains spoilers through the Sept. 8 episode of Burn Notice.

As someone who gets prickly and discontented about the fact that it would be really extraordinary difficult to do what Michael, Fiona, and Sam do, I was glad to see the half-season finale of Burn Notice actually address that trying to pull off running a sophisticated covert network without the backing of an agency is something that would be difficult to the point of being impossible.

As it turns out, when you don’t have the infrastructure of an agency behind you, the following things can happen. A deeply twisted shrink can a) fake his own wife’s death, b) infiltrate your mother’s therapy to learn about your vulnerabilities, c) present himself as your client because you have no mechanism to do a background check and figure out that he’s a fraud, and d) set you up to kill several people, putting you in his debt so you have to work for him. Being independent makes you as vulnerable as it makes you free.

A couple threads back, someone said that rather than have Fiona do something out of line, they’d prefer to see Michael cross over, testing a reformed Fiona’s limits, rather than seeing her relapse into her old IRA ways. And I actually thought the show, which has been somewhat slack this season, did a nice job with that idea tonight. When Fiona accidentally kills two innocent bystanders in an operation that’s been tweaked by said twisted shrink, she’s genuinely shocked and traumatized. And the episode plays with the idea that Michael’s actually the bad guy, who has gotten everyone he’s working with way in over their heads. “I know someone that no one else knows. You deserved to be burned,” Larry, who has rematerialized to cause trouble, tells Michael. “You stood there. You watched it happen. You killed those people. And then you helped me cover it up. Because that was the job.”

The show has acted all season as if the unit Michael’s built around himself is sacrosanct and at risk if he returns to the CIA. “You had no friends, you lived by yourself, but that isn’t true anymore. you have roots here now,” Michael’s mother tells him. “Anything happens, it affects all of us.” But it seems that unit, the fact that Michael has people, is precisely what’s made him vulnerable. His greatest enemy has attacked him through his mother, a profound if accidental betrayal. Michael’s concern for Fiona means that he feels a responsibility to her when she is framed. If he was genuinely part of an agency, he’d have resources, he would be protected. But when your agency is your family, you don’t have a layer of backup to protect them from you.