If someone has a good reason why it makes sense to retroactively void the world record Paula Radcliffe set in the marathon because she ran with male pacers, I would like to hear it, because it’s making large amounts of steam come out of my ears. It’s one thing to say that in the future, men and women will run separately because male pacers help make women run faster, but Radcliffe set her record in a way that was totally legal at the time she set it, and she shouldn’t have it taken away from her.

And even that doesn’t really make sense, and will cause logistical challenges for marathons that typically run men and women together. It’s not as if Radcliffe was running in circumstances that are wildly abnormal for the sport. The presence of men may make women run a little faster. I’ve never run 26.2 miles all at one go, but I imagine that weather, courses, and road conditions all make for variable performance. Are we going to limit world records to races run on days when the temperature varies between 55 and 72 degrees? The presence of men is not an artificial stimulant. Instead, maybe it’s evidence that competing together can help women reach their personal best.

A couple of weeks ago, on the evening of Troy Davis’s execution, I said it was time for this blog to pay some serious attention to the death penalty in popular culture. Enough people were interested that I thought I’d pull together a formal reading list. Let’s get started two weeks from Wednesday. Every Wednesday, we’ll consider a different piece of pop culture on the death penalty divided into six different themes. I chose to stick with works that deal with the death penalty in America, because including the canon of literature and movies about political executions in Europe and Russia would have exploded the project without letting us really focus on the particularities of the death penalty as we understand it in America. I’ve tried to space out books, and to create enough time so long things like The Executioner’s Song have a lot of lead time. So put Native Son on hold at the library, and get ready for Wednesday, Oct. 19. And if there’s interest in a lunchtime discussion group in Washington or a live chat online, let me know and I’ll see if we can set something up.

Black Men and White Women
October 19: Native Son, Richard Wright
October 26: The Green Mile (1999 film)
November 2: The Confession, John Grisham

Women on Death Row
November 9: Monster
November 16: Last Dance
November 23: Oz: Season 2, Episode 3; Season 3, Episode 7; Season 4, Episode 4

Lawyers, Judges and Juries
November 30: To Kill a Mockingbird (1962 film)
December 7: 12 Angry Men (1957 film)
December 14: Judgment at Nuremberg (1961 film)

Forgiveness and Vengeance
December 21: A Time to Kill and The Chamber, John Grisham
January 4: Dead Man Walking (1995 film)
January 11: Monster’s Ball (2001 film)

Journalists and the Truth
January 18: The Life of David Gale (2003 film)
January 25: Capote (2005 film)

Back Into the Past
February 1: The Executioner’s Song, Norman Mailer
February 8: Rosewood (1997 film)
February 15: Angels With Dirty Faces (1938 film)
February 22: Paths of Glory (1957 film)
March 29: Deadwood, Season 1, Episode 1, Episode 5, Episode 7

Wow. io9′s found out that in the script for Army of the Dead, a zombie picture Zack Snyder is producing, zombies reproduce by raping human women.

Regular readers know that I’m not categorically opposed to scenes of rape and sexual assault in art, and in fact, I think they can serve to educate readers and viewers about the horrors of being attacked. We do, after all, live in a world where Johnny Depp can compare a photoshoot to getting raped. Education in sympathy is still very important. But it sounds like there’s strong potential for grossness-for-grossness’s sake here, a la the Human Centipede movies. You don’t actually need to have zombies rape women to get the message across the audience that zombies are gross and it would be better not to be one. I suppose along the same lines, The Walking Dead didn’t actually need to show a horse being ripped apart by a horde of zombies — one of the most disgusting things I’ve ever seen on television or in any medium — though that scene did provide a sense of vast, massing hunger. It may have been very difficult to watch, but it wasn’t artistically irredeemable.

I suppose I can see a scenario where the threat of sexual assault means that the women of quarantined Las Vegas end up leading the fight against the city’s zombies, cocktail waitresses, card dealers, and strippers teaming up to do what the government, which isolated the city, can’t. I’m not saying a scenario like that couldn’t be empowering under any circumstances, but it would be much more likely, if the movie even went that way, to be the kind of thing that thinks it’s sophisticated because it’s sexual, violent, and sexually violent. More likely, the fight against the zombies will end up being a major airlift in aid of hookers with hearts of gold. Or just plain vile and unredemptive. Either way, rape as a means of conquest is not something that should be approached lightly or enlisted just for its gross-out factor.

Initially, when I heard that Fox was asking the voice actors behind The Simpsons to take a 45 percent pay cut, I assumed they were just being tough negotiators. In 2008, the voice talent signed a deal that gave them $400,000 an episode, equivalent to Hugh Laurie’s salary on House, and the target figure for whole per-episode cost for a new generation of low-cost television shows. Given that The Simpsons has been around literally from one generation of television watchers to the next, from the age of mass attention to a few shows to an age of niche entertainment, it makes sense both that the actors’ salaries would rise over time, and that as its ratings fell, they might come to seem quite expensive. And it wouldn’t be the first time that a network tried its darnedest to drive down the compensation it gives the people who produce its product.

But instead of all that, it sounds like the network’s up to even more complicated jiggery-pokery. The Hollywood Reporter notes that the show’s syndication deal means Fox can’t sell The Simpsons to anyone but local affiliates, which explains why I’ve never sat down in front of the television and suddenly found that I’d watched 10 straight hours of Simpsons episodes. And apparently, a syndication deal could net the network and its embattled parent company $750 million. That’s not going to make up for the hits News Corp lost this summer over the hacking scandal. But if the show has declining returns from new episodes, a decent-sized price tag, and $750 million in untapped value, I might be tempted to see if I can get the actors to force a cancellation so I can unlock that value and avoid as much blame and gifs of a righteously outraged Lisa Simpson being sent in your direction as is possible. It’s just a different kind of greedy.

I was talking to my friend and Good Wife-recapper extraordinaire Kate last night about A Gifted Man, which I liked rather more than she did. She was arguing that the show’s solution to the health care crisis in the presence of Patrick Wilson as a Fancy Neurologist Who Decides to Serve the Poor is incremental rather than systematic, which I basically agree with. But I also think that the existence of a show that illustrates all the big and little things that makes it difficult to obtain health care is worthwhile. Laying out and emphasizing the full extent of a problem while providing emotional hooks for viewers is something pop culture can do well. Though of course, it’s important to lay out the problem in a way that supports the best possible solution. I agree with Kate that positing that clinic employees are clueless is a bad way to go, though it’s smart for A Gifted Man to emphasize that it’s nice to have health insurance, but you also have to have a place you can use it, the knowledge to seek out the right treatment, and the resources to maintain your health in other ways.

All of which is a long way of saying that I’m curious to see what Sesame Street will do with a new character it’s introducing: Lily, whose family is financially disadvantaged enough that they have trouble keeping food on the table. As much as very special episodes are annoying, this strikes me as a good idea. The prospect of not having enough to eat is really viscerally terrifying, especially if you’re young. But it’s important for kids (and adults as well) to understand how many Americans are hungry in what’s supposed to be a land of opportunity. More than 10 percent of Americans relied on food stamps for at least part of 2010. Trying to communicate the magnitude of that problem while spurring people to action (rather than scaring them so much they shut down) is a difficult task, but I hope this special can be an occasion for broader family conversations about poverty and the economy.

And I hope they manage to integrate Lily into episodes regularly. It would be unfortunate to trot her out and then shove her and her family’s financial situation out of the picture a la Glee‘s approach to Sam’s homelessness — that show didn’t just eliminate the plotline, it got rid of the whole character. There may be two Americas, but it’s not as if they’re on opposite sides of a wall. Teaching kids not to assume that everyone has the same level of resources is a valuable lesson in social awareness. So many signifiers of coolness — clothes, birthdays, activities, cars, housing — are really signifiers of wealth, and in a deep and prolonged recession, poverty makes you socially as well as materially vulnerable. And Sesame Street can demonstrate both that vulnerability and the hope for something better by sending Lily out into the world of the show and encouraging other characters to recognize that even if they themselves aren’t hungry, poverty still affects them through their friendships.

The bridge is yours.

-It’s National Arts and Humanities Month!

-It’s official: Glee is watchable again.

-Best birthday present ever: a chance to see Beauty and the Beast on the big screen again.

-If we’re going to have a Mr. Ed remake, can Lil’ Sebastian play Mr. Ed?

-Also great birthday presents — great new Rihanna:

Normally, I wouldn’t mark my birthday on the blog. But I’m 27 today, so I thought it was important that I promise you that I will absolutely, under no circumstances, join the 27 Club this year. No strychnine poisoning, no “death by misadventure,” and definitely no heroin. Needles kinda freak me out. That said, I’m psyched for another year of writing about what club member Janis Joplin referred to as culture “of great social and political import”:

Not to get all Chris Traeger on you, but coming to ThinkProgress and getting to hang out with you guys for a living is literally the best thing that’s happened to me in the past year.

A great question comes in to the blog from always thought-provoking commenter Jason Byrd Marshall: “Do you mean shows that star ‘people of color’ or stories about ‘people with color’? It would seem that we have a few of the former (there should be more!), while the latter has failed again and again (see Cane with Jimmy Smits).” That actually gets at a question I raised slightly in the post Jason commented on. Simply having people of different races, religions, ethnicities, national origins, sexual orientations, and abilities (disabled folks are probably the most underrepresented constituency in American popular culture) is a first step towards true diversity. But it’s not the only kind of diversity. And it’s an opening of the door, rather than the end of the journey.

The imperative for diversity, beyond the simple fact of its rightness, is the fact that if you have characters with different experiences and perspectives, you ought to get a more interesting set of stories. If 2 Broke Girls didn’t seem committed to being flagrantly racist, Earl’s presence at the diner check-out could be an entry-point for conversations about gentrification in Brooklyn. Ugly Betty was a show both about the weirdnesses of the high fashion world and about the process by which you become a citizen. Avatar would have been a creative if somewhat generic action movie if not for the specific perspective Jake Sully had as a result of losing his mobility in an accident (not a perspective that all wheelchair users share, of course).

The challenge, I think, in making shows that fall into Jason’s second category (and pop culture more generally) is convincing majority white audiences that shows that don’t just have black characters but that are about blackness and black experiences, or that are about, in part, being Latino, or Muslim, or disabled, or whatever, are shows that they will enjoy. This shouldn’t be as hard a sell as it is, of course. Audiences drawn from racial majorities should be, and fairly demonstrably are, interested in stories about social movements and fights for justice by minority groups, even if they like to consume them in problematic forms, like The Help.

The heavier lift actually seems to be with pop culture that’s about not painful stories of oppression where majority audiences might have to acknowledge some complicity with racism, sexism, or homophobia, but about the day-to-day lives of people who are not white, straight, etc., and who are not the sole minority representative in a group of friends or couples who are mostly white and straight. I don’t know if that stems from ideas that, say, black or gay families or couples or groups of friends are in some way fundamentally different from pairings and groups with other compositions; a fear from audiences that they won’t get the jokes or references or background assumptions; or what, but it’s often unfounded. I may have been the only white person at the showing of Jumping the Broom that I attended, but I liked it plenty. The specifics of jumping the broom may not be part of my traditions, but stomping on glasses, which is just as silly, is. I don’t know how to strike a balance between coming up with a diverse set of stories and depictions of universal experiences like weddings and friend-based sitcoms that are inflected by a diversity of experiences and traditions, while simultaneously convincing majority audiences that the differences aren’t that big. The impulses to explore diversity and to minimize its important is can be contradictory. In the entertainment industry, expanding curiosity and sympathy to a wider range of stories is a heavy lift. But that doesn’t mean it’s not important to try.

Comics Alliance has a big story up about the latest twist in Archie Comics’ storyline about Kevin Keller. Not only is his character going to be in the military in the future, not only is he getting married to a character who appears, at least in these sample pages, to be of a different race, but the twist is going to be that he met his future hubby during his term of service. But what actually struck me about the story is not that it’s about a post-Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell world, not that it’s about an interracial gay wedding, but that Archie is following Doonesbury and telling a story about injured veterans.

I don’t know how many of y’all have followed B.D.’s arc over the past couple of years, but Doonesbury’s done more than any other pop culture artifact that I can think of to explore what happens to soldiers who bear the cost of our current involvement in two disastrous wars. Whether it’s B.D. losing his leg and struggling through physical and mental therapy; Toggle’s battle against traumatic brain injury; Ray Hightower’s panic attacks; and Melissa’s struggle to overcome the lasting impact of surviving command rape, the strip’s effortlessly, compassionately, and often hilariously integrated B.D.’s military family into the strip.

Archie’s decision to do something similar may be derivative, and it may not be as sustained — the stories about the characters as adults are, after, part of a one-off storyline. But I’m glad to see another American institution in comics integrate the diverse experiences of servicemembers and their families into key storylines, and to emphasize that war is not cost-free, and it’s not temporary. Not everyone’s going to be lucky enough to get rehabbed by a hunky gay nurse in a military hospital. But a lot of folks are going to have to deal with lost limbs and the lasting effects of injuries that might have killed them in earlier conflicts.