This is one of those situations where my instincts as a journalist, and my instincts as an advocate for feminism in entertainment come into conflict. An actress is suing the Internet Movie Database for publishing her true age on the grounds that discrimination against actresses over 40 is so pervasive that revealing her age would complicate her efforts to find future employment. IMDb is, of course, a resource both for journalists and for folks who work in the entertainment industry, so it can be used to both inform and to discriminate (it isn’t always accurate, either, which is a larger but separate problem).

But I suppose I come down on the side of keeping her age in there, though I would be curious as to where IMDb got the information because birth certificates, as we’ve learned via national farce, aren’t always part of the public record. Ultimately, hiding it is capitulating. I don’t think that changing norms around actresses and age is easy, and the battle to shift them will have costs for individuals along the way. But ultimately I think the cause of building good databases and asserting that age discrimination is wrong is more important. I’d be curious to hear this actress name the jobs she’s been unable to land because of age discrimination. It’s not people who put the information out there who are doing wrong. It’s people who are using it to make pop culture even more homogenous and youth-oriented.

This may sound strange, but even though Britney Spears is three years older and vastly wealthier and more famous than I am, I’ve felt for years like she was my pop-cultural little sister. Maybe it was the video for “Lucky,” which felt like the confessions I heard from cheerleaders in high school about how miserable they were — I know, I know, but pretty blondes have problems, too. Maybe it was the very public meltdown, that left her, a grown woman with two children, under her father’s conservatorship. And maybe it’s the perpetual sadness that seems to haunt so many of her subsequent music videos: her smile at the end of the video for “Circus” felt like the happiest we’d seen her in performances — or in life — in years.

But it’s also fascinating to me the way post-breakdown Britney and the folks around her have aestheticized her vulnerability. Take her new video for “Criminal”:

It’s not that we don’t see female pop stars put themselves in a position to be manhandled in their own videos — Rihanna suffers a much more brutal and extensive assault in “Man Down.” But in this case, we’re attuned to Britney’s vulnerability, we believe she really would choose a guy who would do something like this to her. And even though her bad behavior once she ditches him isn’t directed at her nasty ex, the fact that he treated her badly becomes a form of narrative permission for her to hold up convenience stores and get steamy with her real-life boyfriend on film.

She doesn’t need any such permission in the video for “Toxic,” where she’s a totally confident troublemaker (And the nodding white, male business-class passengers actually feel like a call-out, whether it’s intentional or not, to OutKast’s circus audience in the video for “The Whole World.”):

That same sort of permission narrative is at work in the video for “I Wanna Go,” where the obnoxious questions of celebrity journalists and persistence of paparazzi photographers (also, the fact that they’re terminators) justify Britney’s decision to lash out against them violently and go for a joy ride:

The invasiveness of celebrity journalism is a common theme in Britney’s conservatorship-era videos, whether she’s critiquing their voraciousness in “Piece of Me” or punking the folks who are camped outside her sex den by baking them pie and presenting herself as an All-American housewife in “If You Seek Amy.” It’s a smart ploy, letting Spears present herself as a victim rather than complicit in an industry that’s ugly but that helps her make a lot of money. But part of what’s interesting about the story in “I Wanna Go” is that it neutralizes her rebellion in the end. The agent of her escape, the guy who tells her he loves dreams and seashells, is one of the same Terminators who were harassing her with cameras earlier. She can never really escape. Her rebellion is sexy, but ultimately futile.

It’s got to be good to be Warren Buffett these days. HBO makes a documentary that depicts you saving the American economy while you’re at a Dairy Queen with your grandchildren. You get to look all magnanimous and cool in comparison to your fellow billionaires when you offer to pay more taxes. And apparently, you also get to have a children’s webseries called Secret Millionaires Club.

The show is kind of dorky and hilarious, and if Buffett wasn’t America’s Rich Grandpa, the show’s theme song, where the cast of adorable multi-racial moppets declare, “I’m good friends with Warren Buffett,” and the whole concept of them hanging out in a secret clubhouse in Buffett’s office would probably come across as pretty strange. But it respects kids’ intelligence, and in a moment when financial stresses increasingly are things that parents can’t keep quarantined for their children, finding a way to explain things like why it makes sense to wait to buy a new Wii, or why it’s so hard to get a business off the ground, is not the world’s worst idea.

In a way, I wish the show were even stranger and more narrative. We already have a Health Care Inequity Ghost, so maybe Buffett could use his considerable riches to reboot Ghostwriter and play a ghost who helps Gabby and Alex figure out what it actually means to keep a bodega afloat; Lenni what it means to survive in a creative economy; and Jamal what happens when the Post Office contracts and Grandma Jenkins gets laid off.

Now that I’m charging through the first season of The X-Files, I’m finding that I can’t help but compare that show’s FBI doctor who did her residency in forensic medicine, Special Agent Dana Scully, with everybody’s favorite federally-employed forensic anthropologist, Temperance Brennan. They’re both fascinating — and at the beginning of each show, single — female scientists who go by their last names and with partners who can be more spiritual than rational. And it’s interesting to see how each show handles a very smart woman who’s in conflict both with an institutionalized bureaucracy and a competing worldview. So, this far in my viewing, how do Scully and Bones stack up?

Style

Scully may be the only woman in the universe who can make a ’90s pantsuit look good. Perfectly coiffed and preternaturally composed (Gillian Anderson was just 24 when she got the role), if Scully’s hair goes up, as it does when she’s investigating a creepy Arctic emotion-manipulating tapeworm, or her clothes get mussed, as they do on her first case with Mulder, you know something serious is going down. Rocks pretty seriously ’90s lace on a date she’s set up on. Her apartment, at least what we’ve seen of it, tends towards minimalist and has an enormous bathroom. Brennan, by contrast, opts for jeans and blazers, accented with funky jewelry she picks up on her world travels. Lots of smokey eye makeup, too. And lab coats. Scully may have to deal with weird things, but Brennan has to handle grosser ones. Her apartment is similarly full of artifacts from her travels, one of which her father used to murder a corrupt FBI agent; tribal music; and a refrigerator that’s occasionally rigged to explode.

Partners

Man, is Fox Mulder annoying. A conspiracy theorist since the disappearance of his sister during their childhood, Mulder’s perpetually in trouble with authority, hectors Scully to question her assumptions when he isn’t turning on the charm — and frustratingly, is almost always right. The show, at least what I’ve seen of it so far, seems like it might be better if he was wrong sometimes. It’s more interesting if the road to the truth is genuinely hidden, and if it takes some work to find it. And if there’s some actual tension between Mulder’s gonzo tendency to sneak onto crash sites, commission computer viruses, and sleep in alleys, and Scully’s tendency towards straightforward investigation. But despite the fact that he’s kind of irritating, I get the early sexual tension. That scene in the pilot where Scully has Mulder check her for alien probes that turn out to be mosquito bites? Total sparks-flying moment.

Seeley Booth, by contrast, believes in something he can’t prove, one way or another: God. But this hunky FBI agent’s quarrel with his partner isn’t really about the existence of another world. It’s about whether she’s cutting herself off from certain experiences. Over the course of the show, as Brennan and Booth grow closer together, she becomes more open to the idea that everyone has their own way to grace, and he learns that the way she sees the world is miraculous even if it’s not divine. And he learns more respect for scientific inquiry, while she becomes more open about her empathy for victims. Also, they’re going to have what one assumes will be a pretty adorable kid. That’s not an alien implant.
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Welcome to the first installment of the Pop Culture and the Death Penalty Project. Up next week, the 1999 movie adaptation of Stephen King’s The Green Mile.

One of the things that struck me most about the structure of Native Son is how perfectly circular it is. In the introduction to the novel in the edition I read, the prefacer described Bigger’s attempt to clean the rat out of his family’s apartment as a humiliation that sets the stage for his murder of Mary Dalton. But it also previews Bigger’s ultimate fate. The rat’s dash from the Thomas family skillets is the same briefly successful evasion that Bigger will experience from the police. Its death in a box is similar to Bigger’s own decline in a cell, though of course Bigger has an emotional revelation the rat is incapable of. And it inspires Bigger’s mother to speak almost prophetically of his own negation and ultimate fate. “Bigger, sometimes I wonder why I birthed you,” she muses after he finally vanquishes the rat. “Maybe you oughtn’t’ve. Maybe you ought to left me where I was…You’ll regret how you living some day. If you don’t stop running with that gang of yours and do right you’ll end up where you never thought you would. You think I don’t know what you boys is doing, but I do. And the gallows is at the end of the road you traveling, boy. Just remember that.” And he does. “Bigger, did you think you’d ever come to this?” Mr. Max asks Bigger during the trial process. “Well, to tell the truth, Mr. Max, it seems sort of natural-like, me being here facing that death chair,” Bigger tells him. “Now I come to think of it, it seems like something like this just had to be.”

But the inevitability of someone committing a crime is one discussion, and the question of whether that punishment is just or effective is entirely another. The main argument made by the prosecution in Bigger’s murder trial seems to be that it is an effective deterrent. “Our experience here in Dixie with such depraved types of Negroes has shown that only the death penalty, inflicted in a public and dramatic manner, has any influence upon their peculiar mentality,” a source tells a Chicago newspaper for a story about Bigger’s trial. “Had that nigger Thomas lived in Mississippi and committed such a crime, no power under Heaven could have saved him from death at the hands of indignant citizens.” The prosecutor takes for granted that the death penalty will be a deterrent, telling the judge during sentencing that “Your Honor, millions are waiting for your word! They are waiting for you to tell them that jungle law does not prevail in this city! They want you to tell them that they need not sharpen their knives and load their guns to protect themselves. They are waiting, Your Honor, beyond that window! Give them your word so that they can, with calm hearts, plan for the future! Slay the dragon of doubt that causes a million hearts to pause tonight, a million hands to tremble as they lock their doors!”

There’s no question that, at various points in the novel, Bigger is afraid of death, and afraid, specifically, of the death penalty. That fear slackens somewhat when he believes he has his family and the Daltons fooled: “But at home at the breakfast table with his mother and sister and brother, seeing how blind they were; and overhearing Peggy and Mrs. Dalton talking in the kitchen, a new feeling had been born in him, a feeling that all but blotted out the fear of death.” When he’s going through his trial, he feels viscerally the horror of his death being made a symbol, though he has that realization only after her’s committed his crimes. Bigger reflects:
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The bridge is yours.

-Do we need slavery revenge flicks?

-Is broadband access a human right?

-Tom Hiddleston on playing Loki in The Avengers.

-The thought of Aaron Eckhart as Dennis Wilson gets me a little swoony. I demand a “God Only Knows” rendition!

-Zombieland may be on its way to TV.

I’ve said this before and I’ll say it again: if you’re not watching Idris Elba’s turn as a not-particularly-mentally-healthy police detective in Luther (which, as I write in The Atlantic today, may be the scariest show on television), you are missing. out. Whether the show’s making callbacks to London’s artistic history, tapping the underpinnings of racism in the U.K. to fuel unnerving crime sprees, or exploring the alienation of returning servicemembers, the show jumps off big issues to profoundly new and strange places. And Elba is fantastic in a role that gives him far greater range than playing Stringer Bell ever did, alternately wounded, sly, and forceful.

In preparation for the second series finale, which airs on BBC America tonight, I interviewed the show’s producer Phillippa Giles, and asked her about something that, as an American viewer, has always stood out to me. Whether it’s Luther’s South Asian wife, his white female boss in the first series, his friendship with the murderous but charming Alice Morgan (Ruth Wilson), and in this series, the fatherly interest he takes in a the daughter of a friend who’s been working in pornography and as a prostitute (watch out for an adorable scene between them tonight), the show is full of interracial relationships that range from the emotionally and sexually intimate, to the professionally bracing. In an environment where it’s striking when advertising campaigns start subtly including interracial couples and when our entertainment can seem rigidly divided between black and white audiences and black and white casts, Luther‘s profoundly refreshing.

“It was nothing to do with black or white,” Giles said of the casting of Ruth Wilson to play Alice Morgan. “Obviously it looks really good, you’ve got a red-headed woman and a dark guy, so that wasn’t bad. We would have cast anybody that had what Alice needs. It was just color-blind casting.”

When I told her how fresh the show’s approach to race — not quite a neutrality, but an insistence that race can be a factor without being the sole focus — felt to me, Giles said she was surprised.

“We always think we’re behind the States,” she told me. “We always color-blind cast. We thought we were copying you. We had no idea that you would feel that that was…Idris is brilliant. Not only is he a mentor to black writers, BBC has a development deal to bring on young black writers. He said he wanted us to try to reflect the country. We’ve tried really hard. We didn’t achieve that.” And when the show introduced an ambitious young black female detective to Luther’s team this year, Giles notes,
“She was written to be cast black or white. We really enjoyed that she was black.”

And I think that’s perfect. When shows and movies assume by default characters will be white and that if they’re going to end up black, or Latino, or Asian, that isn’t a neutral choice. There are stories that are driven by particular racial dynamics, and in that case, it may be important to, say, have a cop be white and a subject of an investigation be black. But if your story doesn’t absolutely require that characters be of a certain race or ethnicity, trying to eliminate any assumption about which race they’ll be before you cast a specific actor to play them seems like a decent rule of thumb. That may take a little work for white creators, but it’s not exactly onerous. And it’s something that Luther gets right and makes the show more fun to watch, both visually and narratively.

I’ll have more extended thoughts on Boss over the next couple of days leading up to its Friday premiere, but HitFix and AVClub columnist Ryan McGee and Aol TV critic Maureen Ryan were nice enough to join me to talk about the show on their podcast. Like me, Maureen is a former political reporter and, unlike me, lives in Chicago, and so has some interesting theories on why the city is making a resurgence right now. As I say on the podcast, Boss is an uneven show, vacillating between the extremely wonky and the operatic. But it’s got ambitions, which after a fall of sort of low expectations and poor execution, feels refreshing.

When Romenesko published the New York Times’ announcement of their expanded online opinion pages yesterday, Alternet editor Sarah Jaffe tweeted, “New York Times expands opinion coverage; only one woman has an opinion.” The plan announced by the paper certainly leaves room for more female contributors, whether in the “Frequent Op-Eds that will be exclusively available to online readers”‘ “Op-Docs, opinionated, short-video documentaries, with wide creative ranges, about current affairs and contemporary life from both renowned and emerging filmmakers”; the “among others” category in the new Campaign Stops blog, for which all announced contributors are men, or the “Additional enhancements to the Global Opinion section.” But it’s absolutely true that of all the names of people who are meant to get us excited about this new section, only one, that of naturalist Diane Ackerman, is a woman’s.

If what the Times wants is to bring in new readers with this revamp, the most glaringly obvious thing they could do is embrace diversity, not just of writers, but of subject material. I know that getting a slot at the Times is supposed to be a reward and validation, a career summing-up (Which, by the way, I think is worth challenging. Editorial pages would be more interesting if columnists had limited-term slots.), but that isn’t incompatible with going out, finding some folks who have built interesting sites and have valuable things to say, and buying, or at least renting, their content and their readership. Not everyone is drawn to a paper by the same thing. And not every views the experience of white men as equally valuable.

And more to the point, it’s always astonishing to me that the folks who put out these press releases, and these white dude-heavy lineups, don’t seem to understand how they look to other people, to other potential consumers. If you’re surrounded by older white men all day, I understand that might not look aberrational to you. But do people seriously not recognize that what is normal (and desirable) for them is not necessarily normal or desirable for everyone else? That doesn’t seem particularly hard to consider. And yet it’s a small cognitive effort that a lot of publishers seem to have tremendous difficulty making.