We’ve got no fewer than four women running for public office at all levels of government on network television this year — Leslie Knope on Parks and Recreation, Britney S. Pierce and Sue Sylvester on Glee, and Claire Dunphy on Modern Family — and two shows where women are at the core of big policy discussions — Carrie on Homeland and Anna on A Gifted Man. The awesome Chloe Angyal and I got together to discuss them all on this week’s Bloggingheads:

One thing we discussed that I think is interesting about Homeland is that by putting a woman in the role of violating other people’s civil liberties and by going to far in the war on terror, the show establishes an interesting cross-gender complicity. It isn’t just men who did this, it isn’t just the military. It’s all of us. Carrie may be feminine and fragile (and she has the best wardrobe of a CIA agent I have ever seen, I would die for her closet), but she’s entirely capable of bugging a man’s house and watching him sleep with his wife.

On the day of Muammar Qaddafi’s death, there’s something appropriate about the announcement of a new service that will help celebrities think twice about the people they take huge amounts of money to entertain at private events. The Qaddafi family were particularly aggressive clients of celebrity singers: Qaddafi’s son Hannibal paid Beyonce $2 million to perform in 2009, Mariah Carey got $1 million to perform at the same event, and Usher, Jay-Z, and Lionel Ritchie have also performed for the family or the regime.

But the Qaddafis were hardly the only authoritarians who bought performances by American stars, and these were hardly the only artists who clearly established the price at which they were willing to associate with dictators and human rights violators. I suppose its nice that very wealthy celebrities will now have a concierge service to make sure that they aren’t performing for secret war criminals, but with the more egregious offenders, a simple Google service should suffice. If folks want to play meaningfully in politics and social causes, they should demonstrate some integrity in gigs that represent egregious violations of their values.

I just read Grant Morrison, Frank Quitely, and Jamie Grant’s All-Star Superman courtesy Douglas Wolk, who gave me a copy last week, and I have to say, I was surprised by how incredibly sweet the comic is. I wasn’t really expecting that. The basic premise, for those not in the know, is Lex Luthor finds a way to essentially give Superman fast-developing cancer, leaving Superman to do a lot of bucket-list things: give Lois Lane the chance to experience his powers for the day; nail one last scoop for the Daily Planet; go back and visit the grave of Jonathan Kent, his adopted father; save the world one last time.

We tend to assume that people with superheroes will use their great powers for the greater good — or to commit great evil. But most of the dominant stories about extraordinarily able people don’t assume that they’ll turn inward, to projects of self-improvement, contemplation, and to the tender range of the emotional spectrum. When Superman tells Lois, who didn’t know he could sew or cook, that “I thought I should learn. My trip to the sun did more than triple my strength, Lois. It tripled my curiosity, my imagination, my creativity…The meal is from the actual one…from the Titanic…I picked the ingredients and prepared it myself,” it seems sort of mundane. But it’s also intensely human, and it’s striking that the things he’s picking to learn are traditionally feminine skills. We all know that Superman is compassionate, but it’s exciting to see him surprised or awed, as Quitely draws him when he sees Lois marching bold out of an alley in the suit that lets her experience his powers while he’s still shucking his Clark Kent disguise; as he is with a big arm cradling his father’s tombstone.

And the political nerd in me is interested to see the way All-Star Superman transmits that awe and empathy to us, through Lex Luthor, who in giving himself superpowers, accidentally taps into the way Superman sees the world, and is overwhelmed by it, if only temporarily. “I can actually see the machinery and wire connecting and separating everything since it all began,” he tells his niece, who is embarrassed by the sudden uncoolness of her favorite uncle.” This is how he sees all the time, every day. Like it’s all just us in here, together. And we’re all we’ve got….You’re supposed to be dead! I had it timed!…I saw how to save the world! I could have made everyone see. I could have saved the world if it wasn’t for you!” But of course he’s wrong. Superman is just an excuse. “You could have saved the world years ago if it mattered to you, Lex Luthor,” Superman reminds him, before knocking his nemesis out yet again.

Douglas thinks that after his defeat, Lex travels back in time and becomes Leo Quintum, the scientist to whom Superman entrusts his DNA and the secret of how to combine it with Lois’. I’ll admit that I was too absorbed in the emotions of All-Star Superman while reading it to pick up on the clues that he found, but it certainly seems plausible, and if so, it’s interesting in that it suggests that experiencing overwhelming empathy is transformative, even alchemical.

I wrote on Tuesday about how 2 Broke Girls had stumbled into being a good show by taking on the issues of We Are the 99 Percent, particularly credit card debt and student loans. But Hollywood’s moved quickly to capitalize on the glamor of Occupy Wall Street intentionally. There are rumors that The Dark Knight Rises is going to shoot at the site of the protests later this month, however unlikely that seems. And MTV, always on the lookout for a hot-button issue, is apparently dying to get an OWS protester into the next Real World house.

Getting incorporated into Hollywood products probably wouldn’t mean much of anything for the advancement of the actual messages and goals of Occupy Wall Street and the 99 Percent Movement. In a Batman movie, OWS would probably more of a backdrop to a different fight than a direct transliteration. It would be interesting to see a crowd turning on Bruce Wayne as part of Gotham’s rot, identifying him as the 1 percent, but the world of the movie would almost inevitably suggest that they’re wrong, but that their ire is a cross Bruce Wayne has to bear to serve his city (much as he performs the role of an oafish billionaire in Batman Begins). Similarly, the Real World would turn the act of protesting or the possession of debt into a trait that’s as much shorthand as the stock virgin or party animal.

But simply the fact that the movement is in demand suggests that it’s moved beyond the initial public perception of it as a bunch of untouchable anarchists. Some of that perception’s disturbing — among it, the gross Hot Chicks of Occupy Wall Street video identified by Racialicious. And no one should make the mistake of thinking that stars are going to lead the movement, or even move it forward. But if Hollywood can validate the actual messages of Occupy Wall Street as sexy instead of just using the movement as a vehicle for sexiness, it’ll be doing something worthwhile.

As I write this, I’m waiting for the end of the work day so I can go home and pick up my iPhone 4s (having made a full plunge and purchased an iPhone and a Young Lady’s Illustrated Primer in the same week). So I’ll have more data to report on this once I’ve done some actual experimenting of my own. But one thing that strikes me about the early reporting on what you can say to Siri and what she says back suggests that there’s something feminist at work in Apple’s chipper new assistant.

I know it sounds odd. My first reaction on hearing that Apple was embedding personal assistant software with the voice and name of a lady in its new phone was vexation. Did we seriously need to be a nation of Don Drapers, men and women alike handing over mundane tasks and dictating notes to a female assistant? If we were going to become a nation of fauxecutives, couldn’t we at least choose the gender of our assistant? Because if we all get one, I want to rescue Entourage‘s Lloyd from Ari. But it actually sounds like Siri’s set up to push back against the kind of sexual harassment a real woman like her might get from the Don Drapers of the world. As Slate notes:

The choice to make Siri a woman leads to predictable sorts of harassment, though I like how she brushes it off with both sarcasm and a turning of the mirror upon the master. If you call her a “bitch,” she will sometimes reply: “Why do you hate me? I don’t even exist.” For me, Siri’s voice isn’t especially bitchy or sexy. She evokes a second-grade teacher, one who is fast with a response but also willing to patiently explain. There’s also a pronounced robotic cast to the voice that I find reassuring, a reminder that the intelligence we’re dealing with is artificial.

And as a Tumblr dedicated to her utterances observes, queries like “Talk dirty to me” are met with responses ranging from “Humus. Compost. Pumice. Silt. Gravel,” to “The carpet needs vacuuming.” Siri’s supposed to adapt, so I’d be curious to see if you persistently abuse her, she learns to take it, or if she keeps pushing back. It’s a first little experiment in what seem likely to be more extensive relationships with artificial intelligence (something that the unfortunately-named upcoming HBO show China Doll will explore). And it’s nice to see that, if we’re going to have sort of stereotypical lady robots, they’re going to be able to show some guff.

The bridge is yours.

-A wonderfully nerdtastic interview with Paul Kupperberg of Life With Archie.

-TV networks’ fear of drama.

-The 10 geekiest moments on Community.

-From Desperate Housewives to the women who work for them.

-We get more raunch comedy and education reform from the stars of Bad Teacher!

In a fall full of sitcoms with marginally pleasant main sitcom characters surrounded by toxic-seeming people, ABC’s Happy Endings is a welcome exception. The characters seem close enough that when they needle each other, it’s got the rhythm of an established group rather than random nastiness that belies an inability to write affection convincingly. And it tells nice, subtle stories about race: it’s got an interracial couple as part of the group without making a big deal of it. And in last night’s episode, Brad (Damon Wayans, Jr.) enlists Max (Adam Pally) as his driver in a ploy to impress his boss, an older African-American man in a reversal of Driving Miss Daisy that was more about Brad’s insecurities about his job than race but played with race without being flip.

All of which is a long way of getting to something I thought was weird: the fact that throughout the episode, Dave keeps trying to accurately explain the housing crisis, and his friends keep treating his explanations of the role of risky mortgage-backed securities:

and extremely low down payments:

As if they’re not just boring, but wrong. Which they aren’t! They’re simplistic but essentially correct. At a time when shows like 2 Broke Girls are establishing their relevance through accurate plotlines based on the financial crisis, it would be smart for the show to use something like this to actually establish something about the characters. Is Dave smarter than everyone gives him credit for? Are his friends sillier? Rich enough to be oblivious? These are the kinds of things where a fact-checker can make a good show even smarter.

A coworker sent me this amazing reflection by David Ramsey about how listening to Lil Wayne helped him get through his first year of teaching in New Orleans:

In my first few weeks teaching in New Orleans’ Recovery School District, these were the questions I heard the most from my students:

1) “I gotta use it.” (This one might sound like a statement, but it’s a request—May I use the bathroom?)

2) “You got an ol’ lady?” (the penultimate vowel stretched, lasciviously, as far as it’ll go).

3) “Where you from?”

4) “You listen to that Weezy?”

I knew that third question was coming. Like many RSD teachers, I was new, and white, and from out of town. It was the fourth question, however, that seemed to interest my students the most. Dwayne Carter, aka Lil Wayne, aka Weezy F. Baby, was in the midst of becoming the year’s biggest rapper, and among the black teenagers that made up my student population, fandom had reached a near-Beatlemania pitch. More than ninety percent of my students cited Lil Wayne on the “Favorite Music” question on the survey I gave them; about half of them repeated the answer on “Favorite Things to Do.”

For some of my students, the questions Where are you from? and Do you listen to Lil Wayne? were close to interchangeable. Their shared currency—as much as neighborhoods or food or slang or trauma—was the stoned musings of Weezy F. Baby.

The answer was, sometimes, yes, I did listen to Lil Wayne. Despite his ubiquitous success, my students were shocked.

“Do you have the mix tapes?” asked Michael, a sixteen-year-old ninth grader. “It’s all about the mix tapes.”

The following day, he had a stack of CDs for me. Version this, volume that, or no label at all.

And that’s just about all I listened to for the rest of the year.

I was talking to Alexandra Lange of Let’s Get Critical about how frustrated we were that, in addition to not announcing women columnists in its expansion of its opinion section, the New York Times hadn’t announced a single cultural initiative in that same expansion. The segregation of culture from policy and politics has always struck me as extremely strange. If you want to talk to and deeply engage with people who come from profoundly different places than you, it may be helpful to know facts and figures about them, but the actual conversation will probably not begin with a discussion of their graduation rates or poverty rates. Icebreakers aren’t the sum of change. But conversations and common ground have to begin somewhere.

In the course of a long discussion about how to get to a place where Hollywood and mass audiences recognize that stories with minority leads, and that contain references to minority culture and concerns, can also be vehicles for universal stories, commenter Paulie made, over the course of two comments, a valuable point that leads to a question with no easy answer. He wrote:

Can we agree, for example, that the work of Tyler Perry is simply not very good? It has no universal appeal. It’s created solely to pander to the lowest-common-denominator in black audiences. If white people like me dislike Tyler Perry, it’s not because his work is “too black.” It’s because it sucks.

I’m sure you can come up with counter-examples of stuff that actually was artistically good, and should have had universal appeal, but was rejected for being too black. (Jazz certainly comes to mind, along with many other forms of black music that were eventually embraced by white audiences, but were initially written off as being solely black.)…My point in the post before that was that quality storytelling is inherently universal. Of course this means that the concept should be defined in concert with minority populations. My point applies in reverse as well: if something only appeals to white audiences but nobody else, then maybe that’s a sign it’s not actually very good.

It’s a really tough situation: when all you’ve got isn’t very good, do you champion it? Ask people to turn out, spend money on it, ignore its flaws in the hopes that it’ll create space for something better? I was profoundly relieved when Bridesmaids turned out to be genuinely excellent so I didn’t have to feign enthusiasm or to write a very qualified endorsement as I’ve done in the past. I could recommend it unreservedly, and be pleased that it did so well because it’s not the thing that needs to succeed to let us get the good thing. It is the good thing.

But I do hit my limits sometimes. And it was interesting that after we finished that discussion yesterday, commenter Kyessa L. Moore wrote a long critique of my piece explaining why I find the way Alan Ball (I would note, a white man with an extremely spotty record on race) has framed Tara Thornton as a perpetual victim exhausting:

Are you really beyond the ability to understand or see the desire of a child of an alcoholic single mother (with no other family) to take advantage of the shelter and care being offered by a woman with so much to give and other people in need under her care? Can you truly be faulting Tara for being bewitched? Do you fault everyone else for their bewitchment as well? And are You Really asking Tara to have been psychic and discerned that the nice lady was really a maenad intent on destroying her life? Because I refuse to believe that someone who went to college would expect precognition of a Black female character as the grounds for the character to be considered ‘dynamic.’..Clearly, the reasons you present for why Tara is “static” are really reasons rooted in a desire for her character to be superhuman, infallable, maternal, and rooted in a quasi-behavioral Whiteness which you point out as being necessary for this to be possible…Now, if you list wonderful things and add, “–and she’s white.”, then follow by saying, “he made her black and an object of perpetual humiliation”, what you are doing, even if inadvertently, is setting up the similarity between the wonderful world of possibility that is White Tara in the book and how awful Black Tara is in the show. You are linking the characteristics to color not for the purpose of clarity, but to further establish why Black Tara is so faulty for this indistinct, intangible but seemingly preferential list of vague plot details.

I don’t think this is a particularly accurate description of my piece, and I’ve said as much to Ms. Moore in comments. Because, look, at the end of the day, I don’t need Tara to have any particular set of characteristics for me to like her more. All I need to see is that she gets as much of a shot as anyone else on the show to win.

My dislike is aimed at Alan Ball’s choices, not at Tara herself. As a white writer, it makes me viscerally uncomfortable to see another white writer take a character, make the conscious decision to turn her from white to black, and then make her the perpetual and most persistent object of abuse on his television show. Maybe, in the process, he’s turned her into a profound and moving portrait of an abuse victim that resonates deeply with some people. I don’t have the lived experience to speak to that. And even if some folks think Ball’s gotten it right, I just can’t tell people to embrace the character and the show when they come out of a process that seems to me like it could lead not to the next good thing, but to something disastrous.