In his most recent appearance on Conan O’Brien’s show, Louis C.K. tells an absolutely brutal anecdote about a radio appearance in Arizona where the person giving him a ride started complaining about “the Mexicans” and what happens when he told her about his experience coming to America after years of living in Mexico and speaking mostly Spanish:

We’ve talked some about C.K. and race, and the extent to which he does or doesn’t claim his Mexican heritage, so it’s nice to hear that he uses his powers of Mexicanness for good. I’m seeing C.K. in Baltimore tonight, so in keeping with this video, I promise not to tweet through the experience. Though I will take notes so I can give y’all a full report on Monday.

I feel sort of guilty comparing Hell on Wheels, AMC’s new Western about the construction of the Trans-Continental Railroad, to Deadwood, but it’s sort of hard not to do when the show is trying as hard as it possibly can to ape as many Deadwood elements as it can transfer to a railroad camp. As I wrote in my review at the Atlantic:

The minister who’s set himself up in Hell on Wheels is a straightforward prairie minister (though one with a dark secret that ultimately reinforces the show’s sympathy for former slave-owners and advocates of slavery), rather than the tormented Union civil war veteran who ministered to Deadwood in its first season before succumbing to the brain tumor that was robbing him of his faith. And when the Hell on Wheels minister mildly asks “Haven’t we had our fill of war? Our fill of killing?” it’s no match for the anguished cries of Deadwood’s camp doctor raging at God: “What conceivable use was the screaming of those men? Did you need to hear them to know your omnipotence?”

Hell on Wheels doesn’t compete with Deadwood in the arts of cussing or whoring, either. Declaring of the Emancipation Proclamation, as Elam Ferguson does at one point, that “Ain’t nothing good coming from this either…Look what this got. I might as well wipe my ass with it,” or the sight of Doc Durant denouncing his own pitch to investors as “Twaddle and shite,” don’t remotely compare to Swearengen promising a crowd fired up by rumors of a massacre by Native Americans “I will offer a personal $50 bounty for every decapitated head of as many of these godless heathen cocksuckers as anyone can bring in. And God rest the souls of that poor family. And pussy’s half price, next 15 minutes.” Hell on Wheels’ prostitutes are hookers with hearts of gold—and in one case, tattoos from her time in Indian captivity—rather than full-fledged citizens in this rough new society, and their interactions with men are entirely predictable.

The one thing that Hell on Wheels has on Deadwood is the sight of Common in a jaunty hat, though of course that doesn’t make up for the show’s Confederate nostalgia. There’s a really interesting story to be told about the black experience in Westward expansion, or about the railroad and Manifest Destiny from the perspective of the Native Americans who are being displaced by it. But this isn’t it. Also, this is a reminder that I need to finish blogging Deadwood. That starts again tomorrow.

Brett Ratner is not exactly a producer of sophisticated entertainments or a sensitive societal compass, so I was prepared for Tower Heist to be a tiresome mess. It’s not a perfect movie, but he’s lucky enough to be working with a script that is acid — if not revolutionary — about the callousness of the 1 percent, and has action sequences that if not precisely believable, have some nicely scary bits. I’m not hugely fond of the movie’s main premise — that Bernie Madoff-like Ponzi schemers are responsible for the recession, rather than people doing risky but entirely legal things and taking advantage of people’s financial illteracy — but Tower Heist manages to be a nice movie about the pain of downward mobility.

It’s not easy to make me feel sorry for investment bankers who have fallen on hard times, but Matthew Broderick, as the depressed ex-Merrill Lynch trader who Josh Kovacs, the manager of the Tower, has to evict, actually succeeds. When Josh comes to tell him to get out, he asks if Mr. Fitzhugh knows anything about the markets. “I don’t know. I used to know. That’s why they hired me at Merrill Lynch,” Fitzhugh confesses mournfully. “I went to Yale 20 years ago. Now, I’m a squatter.” Later, when Josh comes and finds him in a miserable hotel, he explains in a perfect deadpan that “I’m thinking of becoming a male prostitute.” And he provides a bitter perspective on why Arthur Shaw took on the Tower employees’ pension fund even after his Ponzi scheme started collapsing, telling Josh that “At a certain point, it isn’t about securities fraud. It’s about catering.” Some folks on the right have used the idea that Occupy Wall Street has downwardly mobile participants as some sort of evidence that the movement is about preserving existing privileges rather than a just realignment of the system. But I tend to think that it’s more about a recalibration, a reminder that the American dream is about security and equal opportunity, rather than the promise of vast wealth.

There’s another nice reminder of that fact in the scene where Josh informs the staff that his decision to ask Shaw to manage their pension fund has left them broke. “I never asked anyone to triple my portfolio,” Odessa (a very funny Gabby Sidibe) tells him bitterly, exposing the ridiculousness of the promise Shaw used to haul Josh in. She just wanted a reasonable rate of return. Lester, the doorman whose planned retirement is ruined by Shaw’s fraud, just wanted to go on a cruise with his wife. It was Josh, who listens to a ludicrous lifestyle radio show about cheese so he can recommend food and wine pairings to Shaw, and mistakes their chess games and Shaw’s professions of familiarity for friendship, who let himself get sucked into an unsustainable dream.

A key question for a lot of folks about this movie is what it means for Eddie Murphy’s career. He gives a good performance in a deeply annoying trope, the black man hired by pasty white dudes to teach them how to commit crimes. But he’s not nearly as much fun as Gabby Sidibe, proving she can crush comedy as well as drama in her turn as Odessa, the Jamaican maid turned safecracker for the team. I can see how some folks might see her as a stereotypical sassy, curvy black woman. But she’s refreshingly and hilariously tough and pragmatic, entering the movie to inform Josh, “My work visa is about to expire. You must find me a husband!” and later, when her plan to drug an FBI agent with a piece of cake fails, explaining nonchalantly, “He’s allergic to chocolate. I had to beat him.” And honestly, it’s nice to see a movie where a woman can be a member of a team not because she’s a hot distraction, but because she has skills that are absolutely vital to the operation.

A couple of weeks ago, some literary wags started tweeting that we should #OccupyAvonlea, the fictional home of that infamous anarchist green hair dye fan Anne of Green Gables. Since, comic book characters have occupied Gotham and Metropolis. But Gotham seems like it would be a dangerous place to camp out in (and how much park space does it really have?), and Avonlea’s a little remote to keep an occupation going. So here are the five best fictional places to occupy:

1. Sunnydale: One of Scott Eric Kaufman’s students suggested it would be a bad idea to occupy a town that’s built on a Hellmouth. But given security concerns at Occupy encampments around the country, there could be a definitive advantage to having a slayer on the prowl, keeping an eye out for vampires and sexual predators alike. And Buffy and the Scoobies have special experience in taking down nefarious mayors, so Occupy Sunnydale wouldn’t have to worry about getting kicked out of their encampments:

2. Pawnee: Leslie Knope can conjure parks out of pits. She can throw harvest festivals while dispelling Native American curses. She can program repeated end-of-the-world vigils. She summons baseball fields out of vacant lots, and at next to no cost. As a mainstream Democrat who’s deeply invested in the electoral process, Leslie might not be fully on board with the alternative world-building element of the Occupy movement, but the woman can handle a logistical challenge. Occupy Pawnee would have the best tents, the most Port-a-Potties, and the tastiest Reasonablist-provided donuts:

3. Nellyville: St. Louis rapper Nelly’s created a fictional kingdom that sounds like a pretty great place to hang out. As he explains, it’s a town that’s already committed to rectifying income inequality, where “all newborns get half a mill” — so much for pesky student loan debt — paper boys have Range Rovers, the town’s redeemed the false promise of “40 acres and a mule” with “40 acres and a pool,” and the weather’s determined by democratic vote (if not by consensus). Still, Nellyville’s gender politics and criminal justice could use some work — automatic executions for murder are a little harsh.

4. Westeros: If the Occupy movement would be about perfecting a society that’s in decent shape in Nellyville, Occupy Westeros would be a somewhat more urgent proposition. After all, in this shattered kingdom, the 1 percent don’t just control most of Westeros’ wealth: they can rape and murder members of the 99 percent with impunity. There would be logistical challenges, too. In Westeros, when they say winter is coming, they don’t just mean you’re going to have to keep taking snow-soaked sleeping bags to the laundromat to dry them out until April. But holdfasts are easier to defend than public parks. As are giant walls made of ice. And nothing brings the 99 percent together faster than hordes of ice zombies:

5. The Ministry of Magic: Those sections of Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows may have turned off a lot of readers, but they mean that some of the most politically potent figures in magical Britain have a lot of camping experience. Plus, the ability to have tents that are bigger on the inside than they are on the outside solves overcrowding, and Hermione’s enchanted purse would solve a lot of logistics problems. Given that income inequality has a discomfiting tendency to produce a lot of genocidal racists in the country’s wizarding community, pushing the Ministry towards a more just economic system and more tolerant policies towards Muggles can go hand in hand.

This post contains spoilers through the Nov. 3 episode of Community.

It may have taken some time, but much more so than “Remedial Chaos Theory,” which I thought was conceptually brilliant but emotionally static, this was the episode that made me feel like there’s a plan for this season of Community that moves the characters forward. And it resolved my concern about what the show is going to do with John Goodman, who I thought was overly broad in his first appearance, existing mostly to confirm old stereotypes about the Dean.

But now he’s got something to do, and it’s terrific. I think the decision to turn the air conditioner repair school into a secret society, complete with “space paninis and black Hitler,” and to put it in competition with Troy’s plumber mentor, is brilliant. It’s squarely in line with what Community does best, which is to take the universal experiences of college, like ordering your first legal drink, or in this case, joining a fraternity or secret society and picking a career path, and lending it a surreal twist that reveals something about that universal experience that other college shows and movies don’t. In this case, it’s both the way professions fetishize themselves, and the way joining a new group simultaneously separates you from your old group of friends and makes them more important than ever because they can help you process what you’re going through. I also really appreciate the way the show is lending a mystique to blue-collar jobs: “Our predecessors were slaves, fanning the pharaohs with palm fronds,” the Vice Dean tells Troy. “We became experts at making our surperiors comfortable, and along the way, we learned to make ourselves comfortable. Now we are the pharaohs, Troy.” But it’s not just his hyped-up mystique: it’s that Troy is ridiculously gifted in a way that’s treated like it’s valuable and powerful.
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This blog’s seen a recent really unpleasant uptick in trolling and now, violent threats. When I started posting some of the things people were saying on Twitter, Fast Company editor Nancy Miller suggested that bloggers start tweeting the harassment they get, with names and institutional affiliations attached, and the hashtag #ThreatoftheDay. This is a great idea, particularly because of a change in Google procedure that means that if you’re telling me, as Urbana-Champaign student John Edwards did today that “I would applaud Odd Future if they slapped you in the face” (something he immediately insisted was just a joke), that Google is indexing your comments, so that comment is now a part of Mr. Edwards’ record.

So here’s the deal. Threaten me, and I will cheerfully do my part to make sure that when employers, potential dates, and your family Google you, they will find you expressing your desire to see a celebrity assault a blogger. And then I will ban you. Or as Jay-Z puts it, via a suggested soundtrack from Spencer Ackerman, “I put the wolves on ya” by which I mean the Wolves of Internet Disapprobation rather than actual carnivores:

The bridge is yours.

-Jennifer Lopez. Live-action Carmen Sandiego movie. It’s a thing.

-Head of major studio admits something everyone knows.

-Nelson Mandela’s grandchildren are shopping a reality show.

-We’re getting an X-Men: First Class sequel.

-William Gibson on the co-option of cyberpunk.

This post contains spoilers through “Day 17″ of Neal Stephenson’s Reamde. Feel free to spoil beyond that in comments, but please label your posts as such. For next week, let’s finish the novel.

I’ve spent a lot of our discussions of Reamde talking about Stephenson’s approach to masculinity, which is rooted in a kind of self-sufficiency. And one of the things I enjoyed about this section of the novel was the parallels, accidental or intentional, Stephenson set up between how the same skills function for men and women. “Men wanted to be strong,” Zula reflects at one point. “One way to be strong was to be knowledgeable. In so many areas, it was not possible to be knowledgeable without getting a Ph.D. and doing a postdoc. Guns and hunting provided an out for men who wanted to be know-it-alls but who couldn’t afford to spend the first three decades of their lives getting up to speed on quantum mechanics or oncology.” But it’s interesting — and I think profoundly touching — the way Zula reflects on how she approached a wealth of knowledge the first time she had an opportunity to consume it broadly: by backing away from it. Knowledge, it’s clear, is power: “Patricia, Richard’s sister and Zula’s new mom, had explained to her that these contained anything that you could ever possibly want to know, on any topic, and had pulled one down to look up the entry on Eritrea. Zula, completely missing the point, had assured Patricia that she would never on any account touch those books.”

And the key to Zula’s survival, it turns out, is the esoteric nature of her collected knowledge and her willingness to employ it, a knowledge of how both guns and Islamic terrorists work, a bit of Morse code and psychology. It’s interesting to see Richard’s pride in her: “He knew a great deal more now of how Zula had comported herself during the apartment building showdown and in the hours afterward, and all of it made him proud and would make the rest of the family proud when it went up on the Facebook page and when, in future years, they retold the story at the re-u. And that was all true whether Zula was alive or, as seemed likely, dead.” Is it because she’s revealed herself, in extremis, to be an unusually good illustration of Forthrastness? Is being a Forthrast to exemplify masculine ideals of knowledge, strength, tenacity, and general cussedness, something that’s available to men and women alike?
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I’ve been writing a lot about the state of romantic comedy recently, and I’ll admit all of my thinking played into some anxiety I was feeling about the return of Bones. I know not everyone here loves the show or the character as much as I do, but I had a real fear that the show would decide that pregnancy would instantly transform one of the prickliest, most independent mainstream female television characters into a miraculously empathetic earth mother.

The thing about Bones is that a lot of the time, she’s kind of jerk, or refuses to behave in ways that would make people see her as a person and then gets frustrated when they’re hurt or angry with her. Sometimes, this can result in a breakthrough, as in the first-season episode where, goaded by a prosecutor who describes her as cold and unfeeling, she finds a way to explain how her extreme rationality is meant as a gesture of respect to victims. And sometimes, she just causes a mess, as when she tries to date two men at once, one for sex, and one for intellectual companionship, using technicalities to convince herself she’s not exclusive with either one and giving neither the respect of trying to engage with them on another level. But Bones has built a good life in part by making good use of her independence. She’s traveled and solved crimes around the world. She dates without anxiety about any artificial set of rules, which makes me more thankful than I can possibly say. When Sully asked her to quit her job and sail around the world with him, she said no because supporting him in pursuing his dream would have meant giving up hers entirely.

And so when she gets pregnant, it’s something she’s wanted, but the show also acknowledges that it comes with costs. When Angela told her on last night’s episode that she’d never be alone again, it was comforting, but it also means that Bones’ life is going to change radically, expanding in some ways that she can’t predict and being curtailed in others where she knows the concrete benefit. When she gets prickly about the prospect of giving up her apartment, it’s because we know that she has a really great apartment that’s a product of the money she’s earned and her travel. And when she gets all rigid and anthropological about Booth’s insistence that they get their own place rather than moving in to hers, it’s an illustration of a tough fact: that Bones may not really have the emotional skills to be in a long-term relationship yet, and she’s going to have to pick them up fairly quickly. That’s the basis for a really interesting and more-honest-than-usual romantic comedy.

This post contains spoilers for the Nov. 3 episode of Parks and Recreation.

Three good things happened in this fairly uneven episode of Parks and Recreation: Leslie’s regret at breaking up with Ben surfaced; we got Ron Swanson’s view on the separation of church and state and a constitutional right to privacy; and the Entertainment 720 subplot that has mucked up this season so far is finally, mercifully over.

The cult subplot was extremely over the top it was, but I do appreciate that the cast treated it with the same deadpan calm that they treat everything, with Leslie checking Google calendars for open dates for apocalypse vigils and Ron taking every opportunity he can to advance his side hustles (I’m amazed Chris didn’t bust him for making like Tom and Snake Juice, though). I do generally really like the idea that Pawnee is outwardly this normal town with a deeply bizarre history, where the residents handle even the strangest experiences with absolute aplomb. And Chris’s cheerful approach to the cultists with questions about their text, beginning with “Full disclosure, I think they’re Bonkersville,” was one of the better uses of his perpetual optimism the show’s made this season. Plus, it brought him and Ann closer together, which I’m in favor of. Ann’s love life was diverting last season, but the two of them feel like a bit too much of a typical television couple kept apart by ridiculousness rather than real obstacles.

And speaking of relationships, Leslie’s reaction when Ben tells her they can’t hang out any more was some of the best acting Amy Poehler’s done in this role. I appreciate that the show demonstrates that there’s a cost to these kinds of decisions. “We broke up because of me,” Leslie confesses to Ron mournfully. “But I have to tell you, Ron, if the world was ending tomorrow, I’d want to be with him.” Parks and Recreation may be a romantic comedy, but it’s one that subtly undermines tropes. There is no chance for a big romantic gesture here, because that could ruin Leslie’s campaign and get Ben fired, just people stumbling towards what they want. The prospect of him hooking up with a pretty reporter is perfect not just because said reporter is someone Leslie’s always tried to control, but because if they go forward, it’s almost inevitable that their affair will be revealed. To win this race, Leslie’s going to have to let go not just of romantic possibilities but of the idea that she can behave exactly as she always has. The world is not the Parks Department, no matter how often it seems like Leslie can manage everything.

Finally, there was the end of Tom’s dream and the fulfillment of April and Andy’s. I thought both were quite sweet stories, though substantially unmoored from the plot. For Tom, at least, it was a return to an emotional tempo that makes sense with the rest of the show. It’s hard not to look at Entertainment 720 and be a bit frustrated with Tom. He’s not a stupid guy: Snake Juice may produce the world’s worst hangovers, but it was lethally effective, and he killed Lil’ Sebastian’s memorial service. And it’s too bad that his effort to strike out on his own couldn’t have been a more measured, meaningful transition that would have brought him into Pawnee’s business community, broadening the scope of the show as Leslie prepares to leave the Parks Department. Similarly, I wonder if April and Andy’s bucket list night marks a turning point for two of them, their growth into something approaching an actual adult couple. A lot of tonight’s episode was about the tough parts of being an actual grownup instead of pop culture’s idea of one, and it was nice to have a reminder that along with the difficult decisions, sometimes you get wonder and beauty.