I feel like I’ve been kind of hard on Tina Fey when I’ve written about her recently, mostly motivated by the fact that I don’t think 30 Rock is particularly funny any more. I haven’t missed it at all this fall, and I think I might be done with Liz Lemon’s stale eccentricities and lack of growth. I do think it’s important for women to be able to have a diversity of interests, and to diverge from socially acceptable norms of femininity if they want, and to tell a wide array of women’s stories, though, so I was happy to see that Fey hosted a couple of NPR specials called “The Hidden World of Girls.” The project started by letting people call in and spend four minutes telling stories about the things about them that no one knows, about their rituals, about their daughter who became a radical mechanic in Vermont, and then they picked some folks for longer interviews. I particularly liked the segment on Irish Travelers in the first episode — I know I’ve heard of Irish Travelers before, but I knew precisely nothing about them, and coming of age rituals were a particularly interesting way to approach the culture as a whole:

Anyway, it’s a nice reminder that there are different kinds of stories to about women (and about men, and everyone else) than the conventional scripts that get followed a lot of the time. The world is big, and strange, and fascinating, and marvelous. And this is the kind of week where that sort of reminder is particularly valuable.

Since I delayed The Yiddish Policeman’s Union for us to do Reamde, let’s get on track and start it next week. Read through Chapter 12; that runs to a little over 100 pages in most of the editions I’ve seen. And I’m excited to discuss this one with y’all.

Apparently, the movie, which is about a brutally repressive centralized government that forces families, who value their children highly, to give up two young people to fight to the death in a televised reality show every year, is going to be one of the 20 American movies that get screened in China next year. I’m honestly somewhat surprised that The Hunger Games made it through the approval process, given that the ultimate theme is the series is violent uprising against said repressive centralized government and the crony class supported by it. But hey! Maybe China figured it was just another Twilight thing with the girl and the blonde dude and the brunette dude and the teenagers will love it instead of spending time on the Internet? Either way, I’ll be fascinated to see what kind of box office it does.

Normally, I would never tell you to watch something just because it would make someone mad. But noted Islamophobe Pamela Geller is apparently vexed that TLC’s All-American Muslim, a new reality show about a group of Muslim families in Dearborn, Michigan, doesn’t achieve what she thinks of as balance, by which she means including storylines where Muslims commit crimes based on their faith. So I’d really like to see the show, which premieres at 10 on Sunday, do smashingly well as a rebuke to folks like her, and to the idea that we should based practitioners of a faith by its extremists.

You should also watch All-American Muslim because it’s a very good show: warm, funny, with great characters, high-stakes storylines, and the some of the most thoughtful discussions of faith I’ve ever seen on mainstream television, or in mainstream popular culture at all. First, the characters: it’s nice to have so many people to like on a television show. Blowsy Shadia’s the least observant member of her fairly observant family, but she’s sweet and funny. Nawal and Nader are expecting a son, and watching them attend a childbirth class, even though it’s not traditional in Dearborn’s Muslim community, or seeing Nader get extremely anxious when faced with a tiny, adorable baby in a tutu makes Up All Night‘s instincts for parenting comedy look clumsy. And seeing the Muslim football coach of Dearborn’s high school team explain to the Christian parents of a black player how he’s trying to balance the obligations of Ramadan for observant players with the need to get the team in championship shape is a great moment of dialogue. In an era of increasingly vile reality television characters, and in a fall television season that’s stumbled in part by relying heavily on abrasive main and supporting characters, it’s a nice to have people to get invested in and to root for.

And it’s fascinating to me that two of the best new shows this season, Homeland and All-American Muslim, are direct and thoughtful contemplations of faith. So much of the conversation about Islam in America in the aftermath of September 11 has been dominated and misdirected by conspiracy theorists like Geller rather than rational attempts at dialogue and understanding. And perhaps the greatest service All-American Muslim does is in demonstrating that Islam isn’t a monolith. The characters banter back and forth about head scarves, drinking, their personal relationships with God, the motivations behind conversions, not because these are abstractions, but because they’re trying to figure out how to live their lives a decision at a time. And while getting that window into Islam is useful for the cause of understanding and tolerance, it would be a mistake to think of the show as spinach. It’s narratively refreshing to have characters with a different set of motivations than the ones we normally see on television, and to see those motivations interact with the ones we’re familiar with, like the search for love and professional ambition. Complications, as long as they’re not ridiculously contrived, tend to make for better story-telling, and in this case, they absolutely do. I can’t imagine what it would be like, for example, to desperately want a child but to have a rabbi tell me that I couldn’t use donor sperm and still have a child recognized as my husband’s.

I don’t think All-American Muslim will change television, or even reality television forever. And as much as I agree that the greater integration of Muslims into our fictional and reality-based popular culture is an important goal, I don’t think one show alone will banish intolerance. But there’s something to be said for executing extremely well within an established genre and framework. And even more to be said for asserting that good entertainment and good causes aren’t mutually exclusive.

The bridge is yours.

-Omelas State University.

-Another movie about journalists in war zones.

-Fashion as art.

-Woo Miles Davis biopic.

-Increasingly excited for Red Tails:

This post contains spoilers for Neal Stephenson’s Reamde.

There are a lot of things that are fascinating about Reamde, which, though I think it’s far from Stephenson’s best, is an enjoyable riff on macho adventure stories. But one of the things that’s lingered with me most is the fact that this is a story about international terrorism that ends with an event much like real ones: the shooting of a notorious terrorist in the head by a noted American badass. And yet the person who does the shooting is a private citizen rather than an agent of the United States government, which is strikingly marginal to the Forthrast and Friends War on Terror.

Yes, government agents play small roles in this story. Seamus, a late entry, is a highly skilled government agency, but his most important function is getting Csongor, Yuxia and Marlon into the United States, in part by explaining that he’s going to try his darndest to marry Yuxia. Similarly, Olivia’s a government agency, but she does her most important work when she’s kind of off the reservation, causing a lot of trouble with Sokolov or trekking into the rural United States by foot and bus to hook up with Jacob’s clan. But the people who kill far and away the most terrorists, and who come up with the most creative and effective responses to terrorism do so as private citizens. I’m all for the idea that terrorism should be handled by law enforcement, and when strictly necessary, by surgical military strikes rather than big wars, but there’s something very different about suggesting that we could have a more targeted response to terrorism than by suggesting we can make it not just private, but personal, enterprise.

It seems to be part of a larger concern the book has with will. The terrorists have to continually and deliberately stick to their rejection of Western society lest they fall prey to its temptations: “they’d made a conscious decision to turn their backs on all that. Like smokers or drinkers who’d gone straight, they were more dogmatic about this than anyone who’d come to that place naturally. Only Jones had the self-confidence to let himself be amused, and that was how he and Richard ended up making eye contact.” Seamus’s argument about getting his motley crew to the United States is largely based on their sheer cussedness: “Let’s focus on the fact that these people have been in physical contact with Abdallah Jones, rammed his vehicle, shot him in the head, been tortured by him, in the very, very recent past. Seems worthy of a free ticket to Langley, don’t you think? Can’t we buy these kids a cup of coffee at least?” Zula’s determination is a product of the fact that early in her life, she had absolutely no choice but to keep going: “she had dreamed of the flight from Eritrea, the six-month barefoot march into the Sudan and the quest for a refugee camp willing to take her group. The faces had faded from her memory, but the landscape, the vegetation, the feel of the march had stayed with her and become the continuo line underlying many of her dreams.” Chet has the courage to take out a bunch of the terrorists via suicide bombing. And for Richard, his moment of clarity comes when he’s able to focus his will for the first time in years: “He was in beautiful wilderness that he had known for almost forty years, just sitting and waiting, alert and alive, banged up, half in shock, but probably soaked in endorphins and adrenaline for just that reason. And no one could reach him via phone or email, Twitter or Facebook, and bother him. His whole mind, his whole attention was focused on one thing for the first time that he could remember.”

And the people who exhibit that kind of will make it to the end or die with honor. In an odd way, I thought the finale, which is reminiscent of the epilogue to Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, worked better than that book. In Harry Potter, the moral of the story is that if you defeat great evil, you get to settle down to a comfortable middle-class existence: normality is the highest prize. But in Reamde, there’s a sense of lingering costs, and of a continual striving towards greatness. Richard deals with his guilt by giving Sokolov John’s legs. Yuxia’s sticking with Seamus for now, but she’s not giving in easily—his quest continues. Zula’s convinced she has something to pay for. The corporation’s proved itself flexible enough to incorporate Marlon into its corporate structure: hackers aren’t really rebels, when you end up with terrorists in the mix. And now that Zula’s proved herself, Csongor’s next up to try to demonstrate that he’s worthy to become a Forthrast. The world comes full circle in a year. And the work continues.

Towards the end of the immortal baseball movie Bull Durham, Annie Savoy reflects that “Baseball may be a religion full of magic, cosmic truth, and the fundamental ontological riddles of our time, but it’s also a job.” What she meant is that for the men who play it, the game can be mundane, difficult, frustrating, and an obligation more than it is a joy. But watching the story of Penn State football coach Joe Paterno’s insufficient action when he learned that his former defensive coordinator and coach emeritus of the team had assaulted a child in Penn State facilities unfold, culminating in his firing late last night, I’ve been reflecting on another sense of that statement. No matter how important the work of sports is, whether economically to schools and regions, or emotionally to fans, it’s work. And if you’re incapable of performing it in ways that comport with the law, the ethics of your profession, and basic decency, it should be totally uncontroversial for you to be dismissed.

Jerry Sandusky raped a child in Penn State football facilities. It took three and a half weeks for Sandusky to be banned from the locker room after he was caught committing sexual assault. According to the Grand Jury report on the charges against Sandusky, Paterno didn’t even attend a follow-up meeting on Sandusky’s conduct after the witness to that rape reported it to him. Even if someone under Paterno was responsible for handing out and taking back locker room keys and the rights that go with them, Paterno has some responsibility for the facilities that were a part of his program, and for whether or not the team continues to give offices, facilities access, and honorifics associated with the program to people who are no longer staff or players. You’re not providing a professional environment for your players if your locker room is a place where children are being abused. You’re not providing a safe environment for your players if you let a sex offender in their locker room, even if he’s a pedophile and unlikely to target any of them. And ESPN’s Chris Fowler made the point last night that by not encouraging or directly helping the witness go to the police, Paterno sent the wrong message to his graduate assistant — and to people everywhere — that the honorable thing to do is to keep quiet to protect powerful perpetrators, rather than to report crimes perpetrated against particularly vulnerable victims.

And yet, people seem furious at the Penn State Board of Trustees for doing the decent, professional thing and firing Paterno. Some Penn State students rallied in support of Paterno at his house yesterday (others with an appropriate sense of events held a vigil for Sandusky’s victims), unaware that the sister of one of Sandusky’s victims attends school with them. When Penn State Board of Trustees Vice Chairman John Surma faced reporters after the Board’s decisions, some of the questions were vituperative. One wanted to know why the Board couldn’t let Paterno ride out the season and finish his career “with a little bit of dignity.” Another wanted to know what Surma had to say about “the perception that the Board has been gunning for Coach Paterno since ’04″ and was simply using the scandal to push out someone they unfairly disliked. And I understand how shocking it must be to have your trust and love for a man who helped you win a lot of football games and appeared to have an appropriate sense of the balance between sports and academics betrayed. But Joe Paterno’s right to do exactly what he pleased makes the fact that he didn’t do more than fulfill his minimum legal obligations particularly distressing, and like all the other people responsible here (and there are many) seems to me, I think he’s lost the right to dictate the terms of his retirement.

Joe Paterno’s right to his dignity is not more valuable than the right of children not to be assaulted by adults.

Joe Paterno’s right to employment if he can’t perform up to standards is not more important than the right of Penn State to run a safe campus.

If Joe Paterno’s highest priority is truly providing quality education, his loyalty to those values should have been higher than his loyalty to a man whose conduct represents a hideous rot in those values. You only stand for what you say you represent if you stand for it when it’s hard.

I cannot possibly imagine a cause so mighty and righteous that it outweighs shrugging aside child abuse and child assault. Certainly not football. College sports may be a business with deeply engaged consumers. But it’s still just a business. And Joe Paterno is just a man, subject to the normal rules of accountability and decency. These are the basic facts of which moral educations are made. Some of us, apparently, need remedial lessons.

Pursuant to our discussion about fantasy earlier this week, Salon has an interesting piece on N.K. Jemisin and David Anthony Durham, fantasy, race, and class. Both authors have some interesting thoughts on the form. Jemisin talks about the inherent limitations of telling stories that fall into a pattern of a “MacGuffin of Power being brought to a Place of Significance.” And Durham points out how useful changing the framework can be when you want to talk about thorny issues, ranging from slavery to Halliburton, saying, “I have some readers who are quite liberal and some that are more conservative than I am, but they still engage with the book that I wrote, with all the components that are at play in it, in a way that I think they wouldn’t if they perceived me to have a political agenda right from the start.” And towards the end, both raise a point that I think merits serious consideration: should we do away with racial and ethnic sections in bookstores?

Durham’s second book, a literary novel titled “Walk Through Darkness,” about an escaped slave and the man tracking him, “never made it to the front of the store, really, because it was immediately shelved as an ‘African-American novel.’” Now, “my stuff is being read by more and a wider range of people than it was in the early days.”

Jemisin has been annoyed to learn that her first novel sometimes gets shelved in the same section, which means that readers searching the science fiction and fantasy area can’t find it. “The inherent danger of that section,” she said, “are the ideas that, a) only African-Americans would be interested in it, and b) African-Americans are interested solely because there is something African-American associated with it — usually the writer. I don’t see the novels of white authors who write black characters getting shoved into that section.” This is all the more irksome when, as was the case with her first novel, people assume her narrator is black; Jemisin envisioned the character and her people as similar to the Incas. “Just because I am black,” she said, “does not mean I am always going to write about black characters.”

I’m sympathetic to both sides here. As someone who is interdisciplinary by profession, it can be really useful to have fiction, history, sociology, etc. on similar themes in juxtaposition with each other,though in reality, that’s not really how African-American or Women’s sections in bookstores tend to work. And just putting books next to each other aren’t a guarantee that someone who comes in for a romance novel will leave with that and something like The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks.

I also think that shelving situations that create and promote semi-artificial differences in taste aren’t useful. The idea that Jumping the Broom or Waiting to Exhale are so vastly different from The Wedding Planner or Julia Quinn’s novels that they need to be shelved separately is just bizarre, and separating them keeps readers who might like them from coming across things they might not otherwise seek out while browsing. Yes, of course, we also bear responsibility to get up and explore new things if we want to be widely read. But if we can’t count on most people to do that, I think I’d favor putting a greater diversity of things in the average browser’s path.

As a side note, would folks be interested in starting a side reading project that explores fantasy that draws from religious traditions other than Christianity and by non-white authors? I’m going to start Guy Gavriel Kay’s The Lions of Al-Rassan this weekend, and while I’ll probably blog it no matter what, if folks wanted to read it specifically for discussion in a few weeks, I’d be more than game to set up something like the Pop Culture and the Death Penalty Project or the book club.