I just wanted to take a moment to say goodbye to my colleague Matt Yglesias and to wish him well in his new gig at Slate. I met many of you for the first time when I was hanging out at his blog earlier this year, but without him, I probably never would have started blogging in the first place. He was one of the first people to ask me to take a whirl at his place back when he was at The Atlantic, and encouraged me in the early days when I was plugging away on Blogger. And in honor of everything he’s done for me, I’ll renew his call for an investigation of the Lyte Funky Ones:

Just because he’s leaving ThinkProgress doesn’t mean that the cause will die.

Normally, profiles of women in Hollywood have at least one anecdote about what they eat (remarks about clothes and jewelry are the substitute for women in Washington) to suggest that said actresses are normal people and to obscure the fact that it takes an enormous amount of self-denial and expensive training to actually meet the industry’s standards for body size. But Vanity Fair is breaking all the rules! Instead of using Mindy Kaling’s order at a restaurant to show she’s a normal person taking advantage of someone else’s expense account by ordering goodies, they’re using it to raise their eyebrows at her lack of fealty to an absurd dieting regimen:

“I’m ready, actually,” she replied enthusiastically, ordering fruit salad, followed by day-boat sea scallops in creamy corn grits with bacon-braised greens, a poached egg on top, and toasted rye on the side. She devoured the second course happily and requested jam to go with the toast.

“Not too careful with the calories, Mindy?” I ventured.

“Are you kidding? I love reading about diets. But I can’t implement them. That’s my problem.”…

“I just want to let you know about the dessert,” our waiter said tactfully.

She chose the profiteroles with chocolate sauce and melted ice cream.

The jam! The humanity! It would be really delightful if someone would actually find a different way to do a celebrity profile. But even if you’re doing a puff piece, this is an even more direct and pathetic reinforcement of stupid norms than usual, skipping the bit where they pretend it would be great if people didn’t have to starve themselves.

Back in June, I put Hilary Mantel’s masterful novel about Thomas Cromwell and Henry VIII, Wolf Hall, on my Introductory Guide to Women-Centered Culture For Guys syllabus. Now, HBO’s making a miniseries out of it.

This is great news for a couple of reasons. First, if it’s done right, the adaptation will be a great look at — in addition to the birth of the Church of England — European trade, the consolidation of church properties that led to the founding of Cardinal College at Oxford, and the allegations that Thomas More actively promoted the torture of Protestants during the lead-up to England’s split with the Catholic Church. Wolf Hall is a phenomenal novel about personal investment in politics. Watching Thomas Cromwell escape his father’s vicious abuse through the kindness of Amsterdam’s cloth merchants and the mercenary armies of the continent; Cardinal Wolsey fret over the future of the college he wanted to make a jewel; or the cold home More builds to prop up the edifice of his righteousness, the show builds a complicated definition of the means and costs of being a genuinely world-historical figure.

And for all that it’s big, it’s a strikingly personal novel. We see what it means to be sold off for your chastity, the cost of being an object of obsessive pursuit in a way that makes a mockery of Twilight. It’s a shame that Natalie Dormer already played Anne Boelyn in The Tudors so she can’t take on a more nuanced version of the role here. Cromwell’s relationship with his late wife, and later, with her sister, who is married to another man, are infinitely tender. The loss of his daughter, the disappointment of his son, sting like whips. And it’s a marvelous novel of friendship, whether it’s Cromwell and Wolsey or Cromwell and Imperial diplomat Eustace Chapuys. I don’t really know how a miniseries will capture the Cabinet of Wonders-like effect of the novel, which is one of the most effective evocations of a historic worldview I’ve ever read. But I’m glad it’s not getting reduced to a movie, and that some serious writerly fire-power will be behind it. HBO’s movie team has been wildly on their game lately, so I can’t wait to see what they do with this.

French glamor has, in recent years, largely been represented by Carla Bruni-Sarkozy: the whirlwind courtship! The record! The Woody Allen movie cameo! The first baby born to a French president while in office! And so it’s interesting to turn back the clock a bit in The Conquest, Xavier Durringer’s fictional account of Carla Bruni-Sarkozy’s husband’s rise to power — and the woman he was married to before her. The Conquest can be ponderous when it comes to putting powerful men together in the gilded French halls of state. But as a movie about what it means to be a political wife, The Conquest can be absolutely searing — and applicable to any continent.

When the movie begins, Cécilia Sarkozy is encouraging her husband to embrace his new job as Interior Minister with vigor, telling him to “Create the news and comment on it. Be actor and director.” Much of the movie’s dialogue has this sort of momentous quality, something it shares with Starz’s Boss. I understand the desire to lend a grandeur to politics, but such language is at constant risk of being risible, and sometimes falls into that trap here. And it’s not necessary as Cécilia watches with mounting disappointment as her husband moves to become party head rather than embracing the work of the ministry, as he lambastes the businessmen she wants him to work with, spitting out that “Their generosity will be compensated.” We feel her growing discomfort as the couple becomes the object of intense media scrutiny — there are constant shots of people doing normal things, like eating breakfast, or going for a bike ride, only to have a cut or a wider shot reveal that they are performing for a cadre of photographers. “Our life has become a reality show,” Cécilia says, as they’re mobbed, walking on a beach. “We’re acting transparent, honey,” her husband replies, clearly feeding off the attention.

When she rebels, the only language Sarkozy has to woo her back is politics. “I’d like to share this with you,” he tells her. “We’ve wanted this for 20 years.” When he says “I can’t be alone,” it’s not because he can’t live without her, but because he can’t run for president without her. During a meeting with Jacques Chirac and his fellow Ministers, Sarkozy performs a double maneuver, showing his contempt for his colleagues by breaking up the meeting to text Cécilia, who has left him for her lover, playing a nasty game of brinksmanship by telling her “Either you come home [for the election] or I marry her,” a newspaper reporter he’s been seeing. Sarkozy’s political rivals and staff see the state of the Sarkozy marriage as a political condition. “If he can’t hold onto his wife, how can he hold on to France?” Foreign Minister Dominique de Villepin crows triumphantly while working out on a rowing machine in a gorgeous historic French mansion. “She decides, he executes,” Sarkozy’s staff say of Cécilia, echoing language Chirac’s staff urged him to use to keep Sarkozy in line. The possessiveness is ugly. “You can’t pull away from me. Or me from you,” Sarkozy says, ignoring the fact that he’s already done that to her, when she says she’s leaving him. “We’re meant to be together.” He grabs her, hard. He throws things. When he touches her cheek after his victory, he touches her flesh less to caress and more to mold and subdue.

The positioning between powerful men is less interesting and emotionally rich, though it can be funny. “You looked great coming out of the water, like Ursula Andress in James Bond,” Sarkozy tells de Villepin while they’re on a working retreat, mocking him for playing the diva. “You know your classics,” de Villepin swipes back, putting down his less traditionally polished rival. And the movie doesn’t deal in a really substantive way with the riots in Paris suburbs that Sarkozy jumped on as a way to gain favor with conservatives. “We talk about ‘incivility’ instead of riots, ‘gangbangs’ instead of rape,” he tells Chirac, but the movie treats this move mostly as a matter of opportunism rather than getting into its racial component. But for its flaws, The Conquest looks gorgeous: lamps glow yellow on Jacques Chirac’s desk, and the yellow ribbons that divide an airport queue pop against the white stone floor, while the green glass of a moving walkway glimmers wetly, transforming a mundane space into something grand. And the grandeur of official French offices highlights the entitlement of these men. This is politics as performed by princes. But these days, princesses tend to have agendas and priorities of their own.

This post contains spoilers through the Nov. 17 episode of Community.

“We have more effect than anyone because we decided to tell it. And we decide how it ends…Will your story acknowledge the very nature of stories and embrace the fact that sharing the sad ones can sometimes make them happy?” -Abed Nadir

I agree with almost everything my fellow critics have written about Community this week. Maureen Ryan is correct that the show gives NBC an aura of principled investment in creative television. Jace Lacob is right that the show acts as a spur to more conventional sitcoms — not all shows should be like Community, but it sets a much more ambitious outer limit in the direction of creativity and experimentation. And I agree with Emily Nussbaum about the consistency of Community‘s delights — not all of its experiments were right up my alley, but I don’t think there’s been an outright bad episode of the show since it premiered.

But all of that said, I think that “Documentary Filmmaking: Redux” would have been a near-perfect series finale for “Community,” if it came to that. The episode was an assertion of both the importance of structure and genre and the value of self-consciousness and self-examination, two of the core values that have distinguished the show, making it both a deft alchemical experiment and a deeply heartfelt social story. It was full of wonderful little flourishes: the Dean describing the study group as the “most diverse, hispanics notwithstanding;” Leonard inaccurately but cuttingly snarking Jeff; the stand-ins for the network executives who want more of “that wacky Chinese guy” in the Dean’s ad, and who could not have arrived in this show at a more opportune time. And in creating a finished product that’s ready to go out into the world and that’s also an act of empathy, Abed’s story — if Community is, in fact, Abed’s story — felt like it had reached a nicely grown-up place.
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The bridge is yours.

-AKA Jessica Jones will fit into the larger Marvel continuity. Just in time for Marvel to stop running books with solo heroines. Also, Powers is undergoing reshoots.

-You know, you can manufacture drama without throwing things at people.

-Will the Academy’s dirty old men deny Meryl another Oscar?

-Glad to see David Oyelowo’s rise continue.

-It’s Friday. Have an owl:

This post contains spoilers through the first 12 chapters of The Yiddish Policemen’s Union. Next week, I’m off for Thanksgiving, but for the Friday after that, let’s read through Chapter 25.

One of the things that’s fascinating about alternate histories is which events and impulses the authors think would stay the same. In The Yiddish Policemen’s Union, the United States went to war with Cuba, but the conflict produced a rash of heroin addictions, much as the Vietnam War did. The Israel Lobby may be dedicated to an Alaskan homeland, run by a Jewish COINTELPRO agent who “diverted up to half his operating budget to corrupt the people who had authorized it. He bought senators, baited congressional honeypots, and above all romanced rich American Jews whose influence he saw as critical to his plan,” but it still exists. Six decades in Sitka haven’t undone the Jewish fear of annihilation — as Landsman’s colleague tells him of the tunnel under his hotel “When the greeners got here after the war. The ones who had been in the ghetto at Warsaw. At Bialystock. The ex-partisans. I guess some of them didn’t trust the Americans very much. So they dug tunnels. Just in case they had to fight again. That’s the real reason it’s called the Untershtat.” Hasidic Jews are still ridiculously well-organized, even if they’re turning their talents to crime in Sitka. Sectarian differences still matter. Landsman knows, when he and Berko go visiting, that “He is on their turf. He goes clean-shaven and does not tremble before God. He is not a Verbover Jew and therefore is not really a Jew at all. And if he is not a Jew, then he is nothing.” And while Jews may have swapped Palestinians for American Indians, the specter of violent conflict still looms, whether in a synagogue bombing, or in Berko Shmets’ hammer.
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I think James Poniewozick gets it exactly right in his look at Up All Night and television’s approach to feminism for men:

Up All Night is one of those shows created by a female writer, Emily Spivey. And its impressive achievement in its handling of the labor division between Reagan and Chris is how matter-of-fact it is. Up All Night is a show with a stay-a-home dad and a work-in-the-office mom; it’s not a show about a stay-a-home dad and a work-in-the-office mom. That is, it’s a show about the challenges of new parenting, not the Mr. Mom weirdness of gender role reversal. (Compare the upcoming ABC sitcom Work It, in which the male stars literally dress in drag to get jobs in female-dominated pharmaceutical sales. Because they’re doing lady work!)

The easiest ways for TV to deal with gender differences (like race or anything else) is to ignore them or obsess over them. What’s tougher, and what Up All Night has been pulling off well (even if it’s still finding its way as a comedy) is treating them as simply one factor among many, sometimes more important than others.

There’s a huge difference between treating people and issues like they’re anthropological specimens because you assume that no one in your audience could possibly relate to them, and approaching people and issues with the assumption that they represent your audience and the things they’re grappling with. The idea of stay-at-home dads is not inherently ridiculous. But that doesn’t mean it’s issue- or anxiety-free. Sexism, among many other things, doesn’t automatically vanish just because some women work outside the home and return to their jobs after giving birth. It just takes different forms, and requires different remedies. It’s not all court battles and pickets. And it’s more ridiculous to pretend that men and women don’t have issues than it is to mine realistic and engaging conflict out of the things that we all navigate every day.

And, as James points out, sexism doesn’t only affect women — and when men futz with their gender roles, it can illuminate how ridiculous those roles for women are, too. In Up All Night, Chris worries about how he’s dressing so Reagan will be attracted to him, whether he’s become boring staying at home, whether his decision to leave his job is the right one. It is really insane that we haven’t figured out a way to cycle people into and out of the workforce to accommodate something that many, if not all, people want: to have children. It’s too bad that it takes men making sacrifices to underscore that forcefully, but if it’s the way to get men and women on board for a common cause, then bring on the television stay-at-home dads.

This post contains spoilers through the Nov. 17 episode of Parks and Recreation.

I have a problem.

I’m angry at Leslie Knope. I’ve been worried about this for a couple of episodes, but in between railroading Ben when he shows signs of interest in someone else; having a high-school level meltdown with him and ruining a Model United Nations tournament; and tonight, stealing Ben’s pencils, engineering a protest against her own park, and aggressively talking over Anne, the show’s made a fairly aggressive turn back towards the grating Leslie Knope of Season One it was difficult to invest in. This tendency’s always been there, and it played a key role in one of the best episodes of last season, “The Fight,” in which Leslie both pushes Anne to apply for a new job and to read Freedom all in the same night. And so it seems fair that Anne calls her out again tonight, explaining that “You made me watch all 8 Harry Potter movies. I don’t even like Harry Potter…when we go to a bar, you order my drink for me.” And maybe Leslie is worth eating 10 cheesecakes to Anne, but she’s been difficult to watch and root for lately.

The show’s approach to fixing that also sort of feels like a disappointment to me. Yes, Leslie and Ben are an entirely endearing television couple. But that also means that watching Leslie make a heartbreaking choice to walk away from him to pursue the dream of her life was genuinely rewarding. It was a real sacrifice that illustrated the value of that dream to her. Resorting to a cliche Leslie-can-have-it-all narrative betrays that. And it won’t feel like real progress to me either if the choice she makes is Ben, rather than City Council and all that lies beyond.
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