Because I have a particular fondness for fairy tale retellings, and occasionally, a girl’s got to watch television that she doesn’t analyze to death, I’ve been keeping up with both Grimm and Once Upon a Time. Both could be loosely described as fairy tale procedurals. In Grimm, a cop finds out that he’s descended from a long line of fairy-tale creature-fighters, and begins taking out the worst of them with the help of his policing skills and a werewolf who repairs clocks for a living and does pilates in his spare time. In Once Upon a Time, Emma, a bail bondswoman who gave her son up for adoption as an infant, has her life turned upside down when the boy tracks her down and asks her to move to Storybrook. There, Emma becomes the town sheriff, working to solve a number of mysteries caused, unbeknownst to her and the rest of the town’s residents except the mayor, by the fact that all of the citizens are exiled from fairy tales by the Mayor’s — really the Evil Queen’s — curse.

I think there are two reasons Once Upon a Time is working better than Grimm for me. First, the serialization in Once is much stronger than it is in Grimm. In the latter show, Nick is supposed to be part of this long tradition of monster-hunters, enmeshed in a struggle with some sort of monster organization. But the show hasn’t done very much to advance or make meaningful that narrative except to give Nick a van full of evil-vanquishing goodies. Monsters show up, are defeated, and disappear without giving us a sense of the larger world around us.

In Once, by contrast, the episodes are part of a contiguous fairy tale about the rise of a great evil. Every case teaches something about what happened to the characters in the past that contributes to our understanding of where they were when we met them — and our sense of where they’ll go. The interlocking stories feel considered, rather than slapped together. And the fairy tale characters are reconsidered in ways that feel thoughtful and intelligent: Snow White is a forest-dwelling badass after her exile from her cushy castle life; Rumplestiltskin is a grieving father; and Midas is basically a central bank, controlling the economies of entire kingdoms.

Second, I think the re-envisioning of the detective role is more interesting in Once Upon a Time than in Grimm. Nick is basically your standard white-boy detective with a black partner for balance and some extra equipment. It’s true that it’s not totally unusual for blonde white women to be cops either. But Emma’s operating in a world that feels different because it’s largely ruled by women on Once. Women hold the mayor and sheriff’s office. The most notable teacher in town is a woman, as is the proprietor of the local watering hold. There are, of course, men in Storybrook, ranging from the therapist to the newspaper editor. But Rumplestiltskin is the most powerful man in town by a good measure, and he tends to exert power outside the traditional channels rather than holding official office. The show doesn’t hammer it in obsessively, but it is nice to spend time in an environment where the normal assumptions about who controls things are flipped.

There’s no question that Ethel, the documentary about Robert F. Kennedy’s wife that premiered here at Sundance, is a less-than-nuanced view of RFK’s opportunism and some of the less admirable moments in his career, ranging from his work for Sen. Joe McCarthy (who I didn’t know had dated two Kennedy girls) to his manipulativeness on civil rights. And given that Rory Kennedy is making this movie about the mother who bore her six months after her father was assassinated, the movie may be gentler than one produced by an outsider would be, though such a film would certainly have gotten less access to everything from home videos of the Kennedys to Ethel’s reflections about her life as a political wife. But Ethel is an intriguing look on a less-discussed subject: what did it mean to be married into the Kennedy family? And what lessons did one generation of Kennedys teach the next that made the family a liberal political dynasty?

Mostly, it seems, Robert and Ethel did it by treating their children as if they were old enough to understand and participate in both the issues of the day and Robert’s work. Kathleen Kennedy Townsend reflects that when her father was chief counsel for the Senate Labor Rackets Committee, “rather than take me to the playground where we could go on the see-saw, [Ethel] took me to the Senate Rackets Committee,” where she learned to refuse to give comment lest she perjure herself. Kerry recalls on a visit to the FBI that Ethel dropped a note in the agency’s suggestion box recommending that J. Edgar Hoover be replaced at the height of his power. During the height of the fight to integrate southern colleges, Kerry and the other children spent time in RFK’s office, occasionally chatting on the phone to Justice Department officials in the field, and Kennedy told them he hoped the issue would be resolved by the time they made it to college. When his brother was assassinated, Robert wrote to Kathleen that she must take responsibility for her cousins, closing his letter with the words “Be kind to others and work for your country.” Kathleen remembers him shaking on his return from his anti-poverty fact-finding trips, telling his children that he’d met families who lived in homes the size of their dining room. The children campaigned with him, including on the night of the California primary — Kerry found out her father was dead when she turned on the cartoons in the morning, and got the news instead.

All of this may sound twee or precious, but it’s clear that Robert and Ethel were sincere in their belief that their children could understand the events unfolding around them and deserved to be shown the respect of being expected to understand and engage. After Robert’s death, Ethel sent her children to live and work in settings that let them understand more deeply the issues that informed their parents passions, whether with Cesar Chavez, on Native American reservations, or on Western ranches. “That really comes from our mother,” Kerry insists of the family’s commitment to politics after RFK’s murder. “Those are her values.” Ethel demurs, insisting “I just don’t feel I can take the credit. I just don’t feel it.” But her influence is clear.

On a more light-hearted note, it’s fun to see the Kennedys beyond the standard football-and-the-Cape playfulness, and to understand how their sense of whimsy informed the family’s politics and campaigning style. There’s no question that Ethel was genetically destined to be a cut-up. “My brothers would take the train to Boston, but they never rode on the inside of the train,” Ethel reflects of her Skakel mischievousness. In school, she bet on horses and stole and burned the demerit book so she could go to the Harvard-Yale football game. The family had a seal at the farm on Hickory Hill, established a tradition (stopped by President Kennedy) of pushing cabinet secretaries into the pool, and Ethel got busted for speeding — and horse theft, when she discovered starving and mistreated animals on a neighbor’s farm and simply took them home, leading her to a court trial where she had to defend herself against a hanging offense. That same sense of humor made her a great campaigner, nailing it on the Jack Paar show when the host declared that “This lovely little girl, mother of seven children, has given birth to her own precinct.” There is a real strength in fun, and the ability to be self-deprecating that I think our politics loses sight of sometimes.

Pamela AuCoin has a piece up at IndieWire that, in what seems to me to be a fairly aggressive misreading of the first season of Homeland, argues that the show takes a dishonest approach towards the intelligence community that ends up validating the war on terror. While I think it’s absolutely true that Homeland argues that we need a vigilant bureaucracy to address a risk of terror that I don’t think any sensible person would deny exists though reasonable people can argue over the magnitude, I think the show is vary more intelligent than AuCoin gives it credit for about parsing terror-fighting techniques.

First, she argues that Carrie’s actions are: “quite horrifying; she installs bugs on the home of a terror suspect, which she has been ordered to take down before she can gather any meaningful intelligence. Isn’t that convenient? Our civil liberties are what come between sniffing out Al Qaeda operatives, who just won’t allow well-meaning if somewhat psychotic spies to do their jobs properly.” But this is a total misreading of Carrie’s bugging activities. The cameras turn up no useful information. Carrie’s first break in the case comes from analyzing publicly available cable footage and finding Brody’s tell. The fact that Carrie’s been spying on him ruins the rapport she’s building with him in person when she accidentally reveals that she knows more about him than she could have without surveillance. And not only does the show emphasize that Carrie’s surveillance of Brody is ineffective, it’s repeatedly and clearly stated by credible actors that it’s illegal. (Relatedly, AuCoin says that Carrie doesn’t lose her job, which is true in that incident, but factually untrue by the end of the season).

Second, she says that the al Qaeda operative who commits suicide was about to give up valuable information. But I’m not actually sure what textual evidence there is that the information he was about to surrender would be significant, actionable, or even true. If anything, the man seemed relatively stoic throughout his ordeal, his suicide a triumphant martyr’s death rather than a desperate act to preserve his silence. By contrast, Saul’s road trip with a homegrown terrorist produces the first break in the case, revealing that Tom Walker is alive. He uses conversation, compassion, and intellect to get her to talk—and the show devotes an entire episode to showing how and why that approach works.

I’m also puzzled by her assertion that, after the effort to capture Tom Walker goes wrong, “the issue is not dealt with; it is understood this will not create an international or even domestic incident. They are Muslims, and therefore expendable; this seems to be the show’s message.” Again, on a factual basis, the idea that the shooting isn’t dealt with isn’t supported by the text of the show: there are protests after the shooting, and Carrie says clearly that the shooting is a public relations disaster that her agency should deal with directly and compassionately. That they don’t is a clear strategic and moral error. And to say that the show’s message is that Muslims are expendable is a dramatic and offensive misreading of a show that treats Muslim prayers as lovely; has the show’s most prominent Muslim talk at length about the beauty and joy his faith has brought into his life; and argues that we should sympathize with that Muslim because of his outrage over the murder of Muslims in a drone strike that treated Muslim children as acceptable collateral damage.

Finally, AuCoin seems to assume that the audience for Homeland is too stupid to parse the gap between how the characters view themselves and how we’re clearly supposed to view them. Yes, David has a lot of power and is told he’s smart: we’re also show than he’s venal, ambitious, petty, close-minded, and an enabler of the Vice President who is more interested in beefing up his anti-terror credentials than the truth. AuCoin praises a British show called The Sandbaggers because “The agency bosses are portrayed as careerists, all too willing to send the sandbaggers on highly dangerous and morally ambiguous missions while they wine, dine, and dream of knighthood.” it’s hard to imagine a better description of David Estes. AuCoin says Homeland would “would never go so far as to suggest that there is something rotten about the State Department, whose endorsement of internationally illegal prisons abroad has served to encourage the growth of terror cells and damaged our authenticity when we criticize other nations like China, Syria, and Russia for not respecting civil liberties,” except that the show clearly shows a lower-level State Department official objecting to CIA tactics only to get sold out by his bosses and rolled by the CIA in such a way that even casual viewers couldn’t miss it. Carrie’s errors and insane decisions, including her affair with Brody, are clearly errors and insane decisions. And if Homeland doesn’t pick up on AuCoin’s pet issue, it makes a strong, sustained argument against the use of drone strikes.

And it’s not really true that “Carrie is the rogue genius who might become occasionally unhinged, but her unorthodox methods are what is needed, and can lead to results.” Carrie’s brain works faster than her colleagues, but her tragedy is less that the people around her can’t understand her, but that her mental illness causes her to undermine her own good, legitimate work and prevents her from presenting it in a way that resonates with and is comprehensible to her colleagues. Given that the first season of Homeland literally ends with her wiping her own brain via electroshock therapy and Saul begging her not to do it, it’s nigh-incomprehensible to me that someone would argue that the show is endorsing a vision of the CIA rife with rogue agents: it’s clear that both Carrie and the organization she works for are deeply broken.

This post contains spoilers through the January 26 episode of Parks and Recreation.

All season, Parks and Recreation has struggled to shift the cast from running Parks Department events to running Leslie’s campaign while maintaining their core identities. We’ve had the incompetence of the ice rink rollout, which didn’t really make sense given their competence on low budgets previously; Leslie acting petty instead of professional when in pursuit of her greatest dream; the awkwardness of trying to figure out how to handle Leslie and Ben’s relationship in a new environment. But last night’s episode made me feel like the season is genuinely, finally back on track.

I thought it was very smart of this episode to root itself in a scenario where Leslie behaves in a typical way — and actually learns that it’s undermined her. A focus group is probably a nightmare for her, though it’s another nice opportunity for Tom to leverage his Entertainment 720 experience for good. “What do you like about her? What don’t you like about her? Her ideas? Her clothes, probably,” he asks the crowd. And typical Leslie, when a genuine jerk emerges from the crowd, declaring, “She seems a little uptight. She doesn’t seem like the kind of person you could go bowling with,” Leslie just has to win him over, seeing him as a symbol of the entire electorate. “That’s so sexist!” Leslie grouses when Ben points out that her vast store of knowledge sometimes makes her seem like a snob. “Would they say that about Disreali?” So she tries to win over Derek with beer, with wings, with Ice Road Trucker references, with losing to him at bowling, only for him to call her a bitch, Ben to punch him, and the cop who’s called to the scene to explain, “When we write official reports, we refrain from using words like jerk or awesome.” Ben tries to get Leslie to disavow him, but she stands up for him at her press conference, telling the assembled reporters that “This guy was drunk, and he was aggressive, and he was foul-mouthed, and he called me by second-least favorite term for a woman…Derek hates me and I don’t particularly like him.”

And in doing so, she finds the emotional heart of her campaign. “I like that that guy punched the other guy and she stood by him,” a voter tells Tom in a new focus group. I think there’s something important going on here. Leslie’s never had any trouble convincing people that she’s brilliant when it comes to policy. But unlike when she was at the Parks and Recreation Department, where it was easy for Leslie to root her policy ideas in a passionate but loopy adoration for Pawnee’s green spaces, Leslie’s had a harder time communicating where her passion is rooted on a larger scale, especially when her campaign has tried to make her dignified. And the truth is, she’s kind of a weird person, someone who keeps a picture of Hillary Clinton in her office, gets off on seeing Ben punch people on her behalf, and judges her moral worth by the amount of whipped cream she’s allowed on her waffles. But that weirdness is specific, and it convinces voters that Leslie is a real person, rather than a policy genius grown in a vat.

Then, there’s the phonebank. I’ve said before that I like seeing Jerry get wins, so it’s fun to see him not just running the phone-a-thon but being the person on the inside of a secret instead of the butt of a joke. But I also appreciate these moments in the show that have the characters being themselves in new environments, whether it’s Andy telling a caller, “I don’t really think we can accept donations over $50,” Jerry cheerfully turning over his social security number, April telling a non-donor, “But I’m calling inside of your house,” or Chris gently counseling a caller, “Put the phone down, take a deep breath, and tell Stephen that you will be treated with respect. And thank you for your donation.” Most of all, though, the phonebank is a vehicle for April’s continued process of growing up. It’s typical of her to want to crush Chris just because he annoys her, but when she wins after Millicent breaks up with Chris (causing her to reflect “I wished for his happiness to go away. I might be a wizard.”), April does something that requires her to sacrifice even if it’s only $8. She shows up at Chris’s office, inquiring after his well-being, and telling him “I thought maybe you, me, and Andy could go to the movies sometime.” I don’t necessarily know where April is going on her journey to be both a grownup and a decent person, but I’m increasingly excited to find out.

After a year of discussion about how to depict heinous acts without endorsing them, I was fascinated to see Compliance, Craig Zobel’s powerful, feminist film about the strip searches and sexual assaults committed by employees at more than 70 restaurants who thought they were helping detain a suspect for a police officer who called them on the phone. Based on a real incident where a disgruntled security guard was caught after pulling the same ugly hoax on the workers at a Mt. Washington, Kentucky McDonalds, Compliance raises urgent questions about gender, class, and most importantly, our desire to not just trust, but to please, the police.

The movie follows the real events of the Mt. Washington case closely. Restaurant manager Sandra (a wonderful Ann Dowd) is already stressed out by a freezer that was left open, spoiling thousands of dollars worth of food, when a man who identifies himself as “Officer Daniels” calls and tells her to detain and search a young employee named Becky (Dreama Walker). As Sandra and Becky begin to comply, the man on the phone escalates, ordering Becky strip-searched, locked naked in an office, and eventually manipulates Sandra’s boyfriend Evan into performing an illegal cavity search on Becky, and telling Becky if she does not perform oral sex on the man, she’ll go to prison. It’s only when a maintenance worker brought in to replace a deeply shaken Evan tells the man on the phone, who has told him that strip-searching Becky again “isn’t your choice,” responds “Like hell it isn’t” and refuses to cooperate that the restaurant’s workers begin to question the source of their orders and come to realize what they’ve done.

Pat Healy, in a sublimely uncomfortable performance as the man on the phone, does an expert job of demonstrating how predators—and bad cops—get people to fall in line. “Mr. Gilmore said I could count on you,” he tells Sandra, desperate to atone for the fridge fiasco, of her regional manager. “Can I count on you to assist the authorities?…Doesn’t it make sense that if she was doing something wrong, she wouldn’t want you to know?” He clouds Sandra’s trust in Becky, and Becky’s trust in herself, with assurances that he has Becky on surveillance, that he has a victim, witnesses, a 90 percent conviction rate. Rather than cackling over his conquests, he feigns sympathy with Becky as he explains why he wants her strip-searched. When Kevin, one of Becky’s friends and coworkers, tells the caller “the procedure is fucked,” the caller tells Sandra he’s unprofessional for objecting. “Don’t give her a choice,” he tells Sandra’s boyfriend Evan, all while preserving the illusion than Evan is deciding for himself to participate. And he relies on Becky’s fear of jail to get her to submit to the terrible—and deeply illegal—things that are being done to her.

Zobel said it was important for him to emphasize, particularly in reference to a questioner who said that the fact that the characters were service workers made it easier for him to distance himself from them, that “I think this stuff happens to people in all classes. I don’t think this is poor people behavior…I don’t think that these people are stupid.” Instead, he suggested, the incidents “made me think about the power we give to people in positions of authority.”

And that’s what happens. Sandra is more than eager to take orders—and receive validation—from someone who she thinks is winning her credit her both within her chain of command in the restaurant and in a society where even the delivery man yells at her. Within the hierarchy of the restaurant, Becky’s coworkers, including shift supervisor Marti, Kevin, and a fellow checkout girl are willing to comfort Becky, to refuse to comply with the voice on the phone, but not to buck Sandra’s willingness to obey, especially not with blame for the fridge fiasco left to be assigned. With the exception of Evan, everyone’s reactions are relatively understandable, even sympathetic, even as they’re a terrifying illustration of our own refusal to defend our civil rights.

The movie also pulls off the extremely difficult feat of keeping Walker naked or close to it and brutalized for much of the film in a way that manages to avoid prurience and keep our focus squarely on her suffering. Zobel told me he had extensive conversations with Walker about what she thought would be comfortable and effective, not just as an actress, but as the kind of woman who would watch the movie as well. That care pays off. Compliance is a powerful call to question authority, and an illustration of what we’re willing to do or let be done to the most vulnerable people in our midst in authority’s name. If Sandra will let Becky be raped, or Evan will rape her simply because of the presence of a voice on a phone, it’s awful to imagine what we’re capable of when the gun and badge are there in person.

Out and about today, but the bridge, as are these pictures from The Avengers, are yours.

The LGBT blogosphere has been wrestling with comments made by actress Cynthia Nixon (immortally Sex in the City‘s ”Miranda”) to the New York Times that she chose to be a lesbian:

I gave a speech recently, an empowerment speech to a gay audience, and it included the line ‘I’ve been straight and I’ve been gay, and gay is better.’ And they tried to get me to change it, because they said it implies that homosexuality can be a choice. And for me, it is a choice. I understand that for many people it’s not, but for me it’s a choice, and you don’t get to define my gayness for me. A certain section of our community is very concerned that it not be seen as a choice, because if it’s a choice, then we could opt out. I say it doesn’t matter if we flew here or we swam here, it matters that we are here and we are one group and let us stop trying to make a litmus test for who is considered gay and who is not.

She doubled down in an interview with the Daily Beast, but in a way that helped clarify where she’s really coming:

I don’t pull out the “bisexual” word because nobody likes the bisexuals. Everybody likes to dump on the bisexuals… but I do completely feel that when I was in relationships with men, I was in love and in lust with those men. And then I met Christine and I fell in love and lust with her. I am completely the same person and I was not walking around in some kind of fog. I just responded to the people in front of me the way I truly felt.

The negative reaction from gay blogs seems understandable, but perhaps unwarranted. Undoubtedly, as the gay community argues in courts across the country that homosexuality is immutable and ex-gay therapy is harmful and ineffective, having a prominent celebrity and activist say she “chose” to be gay is a little off-message. But I think it’s pretty clear that’s not what she meant, and so the real problem is that even within the gay community, we still have a very shallow understanding of sexual identity.

The bottom line is that there is a big difference between sexual orientation and sexual identity, even if it usually goes unnoticed. In other words, the language a person uses to describe how they identify does not have to perfectly align with what their natural attractions actually are. The Williams Institute estimates that about 3.5 percent of the population identify as LGBT, but as many as 11 percent of Americans report having same-sex attractions. I think Nixon’s comments make it pretty clear that she did not choose her attractions to women — nor her attractions to men — she merely chose to identify primarily as a lesbian.

Of course, the other factor is persistent biphobia (and inherent at its root, sexism) in both the straight and gay communities. Cathy Renna has highlighted that women’s sexuality is much more fluid than men’s, which makes E.J. Graff’s observation that most of the comments against Nixon have come from gay men fairly unsurprising. The impulse is still to fit people into neat little boxes, and some — again, often men — refuse to believe bisexuality even exists. By the way, science says it does. As Tyler Lewis has pointed out here before, this problem extends into the media, allowing for very few authentic portrayals of bi men. Nixon’s comment that “nobody likes the bisexuals” speaks for itself.

If the LGBT movement is fighting for the right of all people to own their identities free from discrimination, we should be better role models for celebrating that ethic.

Cliche and uncreative as it may be, Graceland is one of my all-time favorite albums, so I was intrigued by the idea of Paul Simon traveling back to South Africa, reuniting with the musicians he worked with to make the album—and perhaps most importantly, sitting down with Dali Tambo, the founder of Artists Against Apartheid, and really listening to why people were upset that he broke the South African boycott. Under African Skies, the documentary that premiered at Sundance, doesn’t really live up to that last promise. Tambo gets to tell the story and significance of the boycott only in brief statements rather than an extended narrative, and the movie ends with an unqualified pardon for Simon given everything that’s come in years past. But even if we only get half the story I hoped we would from it, Simon still offers a forceful articulation of the idea, which I don’t entirely agree with, that artists should stay entirely separate from governments and movements, even ones they disagree with.

“I saw right then and there that Paul resisted the idea,” of at least notifying the African National Congress he was coming to South Africa, Harry Belafonte recalls of Simon’s reaction when Belafonte made that recommendation.”The power of art was supreme…and to go to any group and bed for right of passage was against his instincts.” Later, in one of the movie’s many celebrity endorsements, Simon says “I thought about writing political songs about the situation, but I’m not actually that good at it,” only for Peter Gabriel to come in to talk about how much more effective Graceland was than his own protest anthem “Biko.” And Simon says he’s resistant to the idea that art should be explicitly put at the service of politics. Politicians, he suggests, tell artists to “come and take the love and respect people have for you and transfer it to this candidate by your support. The artists are always treated as if they worked for the politicians.”

But I think there’s a bit of a false choice here that Under African Skies doesn’t quite acknowledge. Doing the ANC the courtesy of letting them know you’re coming to town isn’t the same thing as accepting approval to come on the condition that you write certain songs or do certain performances, and it wouldn’t have taken away from Simon’s ability to arrange for the Graceland tour to come to Zimbabwe or to sing the then-banned South African national anthem at those shows in a demonstration of racial unity. In the movie, Simon says he was viscerally disturbed by the racism he witnessed while recording in South Africa, including comments by engineers that the inability by black South African musicians to master part of a song was proof of their racial prejudices. Hooking up with anti-apartheid groups could have given Simon some context for what he was dealing with. There is a middle ground between seeking out information about what you’re confronting and how to behave respectfully and compassionately in a new situation, and turning yourself into an artist-for-hire to political parties. History has validated Simon’s approach to promoting the album and the artists involved, including anti-apartheid activist Miriam Makeba and Ladysmith Black Mambazo, who he brought to international prominence. But that doesn’t mean that it wasn’t possible for him to act in a more consultative manner at the time.

All of that aside, Under African Skies is just a fantastic making-of-the-album movie. There’s a ton of video footage available from Simon’s recording sessions in South Africa and of Ladysmith Black Mambazo’s reporting trip to New York (in one of the movie’s most heart-wrenching stories, the members of the group asked Simon where they had to go to get a pass that would permit them to visit Central Park during that journey). It’s amazing to see the music come together, to see the role that dance played in the recording process, and to see Simon’s wonder as he discovers something entirely new. And it’s a gift that so many of the South African artists involved could come back to discuss their memories of the collective creative process. In a particularly terrific moment, Lorne Michaels tells Simon before he and Ladysmith Black Mambazo go on stage to reveal their songs to the world “If it doesn’t work, we’ll just cut it.” What a wonderful thing for music that he was wrong.

We Need to Talk About Kevin, the movie adaptation of Lionel Shriver’s skin-crawlingly-excellent 2003 novel about the mother of a school shooter, comes out in wide release today. The novel is unflinching in its exploration of the idea that some mothers don’t bond with their children — and that some women aren’t meant to be mothers at all. I talked to Shriver for my column in the Atlantic about everything from the way gender expression limits men, to how her work as a journalist influences her fiction, to taking the money and running on movie adaptations. Shriver is an expatriate, and the main character of We Need to Talk About Kevin, Eva Katchadorian, spends a lot of time running a travel guide company to escape her Americanness even as she marries a man who is an old-fashioned avatar of patriotism. So I was particularly interested in what Shriver had to say about the impossibility of transcending your nationality:

You can’t change fact. She’s tried to opt out of her country, but you can’t really do that. It’s a very West Wing impulse, and meant to be trite. If you have had much to do with liberal intelligentsia in the U.S., they like to think they are above their own country, and they often have contempt for their compatriots, and they think they’re better. They think that being super-critical of the United States exempts them. When they talk about Americans, they don’t think they’re talking about themselves. They’re the same people who are always vowing if Bush wins the election, they’re moving to Italy. They never move to Italy.

And of course we talked about the key question of the novel: whether it’s rational or not to have children. Shriver told me:

You go through these rational set of pros and cons. And that kind of cost-benefit analysis doesn’t get you anywhere. It is this huge leap of faith. You have no idea what’s going to happen. You have no idea who’s going to walk into your life….Rationally, it’s amazing that now that we have birth control, anyone has kids…The stigma against childlessness, now that the norm has changed considerably, has lifted. I don’t feel discriminated against because I don’t have children, and I don’t think people feel sorry for me. It’s the safer option.”

In any case, it was a fascinating conversation. Shriver’s a reminder of how homogeneous novelists’ perspectives can be and how rewarding it is when someone with a very different frame on the world gives us novels from that place.

Your Parks and Recreation recap will be up a little late due to the mix of screenings I’ve been hitting up at Sundance yesterday and this morning. But I hope you will forgive me for the delay since I’m giving this to you instead: