Ernest Cline’s Ready Player One, a novel about a futuristic America wracked by poverty and severe energy shortages where most people spend the majority of their time inside an extremely sophisticated video game world called OASIS, and the billionaire inventor of the game who sets off a treasure hunt within it on his death, came out last summer and I finally got around to it last weekend. It’s not a perfect book—Cline does a lot of telling when he should show, as when he introduces us to a blogger and tells us what her style is like at length rather than letting us see it for ourselves in sample posts. But it’s an engaging story, and I think worth comparing to both Reamde, Neil Stephenson’s novel about a similar video game empire though set in a time closer to our own, and The Hunger Games, which features a similar teenaged protagonist—and in a similar way, prioritizes romance over political engagement.

Ready Player One‘s main character is an isolated teenager named Wade, who lives in extreme poverty with his aunt in the stacks—a name for tightly packed and deeply unsteady complexes of stacked trailers. Wade goes to school in OASIS and after the game’s founder dies, Wade becomes a deeply dedicated participant in the scavenger hunt that the man left behind—and that guarantees the winner access to his fortune. As Wade advances further in the quest, a corporation that wants to take control of OASIS starts stalking Wade and his counterparts, killing his aunt and one of Wade’s fellow gamers in an effort to coerce them into turning over the clues that lead to the treasure. In that respect, the book is a lot like The Hunger Games—both books feature a poor teenaged protagonist struggling to maintain his or her integrity in the face of a murderous and seemingly unalterable system, whether it’s a corporation that’s more powerful than any government, or a government that’s taken control of the economy. And like Reamde, Ready Player One features a game founder with a near-unkillable avatar who is an unpredictable free agent in the game.

But all three books have slightly different perspectives on how their main characters should engage with the world outside of the games they’re playing. At the end of The Hunger Games, Katniss Everdeen, who has been turned into a political symbol and used for purposes contrary to her values, quits altogether: she commits a symbolic act of political violence and returns home, marries, starts a family, and gets as far away from engagement as possible. At the end of Ready Player One, Wade’s victory ensures him not just tremendous wealth but tremendous political power—the reward for winning the scavenger hunt isn’t just the billionaire’s fortune, but his OASIS avatar and the ability to self-destruct the game, driving everyone back into their real, and very broken, world. But the book treats that power, and the possibility of a massive intervention to change the fate of the American public, raised by another character, as if they’re simply not very interesting, at least in comparison to Wade’s reconciliation with his first love. In Reamde, by contrast, getting out of the game and into a world where they go head-to-head with some very nasty terrorists and a mountain lion, is reinvigorating and rewarding for the characters. They get major personal rewards for acting in the world—there doesn’t have to be a tradeoff.

Now, not all novels have to be social novels. And not all heroes have to change the world—nor is it realistic to expect that all heroes will be in a position to kill the hell out of an Osama bin Laden stand-in while also helping ensure the marital happiness of their favorite niece. But there’s something very odd about setting up very clear dystopian conditions, enumerating how they affect the characters, and then suggesting that engaging with those conditions and working to change them isn’t very differing. Both Ready Player One and The Hunger Games are grounded in more explicit social critiques than Reamde, but Reamde‘s far more interested in engaging with the world than they are.

I’ll have longer thoughts on Game Change, HBO’s adaptation of John Heilmann and Mark Halperin’s 2008 campaign book, closer to the movie’s air date. But one thing that struck me as strange about the movie was that it focuses entirely on John McCain and Sarah Palin, a story that’s both been done to death and is essentially irrelevant: Palin is a PR phenomenon and McCain will never be president. They’ve both returned from whence they came. By contrast, the story of how President Obama and Secretary of State Hillary Clinton regarded each other in the buildup to and during the 2008 campaign, and how they came to be partners rather than enemies, is both directly relevant to ongoing events and a much richer story than that of John McCain’s taking a flyer on his VP selection.

But I wonder if part of the problem is that it would be extremely difficult to cast a credible Obama. Fred Armisen’s impression of the president is laughable. Jordan Peele has Obama’s voice entirely locked down, but he doesn’t particularly look like him. I have no idea if Adrian Lester has the voice, or could figure out how to do it, but he’s got the look, or could pull it off plausibly. I also really like the idea of the main character from Primary Colors, who was responsible for wrangling John Travolta’s Bill Clinton stand-in character, returning to the movies as Obama. There are obvious decent stand-ins for Hillary: Emma Thompson could also step back into those shoes post Primary Colors, not to mention my personal favorite candidate Judith Light. But Obama is tricky—and important—to get right.

I very much wanted to like Smash, NBC’s show about the making of a Broadway musical, and not just because I’m eager for the generally well-intentioned network to be repaid for Parks and Recreation and Community with some huge commercial successes. I’m interested in people’s artistic processes, and I adore Anjelica Huston and Debra Messing, who star as the show’s book writer and producer, respectively. But the show isn’t drawing the kind of numbers NBC would have hoped for, particularly for a show they would have loved to monetize the way Fox has turned Glee into a cash cow, with iTunes sales and a spin-off live show. And it’s not really working creatively, either.

Perhaps the central problem of Smash is that it’s predicated on a rivalry that the show is contorting itself to make plausible. There’s no question that Ivy (Megan Hilty) deserves the lead in the Marilyn musical under development over Karen (Katherine McPhee): she’s a more polished Broadway singer, a more accomplished dancer, she has much more experience on the stage, she’s a physical match for Marilyn, and she’s a more dedicated professional. So how does Smash make it seem like an emotionally engaged contest? By making Ivy a shallow bitch. While we get Karen’s home life with her devoted boyfriend and trips home to her friends and supportive family in Iowa, Ivy gets a single phone call home, where it’s clear that things aren’t all right, but we never get any details. Even though she’s clearly more qualified, we’re told Ivy only really gets the part because she slept with Derek, the director, a convenient drama-driving plot device that also happens to reduce a talented performer. Now that we’re in rehearsals, we see Ivy pushing Karen (now a member of the chorus) to the side, even though she’s not exactly doing her job. It’s contrived and irritating.

Then, there’s the show-within-a-show itself. The characters talk endlessly about Marilyn Monroe without revealing anything particularly interesting about her character. The numbers themselves are charming, but ultimately light—maybe it’s just me, but I’m not particularly moved by a faux Marilyn cooing about manipulating men with her sex appeal. The show tells us, rather than shows us, that these artists are having profound experiences with the material—though it does a nice job of showing us how sexy artists can be to non-artists when they’re in their zones.

And I wonder if that combination of material and setting is what’s preventing Smash from becoming the grown-up version of Glee—and would prevent it from being that show even if everything else was clicking. Glee is a hot mess these days, but it can be genuinely daring and moving when it takes on the subject of gay teenagers. But it does so in a setting where everything else is familiar: this is a small town populated with relatively familiar archetypes, the students attend an essentially typical high school, and they’re singing songs almost everyone in the viewing audience has heard before. The gay characters are a minority in a largely straight world. It’s a show that is sometimes about tolerance, and asking to do that from a very safe space for straight, middle-American viewers.

Smash, on the other hand, is asking viewers to come into a world where women and straight men are dominant, framed by music that’s original rather than familiar. I don’t think there’s anything wrong with that, per se—shows shouldn’t have to star straight dudes to be successful. But I do think that it might be a sign of NBC’s unwillingness or inability to accept that it’s going to have to make some genuinely popular entertainment to score a smash hit. What makes Glee easy to consume isn’t just the renditions of popular hits—it’s the setting. It’s not actually a natural sege from the cover extravaganza that is The Voice and its quartet of judges who represent the full spectrum of the music business to a show about the making of a Broadway musical.

NBC needs to recognize the difference between the two and decide what kind of entertainment it wants to make. If it’s going to make quirky shows or shows that imply that rivals like Glee aren’t grown-up enough, NBC may be consigning itself to a smaller but wealthier group of viewers who are desirable to advertisers. But if it’s going to make big, mass entertainment that it endeavors to make somewhat smarter than its competitors offerings, it needs to do so without giving the impression that it resents having to do it.

Vida, an organization devoted to examination and discussion of the roles women play in literature, has released its latest survey of the articles and reviews published by women in major magazines in 2011, and the results aren’t encouraging.

Of articles published by The Atlantic in 2011, 64 were by women and 184 were by men. In the Boston Review, the ratio was 60 to 131; in Harper’s, 13 to 65; in the London Review of Books 30 to 186; in The New Republic, 50 to 118; in the New York Review of Books a truly embarrassing 19 to 133; the New Yorker published 165 stories by women to 459 by men; and the New York Times Book Review printed 273 articles by women to 520 by men. The Nation, ostensibly a progressive publication, published 118 articles by women and 293 by men. Granta’s the only publication that’s close to parity—in fact, it published slightly more pieces by women than by men, 34 to 30. Perhaps some of these other publications should ask how Granta finds women, a task that appears so phenomenally daunting to the rest of the publishing world that it suggests that women, rather than man, are the most dangerous game.

Because really, the only answer here is not that these publications can’t find women. It’s that they don’t really care if they do or not. These numbers, and the annual discussion of them, seem to have succeeded in making a lot of female journalists and readers angry and frustrated, but they don’t appear to have made editors feel ashamed, much less called to action. And I’m not quite sure what it would take to persuade them to shake off their lethargy and acceptance of the status quo, which really means accepting sexism. Do we really have to educate editors that women can bring new perspectives on major stories, and not just to stories about living as a single woman or going through a divorce? What level of evidence would it take to persuade folks that while Katherine Boo and Marie Colvin are and were utterly extraordinary, they are not the only women who can go into profoundly difficult settings and win sources’ trust? Because at this point, I would like to know what it would take to humiliate or convince editors at the major magazines to think more creatively about story assignments and recruiting pitches. Numbers clearly aren’t doing the trick.

Since market research came back with some deeply awful numbers about audience anticipation that suggest that America has basically no interest in seeing John Carter, Disney’s epic and epically expensive movie set on Mars, there’s been a lot of dissection of the way the movie has been marketed. But I want to return to the first big decision in that campaign: to change the name of the movie from A Princess of Mars on the grounds that nobody goes to see movies about women, to John Carter of Mars, to John Carter.

The thing about John Carter is that it’s totally nondescript. This literally could be the name of anything—there have been 8 movies made that are simply called John, and they’re everything from creepy horror movies to drug flicks to foreign films. John Carter could be the name of a cubicle drone or a futuristic warrior. The novels by Edgar Rice Burroughs that the movie is based on may be lovingly remembered, but they’re not part of the canon like Ender’s Game. This name means nothing to be people. A Princess of Mars, or a variant like John Carter and the Princess of Mars, would have at least provided the crucial context that this movie is set some place other than the planet Earth.

And the central premise, that women don’t see enough science fiction to make up for the presumed hordes of men who would run in horror at a move with “princess” in the title is just bizarre. Sure, there are action movies that don’t involve romances. But the vast majority of the time, whether a dude is stealing cars or blowing up planes, he is also wooing a member of the fairer sex. Even if Disney is assuming that its audience is shy dudes who are afraid to talk to women in real life, that audience still seems to enjoy watching Paul Walker or Brad Pitt or whoever spit game and bed ladies. Would that they’d turn out consistently to see women be strong and powerful and be the ones who are delivering lines and seducing guys. But when Disney is setting the bar for their expectations of their audience even lower than I assume it is, dudes and women alike should find themselves insulted.

All of which is a way of saying this fan-made trailer looks amazing:

The bridge is yours.

-Downton Abbey and Luther will move from the miniseries category to the drama category at the Emmys next year—and the category may expand as a result.

-Inspector Spacetime, to tide you over until the return of Community on March 15.

-How Oscar voters made their decisions.

-Kid Rock turns out to support the Detroit Symphony.

-Estelle’s back! Summer’s here!

I quite like this meditation by Noah Berlatsky on cheesecake and precisely why drawing superheroines as pinups as offensive, and just plain incompetent:

If you make it simply about visual stimulation, it’s simply about visual stimulation, and doesn’t have to have anything to do (or at least, not much to do) with real women. Once you start pretending that you’re talking about a smart, motivated, principled adventurer, on the other hand, you end up implying that said smart, motivated, principled, adventurer has an uncontrollable compulsion to dress like a space-tart on crack. Which is, it seems to me, insulting.

The second thing is that, if you must make your adventurer into a fetish object, it seems like the least you could do is make her tough…if you’re going to do action-hero cheesecake, then bring on the masochism: get off both on how hot the action hero is, and on how thoroughly she can beat you black and blue. It’s feministsploitation; not feminism exactly, but a fetishization of feminism, and it makes some sense at least to the degree that the fetish clothing and the putative power of the character are coherently working together, both in that the power makes the character more sexy and in that that the clothing adds (not necessarily logically, but still) to the sense of the character’s potency.

I basically agree with Noah: there’s nothing essentially wrong with producing sexy depictions of everyone. The problem comes when you mash up two projects in a way that undermines both: so-called sexy superheroines are drawn in a way that undermines our sense of their competence and power, and the things illustrators do that are meant to make them sexy often show more ignorance of the female form than appreciation for it. Sexist justifications for the depictions of female superheroines often get more contortionist than the heroines’ poses, and there’s something oddly refreshing about Noah pointing out that the guys who want hot depictions of powerful women are undermining even their own interests.

Well, the newest trailer for the second season of HBO’s Game of Thrones, which premieres on April 1, looks dandy, doesn’t it?

The nerd in me is rather pleased to see that the characters’ debates about who is best suited to rule Westeros and how that rule should be accomplished are intact, and are something the show is embracing, rather than running away from. But the trailer did remind me of something I find interesting. Given the extent to which A Song of Ice and Fire is based on the War of the Roses, I’m surprised that most people don’t point out the central difference between that conflict and the War of the Five Kings very often. In Martin’s universe, there’s no Parliament, nor any representative assembly, that the contestants for the Iron Throne can appeal to for recognition of their claim.

Sometimes, that makes the process more democratic: Stannis Baratheon, the late King Robert’s brother, can pull a Richard III and tell the world, instead of Parliament, that Cersei’s children are the product of incest rather than legitimate heirs to the throne, and then proceed to demonstrate that he’s best-prepared to lead Westeros by heading up the defense of the Wall when it comes under assault. And sometimes, it’s less direct: Stannis and his brother Renly, who wants to jump over him in the line of succession, argue about what the citizens of Westeros want in a neutral meeting that doesn’t actually involve consulting any of those citizens on what would be best for the country. Cersei Lannister, ruling as queen regent even as rumors about her children’s parentage fly, views her subject with utter contempt. Across the Narrow Sea, Daenerys Targaryen finds that presenting yourself as the mother of your people isn’t an automatic solution to their needs.

But having all of these debates about governance without the presence of a parliament obscures the extent to which they’re an anachronism. In the real world, Parliament may have been manipulatable during the War of the Roses, but its power and discretion grew as that of England’s kings waned. Part of the triumph of history is that we evolved forms of government that would prevent these bloody and unproductive dynastic struggle. I’m not sure what it means that we don’t see this germ of the future in A Song of Ice and Fire, but it is striking.

Michael Douglas, atoning for his stint as Gordon Gecko, that avatar of rapacious eighties capitalism, has cut an ad encouraging traders who see evidence of wrongdoing or get offered shady deals to call their local FBI office:

Somehow, it’s not as catchy as “Greed, for lack of a better word, is good.” And the problem, I suspect, is less that folks on Wall Street don’t know where to go and more that you’ve got to make them want to pick up the phone in the first place. In pursuit of that goal, it might help if folks other than Bernie Madoff had ended up suffering more than embarrassment and financial losses for facilitating the downturn.