Whatever I’ve thought of the last couple of movies that George Clooney’s made, his response to rumors that he’s gay is amazing—particularly given how Hollywood used to handle that kind of gossip. He told The Advocate:

I think it’s funny, but the last thing you’ll ever see me do is jump up and down, saying, “These are lies!” That would be unfair and unkind to my good friends in the gay community. I’m not going to let anyone make it seem like being gay is a bad thing. My private life is private, and I’m very happy in it. Who does it hurt if someone thinks I’m gay? I’ll be long dead and there will still be people who say I was gay. I don’t give a shit.

That kind of pure confidence, or the ability to buss Billy Crystal in the Academy Awards’ opening skit without making it a joke that relies on a “gross! Two dudes kissing” reaction:

is welcome, and something we could use a lot more of. We think of Hollywood as this bastion of liberalism, but we’re not that far removed from a time when Rock Hudson was revealed to be gay only after he died of AIDS-related complications. And we’re still in a time when movies and television shows starring gay people are events. Given comments and actions like these, it’d be awfully nice to see Clooney extend his auteur project, break out of his pattern of Tortured But Honorable Heterosexual Dudes and insist that you can both be America’s Favorite Bachelor and play gay.

Remember back in 2010 after the earthquake that devastated Haiti, when Wyclef Jean briefly emerged as a major spokesman for the island? His Yele Haiti foundation raised a fortune. He was briefly a candidate for president of the country. And then it turned out that Yele Haiti at minimum wasn’t providing much in the way of useful services, and at worst, was something of a personal slush fund for Jean and his family. Now, Kanye West’s foundation, which has a stated purpose of combatting “the severe dropout problem in schools across the United States by providing under-served youth access to music production programs,” turns out to have spent just $7,695 on programming that serves that purpose between 2008 to 2010. It doesn’t seem like Kanye was looting the foundation or anything—the spending on wages, salaries, and benefits seems fairly reasonable for a non-profit. But it does raise the question of why celebrities set up personal foundations at all.

I’m all for celebrity charitable giving. I think it’s just dandy that rich people feel obligated to give away at least some portion of their wealth lest folks get too angry at them for having it. And of course it’s well within people’s rights to give money to whatever wacky causes they wish. But I do wish that when celebrities started thinking about how to give their money away, efficacy was at the top of their lists.

Acting is a highly specialized profession. So is non-profit management. As is, say, rebuilding after an earthquake or running a music education program. So just because celebrities are invested in an issue doesn’t actually mean they’re particularly well-qualified to do work in that arena, or to know how to hire people who are. Creating a new organization in a space can be redundant, and create a burdensome grant proposal process that adds work for organizations who are better-qualified to actually spend that money. And if that new organization ends up doing essentially no valuable work at all, it’s an embarrassment. Having your name on the organization isn’t worth it if that’s going to be the final result. And it’s not as if there aren’t a plethora of organizations who would love to give celebrities a seat on their boards, ask them to do very little work, and ensure that their money gets spent in a way that’s efficient and useful. Being lazy about your charitable giving can end up requiring that you expend more effort in the long run when it’s revealed to be hollow or a fraud.

I’m a bit late to this bit of brilliant viral marketing for Prometheus, Ridley Scott’s Alien prequel, in which Peter Weyland, the founder of the franchise’s fictional Weyland-Yutani Corporation, gives a talk at a futuristic version of TED:

I think what I like about this is not just that the clip gives me a sense of what the movie is going to be like, but that it’s a bit of connective tissue between this world and our own. For me, a lot of what’s fun about near-future science fiction is a sense of what will survive from one era into the next, whether it’s jazz on Mars in Kim Stanley Robinson’s Mars trilogy, eighties pop culture in Ready Player One, or a version of TED that kind of looks like it got mashed up with the Old Republic’s Senate Chambers. The future has to evolve from something. And while it can be interesting to just jump thousands of years away from where we are now, I’m actually more excited to see what I might have to look forward. We’re evolving fast, and I expect the world will change a great deal while I’m still around to see it.

The bridge is yours.

-If you were considering watching GCB…reconsider.

-The Princeton Review’s top schools for video game design.

-The most stereotyped characters on American television.

-The greatness of Davy Jones.

-Katniss’s archery will never not be awesome:

There’s a long tradition of trying to crack the famously celibate Sherlock Holmes. In Arthur Conan Doyle’s short stories, the adventuress Irene Adler wins a spot in his pantheon as “The Woman,” but she matches wits with him rather than trying to seduce him. Laurie R. King, in her Mary Russell books, married off Holmes. And while Holmes’ companion, Dr. John Watson, does eventually marry a woman, but that hasn’t prevented generations of readers and analysts from wondering if the flatmates at 221B Baker Street are something more than heterosexual bachelors.

Sherlock, the recent BBC adaptation of the classic story, updated the events, making Watson a veteran of America’s most recent misadventure in Afghanistan—and foregrounding the sexual tension between the two. While Sherlock (Benedict Cumberbatch) is more open about his essential asexuality, the show makes a joke of the assumption that Holmes and Watson are a couple. Whether they’re out at a restaurant or on an investigation, waiters and acquaintances of the pair keep assuming they’re on dates or an established couple. But the joke’s on them—and us—for assuming. The show isn’t actually going there, though it does have Sherlock’s nemesis, Moriarty, introduce himself in the guise of a gay man hitting on our hero, whose obliviousness keeps him from recognizing vital clues.

But the next riff on the show promises a new take on the dynamic. I don’t particularly feel we urgently need another modern update on Sherlock Holmes, but we’re getting one in the form of Elementary, which will star Jonny Lee Miller as Holmes, and in a nice twist, Lucy Liu as Watson. It wouldn’t be the first time that a woman’s played one of the roles that Conan Doyle created as a man—Watson’s granddaughter thawed out a frozen Holmes, once, and Inspector Lestrade’s been a woman. But this is the first time, as far as I know, that the original pairing’s been a man and a woman.

That means the show can do one of two things, either of which would be interesting. It can have Miller and Liu get along purely as friends, which given the dominance of slow-burn will-they-or-won’t-they cops-and-their-partners shows on television, which would be refreshing and different. We could use more solid friendships between men and women in pop culture. And if they don’t do that, Holmes and Watson can finally get it on. Bones appears to have finally broken the Moonlighting curse, proving that a will-they-or-won’t-they couple can get together without blowing up a show. So maybe we can see Holmes and Watson’s partnership go through some growth, evolving beyond its—admittedly entertaining—stasis.

When Netflix and other content distributors like Hulu and Amazon Prime announced that they were going to start producing their own content in-house, my assumption was that this was really an effort to establish a stronger bargaining position with other content producers by trying to prove that the streaming services could get along without Starz, CBS, or whoever they were negotiating with at a given moment. Now, it seems like one company, at least, might have gotten hooked on making its own content. Netflix’s CEO Reed Hastings has suggested at a conference in San Francisco that Netflix will increasingly resemble a cable channel—and he’s said he might even pitch Netflix offering as part of a cable bundle.

All well and good. But given the weird combination of content Netflix has ordered up—the deeply odd mobster-in-Norway comedy Lillyhammer, an inexplicable remake of the British masterpiece House of Cards, and a revitalization of Arrested Development—it’s hard to grok what said channel’s identity would be. I wrote about this for The Atlantic last week as part of a meditation on the confused identities of both Lillyhammer and Hulu’s Battleground:

Over time, most television networks settle on what kind of programming fits their brand: NBC’s known for its quirky comedies, CBS for its bland, broadly appealing sitcoms and cop dramas, ABC is full of soap suds, while HBO goes dark and Showtime goes abrasive. Hulu and Netflix, if they continue to develop full original programming slates rather than using a few original shows as leverage to cut better deals with original content companies, will likely figure out what works for them, too.

But if Battleground and Lillyhammer are any indication, both companies pulling elements from many different kinds of shows together rather than aiming for a single demographic around which they can build an audience. It’s one thing to get people to come to your site because you get them access to everything from Sons of Anarchy to Dora The Explorer. But you’re probably not going to get all of your subscribers, or even a large number of them, to tune in to any given show. The sooner the people who deliver content recognize that, the better their original content projects will be.

Ultimately, if Netflix and Hulu are going to persuade people to subscribe on the strength of their original programming rather than their acquired content libraries, they’re probably going to have to come up with clear brands that are narrower than the scope of their acquisitions. You can’t compete with HBO, and FX, and Showtime, and Starz, and AMC all at once and do it right.

This post contains spoilers through the March 1 episode of Parks and Recreation.

It’s always interesting to see how Leslie Knope does when she’s up against the various forces that hope to stymie her. If it’s Ken Hotate, she negotiates. If it’s her evil doppleganger in Eagleton, she overcompensates. But as we’re learning this season, cynicism is Leslie Knope’s Kryptonite. She doesn’t know how to handle it when it’s a disengaged creep who happens to dig bowling, and she doesn’t know how to deal with it in the slick, well-compensated package that is Jennifer, Bobby Newport’s new campaign manager.

And this is a great episode of television about the corrupting influence of national campaign infrastructures on lower-level politics. Jennifer is horrible, the kind of person who will wow Leslie by eating egg salad with Colin Powell; laugh along with her when Leslie explains “Do you know Joe Biden? He is on my celebrity sex list. Actually. He is my celebrity sex list.”; and then go on Ya Heard With Perd,the least-appropriate venue for a political shivving on the planet, and declare “She’s naive, she’s untested, and she’s an entrenched bureacrat who has the stink of big government all over her.” And Leslie is right, of course. Her ramp plan is better than Bobby-cum-Jennifer’s lift plan. She’s more connected to Pawnee in ways that count. And it’s awful that not being good at corrupted national-level jiujitsu could keep Leslie from beating a guy who doesn’t even care enough about Pawnee to stay in the race. It’s easy to decry money in politics, but much harder to explain why what it buys is inherently corrupting and damaging, and Parks and Recreation deserves more than the usual points for illustrating that tonight.

The second-tier story last night was also a nice step up from some earlier anemic writing. I appreciated that Ann had an actual role tonight, as the person who can translate between April and Ron, who have the cynical code cracked but can’t necessarily talk to each other directly or sincerely. Ron was in a real pickle here, explaining “Either we complete a government project, which is abhorrent to me. Or we bring another person into the department, which repulses me to my core.” And so it was nice to see Ann get a win, even if it’s one as minor as making Ron realize an obvious solution: facilitate April’s growing up and take advantage of the talent she tries so hard to disguise by giving her actual responsibility. To hear Ron tell April “I don’t like you wasting your brain,” warms my heart, and it makes it even better when April steps up. Her evolution is by far one of the most rewarding things about this season of the show. And it’s wonderful to see that Ron’s commitment to great mentoring isn’t limited to the woman who may have to leave him behind.