When Perry v. Schwarzenegger (which became Perry v. Brown), the legal case challenging California’s Proposition 8 ballot initiative which banned marriage equality, went to trial, the proceedings, like the proceedings in many American courtrooms, weren’t broadcast. It’s a case that would have been of interest to thousands, if not more, Americans who had to rely on news reports of the case. That may have been fortunate for proponents of Prop 8, who spent a considerable amount of tangling themselves in some truly linguistically and logically hilarious knots. But it was still a lost opportunity.

Fortunately, playwright and screenwriter Dustin Lance Black attended a considerable amount of the trial, and adapted transcripts of it into 8. I’d heard excerpts of the play, which is both insightful and funny before, but a group of celebrities did a reading of it over the weekend, and it’s even better. And it’s a great example of how art can open up closed government proceedings and amplify them to a much wider audience than they might have found in the first place. Artists don’t always have to be facilitators of the messages and work preassigned them by people who work full-time in politics. They can break information out, and they can frame the message themselves.

And thanks to YouTube, you can enjoy that reading—and that amplification—yourself:

As I wrote last week in considering Gary Oldman, I consider the idea that people should be marginalized in Hollywood simply because they are conservative, or denied work because of their political views, to be unfortunate and stupid. That said, I have no real problem marginalizing ideas that are profoundly uninformed or deeply uncivil. And when folks are ugly and uncivil in the course of expressing their conservatism or liberalism, I think they’re roundly off-base if they interprent the ensuing criticism as directed at their politics rather than their tone.

This seems to be a lesson that Patricia Heaton, who currently stars in The Middle and is famous for her role on Everybody Loves Raymond, learned last week. It’s no secret that she’s conservative, but when she jumped on the bandwagon and commenced attacking Sandra Fluke on her Twitter feed, things got out of hand. “Hey G-Gal! Change major to Health Sciences, then look at pix of people w/syphilis, gonorrhea, herpes, and chlamydia! Instant birth control!” she wrote. “Hey G-Town: stop buying toothpaste, soap and shampoo! You’ll save money, and no one will want to sleep with you!” Things went on this vein for some time, with Heaton also retweeting other nasty things people were saying about Fluke. The conversation, such as it was, revealed both that Heaton had no idea whatsoever what was at stake in the contraception coverage debate, and that she has a real nasty streak.

Heaton appears to have recognized, at minimum, that her tweets weren’t exactly helpful to her public profile—she’s deleted her Twitter feed. She might consider taking a lesson from her progressive counterpart on a show about a working-class family. Raising Hope star Martha Plimpton’s Twitter feed is funny, and fact-oriented, and she’s serious enough about her work on contraception and women’s health to write pieces on the subject in Slate. It’s possible to have strong opinions—in Hollywood as in everywhere else—without being downright horrible to other people.

The Lorax didn’t exactly get spectacular reviews. The original environmental message of Dr. Seuss’s book was tarnished by the heavy use of the title character in cross-promotions, including to try to sell SUVs. And yet, the movie made an absolute fortune at the box office this weekend, hauling in $70.7 million in the biggest opening this year.

There are a lot of ways to interpret that number, but I think the most important one is this: people are just desperate for entertainment they can genuinely share with their children, rather than sitting through something that only works for their kids. The opening weekend figures don’t lie. The Incredibles opened with $70.5 million. Up? $68.1 million. Wall-E? $63.1 million. Cloudy With a Chance of Meatballs, which wasn’t from Pixar, and was based on an obscure children’s book? $30.3 million. Shrek, which is an utter bastardization of William Steig, but pretty fun none the less? $42.3 million.

The Pixar movies on that list may count as high art. But even though the rest of them may not—or don’t even remotely—clear that bar, they’re all fine, fun, mid-level movies with fresh plots and interesting character beats. They’re all movies that took as a baseline requirement that they needed to be non-offensive and age-appropriate, and then started thinking about what would be fun for viewers of all ages. The Incredibles tweaks the superhero tropes that are familiar to adults and adds plausible marriage drama, while giving the kids in the audience feisty character hooks and cool fights. Up bridges the generation gap and does absolutely hilarious things with animal humor. Wall-E combines cuteness with abject terror at what we’re doing to ourselves as a society. Cloudy With a Chance of Meatballs mashes up global warming awareness with mad science (there’s a lot of light environmentalism in these movies that doesn’t particularly challenge the way we live our lives now). And Shrek, however much I wish they’d had the guts to go all the way with the original story, is a wonderful jab at the corporatization of fairy tales.

These things aren’t totally easy to do well—I’m not sure many movies could do the cross-dressing jokes in Mulan, for example—but they’re far from impossible, either. A lot of the movies that are aimed just at adults or just at kids don’t treat those age groups with much in the way of respect. But movies like these successes illustrate that no matter how old you are, being approached you as if you’re intelligent enough to catch jokes and emotionally open enough to be engaged is a pretty appealing prospect.

Rush Limbaugh’s been facing a wave of protest since his ugly attacks on Georgetown Law student Sandra Fluke: he called her a “slut” and a “prostitute” after she testified before Congress about the importance of employer coverage of contraception. In response, advertisers have begun to pull out of the show. And in a near-unprecedented move, Limbaugh issued an apology for his choice of words, though not for the sentiments behind them. But Limbaugh’s efforts to save his show seem unlikely to stop advertisers from fleeing the show or to stem the tide of criticism from figures ranging from Sen. John McCain, to New York’s Cardinal Dolan—to one of Limbaugh’s colleagues in the shock jock game, former CBS radio host Don Imus.

“So were it me, and I ran a radio station or whatever, I would make him go down there and apologize to her face-to-face. He owns a Gulfstream 4, get on it, go to Washington, take her lunch, tell her, ‘look, I’m sorry I said this stuff and I’ll never do it again,” Imus said. He recalled that when he made offensive remarks about the Rutgers women’s basketball team, referring to them as “nappy headed hoes,” “Look at what I did. It was a lame attempt to be funny, and it was three words. And I went and met with these people after I’d been fired…If he was on my radio station, he wouldn’t be on it.”

Imus’s criticism also illustrates that Limbaugh is held to different standards than his fellow commentators on radio and television. Here are some of the punishments Limbaugh’s counterparts have faced for ugly sexual remarks about women:

-In 2009, after Imus made his remarks about the Rutgers basketball team, CBS Radio suspended him for two weeks without pay, MSNBC stopped simulcasting the program on television, and CBS eventually fired him even though his program netted $15 million in annual revenue. Imus apologized at the time and publicly acknowledged his comments were “really stupid.”

-Last May, MSNBC suspended host Ed Schultz for a week after he used language similar to Limbaugh’s during his radio show. Talking about Laura Ingrahm, a staple of right-wing radio, he described her as “this right-wing slut, what’s her name? Laura Ingraham? Yeah, she’s a talk slut.” He apologized to Ingraham on television, calling his language “vile and inappropriate,” and saying “It was wrong, uncalled for, and I recognize the severity of what I said. I apologize to you, Laura, and ask for your forgiveness.”

-In February, Clear Channel suspended California radio hosts John Kobylt and Ken Chiampou for two days after a segment about Whitney Houston’s death in which Kobylt imagined what it must have been like to be Houston’s friends, saying: “It’s like, ‘ah Jesus, here comes the crack ho again. What’s she gonna do? Oh, look at that, she’s doing handstands next to the pool. Very good, crack ho. nice.’ After a while, everybody’s exhausted. And then you find out she’s dead.” The hosts agreed to attend sensitivity training and bring on guests to discuss why their remarks were so ugly.

Fluke was asked today whether she thought Limbaugh should be fired. She said that was a choice for Clear Channel and Limbaugh’s advertisers. But we’ll ask for her: what makes Limbaugh immune—thus far—from punishment by his employer for an ugly, extended personal attack on a woman performing her civic responsibilities? Maybe it’s that, given the profits Limbaugh rakes in, Clear Channel’s established the price of a woman’s reputation.

It’s true Lindsay Lohan was not exceptionally good on Saturday Night Live this weekend, though the Real Housewives of Disney sketch was brilliant and Kristen Wiig should definitely play a dissolute princess again at some point:

But the main thing the furor over her appearance on the show made me think about was why the question of whether Lohan could—and should—be working again is even close to as heated as discussions about Chris Brown and Charlie Sheen. Vulture wants to know why she keeps getting chances in the industry (and totally mischaracterizes her performance and character in Prairie Home Companion, for the record). Gawker treats the question of whether she was good on the show as a Zen koan in need of extensive contemplation.

Lindsay Lohan has absolutely had some issues. She appears to have had substantial problems with substance abuse. She stole some jewelry and was punished for her. She apparently behaved somewhat badly on the set of her movie Georgia Rule—Jane Fonda, who has not had such a hot streak picking projects herself lately, complained about Lohan. She’s potentially a lesbian in a climate that can be pretty limiting to the career prospects of gay women. She also has a notoriously dysfunctional family, who have placed obligations on her ranging from having to support her mother to dealing with her father who’s done everything from condemn Lohan’s relationship with Samantha Ronson to be arrested for battering his girlfriend. That’s quite a bit to put up with, but Hollywood’s had quite a nice little streak of rehabilitating women with similar issues. Britney Spears has a steady boyfriend, a resurrected career, and custody of her kids bad. Nicole Richie’s overcome both eating and substance issues to launch a successful jewelry line and have a couple of deeply adorable munchkins. Paris Hilton, the most notorious of a generation of Hollywood party girls, has quieted down. Given the extent of Lohan’s talent and the trajectory of her peers, it’s totally reasonable that she’d be given subsequent chances.

Charlie Sheen has also had some issues. Unlike Lohan, however, the harm he’s done is as much to other people as it is himself. He’s got substance abuse issues he’s been treated for repeatedly. He’s also shot, strangled, and thrown a woman to the ground. And if it’s true that he’s been largely professional and together when he’s on the job, throwing a months-long temper tantrum about his current and former employer and getting a $25 million settlement is at least as costly and distracting as anything Lohan ever did. And Sheen’s talent-based glory days are at least as far from his present as Lohan’s are from hers—maybe even further. It’s pretty bizarre that doing harm to yourself makes you a pathetic object of condemnation but doing harm to others earns you supporters who are eager to forgive you or regard you as a badass.

The bridge is yours.

-R.I.P. Ralph McQuarrie. We are all crying droids today.

-Distract yourself: Yahoo’s original web series debut today.

-If you can’t live without more Katniss Everdeen, you are in luck.

-Jeff Goldblum will break up with Sarah Silverman on her new show.

-If Disney made Game of Thrones:

America’s shock radio hosts are not particularly know for their respect for and decent treatment of women. It’s hard to think of a week in American politics where that tendency has been more on display. When Rush Limbaugh gets so disgusting in his smearing of a monogamous woman who’s testifying in support of the administration’s birth control policy that President Obama is moved to intervene, it’s a clear sign—as if we needed yet another one—that we’re harboring something disturbing in our public discourse. So there’s something very odd about the pop culture effort in recent years to rehabilitate shock jocks—or at least to persuade what are clearly America’s ridiculous uptight feminists to get over themselves.

First, there was The Ugly Truth. In that movie, Katherine Heigel is a television producer who’s forced to work with a gross, lowest-common denominator shock jock played by Gerard Butler. He’s the kind of guy who we’re supposed to think is clever because he boosts ratings with jello wrestling, and who, when he spends a dinner torturing Heigel’s character with a pair of vibrating panties (literally), it’s supposed to be hilarious rather than at minimum sexual harassment. But instead of interpreting him as a crass creep, the whole point of The Ugly Truth is that he’s actually a nice guy, who is good to his nephew, brings his coworkers closer together, and is actually what Heigel’s uptight, narrow-minded control freak needs in her life, sexually and otherwise. The reckoning isn’t really about the gap between his public behavior and his private self—it’s Heigel’s character being forced to realize he’s right about everything, and to stop giving him trouble about behavior that is ugly but commercially successful.

Now, we’re going to be forced to go through this all over again in a show that’s not just meant to sell us on the idea that shock jocks are cool but that will also be about trying to get us to like Dane Cook. NBC, in what seems to be proof that the network that gave us Community can go lowest-common-denominator with the worst of them, is going to have Cook play a shock jock who’s paired with a feminist radio host. His character is supposed to be a “disheveled, unshaven, hung-over and purposely detached magnetic grouch who doesn’t like that his co-host is a woman.” The formula’s so obvious it’s painful: Cook will get over his objection to his co-host being a woman because they’ll evolve into a will-they-or-won’t-they pairing. But it’l be the co-host who starts making compromises on her feminism on discovering that Cook’s character has some sort of painful past. In other words, utter nonsense that requires the man involved to accept approximately zero responsibility for being sexist and awful.

But in real life, slut-shaming women in an effort to terrorize them out of speaking publicly, sexually harassing them on the airwaves, and treating them like objects aren’t excusable because your’e a wounded man-child. They’re not acts that have no impact in the world and can be made up for with dinner, or good sex. And feminists of both genders and women in general aren’t the people in this dynamic whose attitudes need to change.

It’s awful to hear the news that the during their recent great years, the Saints were involved in a system that offered players bounties if they injured the players on opposing teams. The scandal is a setback for the NFL’s efforts to make football a safer, more sustainable game, showing that team and player cultures are fiercely resistant to that league-wide imperative. But it’s also a failure of the NFL collective bargaining agreement by the players who ought to be protected by it, and an illustration of the difficult web of financial incentives players negotiate.

The explanation of how the bounty system worked is a fascinating look at the financial stratification within NFL teams. The bounty system was organized by the Saints’ former defensive coordinator, Gregg Williams, and he kept running the system even after he was specifically ordered by the team to shut it down. But the bounties themselves were offered—and paid—not by the team but by Saints players to Saints players. And they worked as incentives because special teams players who are in a position to inflict those injuries make less than the teammates who offered them the bounties. And that doesn’t even always work out. As Deadspin pointed out, the fines Bobby McCray was assessed for a hit to Brett Favre probably cost him more than he made based on the report’s assessment of what he would have made in bounties.

But however complicated the financial interests are here—and even scarier than the fact the bounties were being offered in the locker room is the news that folks outside the team appeared to be ponying up money—it’s a worrisome illustration of how the league’s compensation patterns could make bounties seem worth reaching for, and could lead to them violating their own collective bargaining agreement. It’s hard to believe that the Saints or any other team would offer bounties in the expectation that they were the only team doing it. And if everyone’s ignoring the collective bargaining agreement’s ban on bounties, then everyone’s ramping up their own risk of being injured by participating in the system. I don’t envy the NFL and the players’ union the task of tweaking those incentives and enforcement to try to make the ban on bounties operative.

Especially since players are coming into the NFL after years of a training that incentivizes hard hits, even if there pride rather than money at stake. I do think that there is a difference between a reward for making a good play and a reward specifically for injuring someone. But I don’t know how meaningful that difference is. I love football, and I struggle with that love and my questions about whether the game as played can be made safer while still remaining exciting.

I am reassured that the leader of our country knows that the best way to inculcate a love of public service in a new generation is exposing them to Parks and Recreation early and often:

Though I do hope Obama’s making very, very clear to Malia that talented, intelligent young ladies don’t have to date men like Tom Haverford. And I’d like him even better if I thought he was using The Wire to explain urban decay—and the awesomeness of gay stick-up men—to his children.