Jennifer Lawrence is tiny—even before Lenny Kravitz, playing stylist Cinna to her post-apocalyptic teen reality contestant Katniss Everdeen, cinches her into a corset to put her on display before the decadent residents of the Capitol—so why did critics and fans alike start discussing whether she looks famished-enough to play the lead role in The Hunger Games? Rue and Thresh, the Tributes from District 11 who face off against Katniss in the 74th Hunger Games, are clearly described as dark-skinned in Suzanne Collins novels, on which the movie is based, so why did fans react to the casting of black actors in those roles with racist outbursts and claims the casting “ruined the movie”? Along with making an enormous amount of money, The Hunger Games seems to have brought out the worst in a whole bunch of people.

Julian Sanchez has a great post on why, even beyond the reading comprehension issues involved, it’s so disturbing that readers would assume all the characters depicted in the franchise are white:

The book doesn’t dwell on this, though, and a reader skimming along at a fast clip could be forgiven for missing the two quick references. The deeper stupidity here is the assumption that the default race of any character is Caucasian when it’s not stated explicitly, and that casting a person of color in this case would represent some kind of deviation from the book’s implicit characterization. This would be wrongheaded for an adaptation of a book set in the present, but at least quasi-understandable: The social realities of people of color in contemporary America are different in a variety of ways, enough so that we do generally expect authors to make at least passing reference to a major character’s minority status.

It makes no sense at all, however, in a dystopian sci-fi novel (implicitly) set two or three centuries in the future. First, we have no real idea what the racial dynamics of Panem are like, so there’s no particular reason to think Suzanne Collins would need to make note of it if Katniss were of (say) Korean or Chicana descent. Second, and maybe more to the point, non-Hispanic whites are already projected to constitute less than half of the U.S. population in 2050, long before the earliest possible date for the events of the book.

The weird bodysnarking of Lawrence, exemplified by Manohla Dargis, of all people (she wrote “A few years ago Ms. Lawrence might have looked hungry enough to play Katniss, but now, at 21, her seductive, womanly figure makes a bad fit for a dystopian fantasy about a people starved into submission.”) reveals both ignorance of the text and another kind of problematic default. Katniss is better-fed than her District 12 peers in part because of her ability to hunt, and she gorges herself during her time in the Capitol so she’ll have energy to burn in the arena. But more importantly, Dargis and the other folks who questioned whether Lawrence who was too thin to play Katniss forget how dramatically Hollywood actresses restrict their diets in order to look the way they do. Lawrence and company may not be starving, but their bodies aren’t exactly a naturally-occurring default, either.

It’s frightening to think we’re still stuck in a place where white is the default for characters and that choosing otherwise provokes such extreme anger, and that even an actress’s carefully maintained, tiny body isn’t starved enough to satisfy some people: she has to look like death, and still be a powerful huntress, too.

Well, it looks like somebody‘s campaign staff figured out that The Hunger Games was going to be a massive hit. Rick Santorum’s campaign dropped an ad over the weekend that borrows heavily from the worn Appalachian iconography that dominates the early scenes of that movie in its efforts to suggest that just two more years of an Obama presidency could produce a dystopian America:

And though the ad doesn’t mention abortion directly, focusing instead on a blown-out candle to represent the loss of freedom of religion, it repeats a quick but ominous image of a baby in a cradle bathed in red light twice. Santorum may, by this point, trust that his pro-life supporters have gotten the message and only feel like he needs to provide indirect reinforcement.

Given the tagline at the end, it looks like the Santorum campaign might run more of these ads like a web TV series. It would be a creative move for a campaign that doesn’t have a ton of money, and is never going to attract the kind of Hollywood support that let President Obama make a 17-minute long campaign documentary narrated by Tom Hanks.

But Santorum might want to think twice before embracing dystopian storytelling in his effort to position himself as the strongest challenger to the sitting president. After all, there’s already a great dystopian story about the logical consequences of his social policies and restrictions on women’s reproductive rights:

The Obama campaign doesn’t even have to worry about cutting new ads if Santorum’s the challenger. They can just take some of their ridiculous campaign war chest and buy time to air The Handmaid’s Tale instead.

In between Google and Facebook, it’s easy to feel like the constant target of a data mining operation that’s garnering an uncomfortable amount of information about our personal lives. But a recent post in Deadline suggests that advertisers feel like they aren’t actually getting very much information about the people who are consuming their content when those consumers view a show or a clip online instead of on a set-top television. Here are some of the most relevant breakdowns:

Conventional TV: A :30 ad displayed to a viewer watching Glee on a traditional TV set is included in Nielsen’s C3 estimate for the applicable demographic.

Hulu: That same :30 ad displayed to a viewer watching Glee on Hulu is reported by Hulu to the advertiser as an impression served, with no specific demographic information (Hulu will provide an estimate of the overall composition of site users)…

Mobile devices in home: That same :30 ad displayed to a viewer watching Glee streaming to her iPad (in her home) isn’t captured at all.

Mobile devices away from home: That same :30 ad displayed to a viewer watching Glee on a mobile device (outside her home) is reported by whatever service is delivering the video clip, with no specific demographic.

I’ve always enjoyed Hulu’s option to give feedback about whether an ad is relevant to me, both because it means I’m deluged with less totally irrelevant content, and because I’ve always assumed that I’m helping make the service a better option for both advertisers and content providers by giving them the ability to target me pretty directly. But apparently that’s not the case. And it raises an interesting question for those who want content to be available online for lower out-of-pocket costs than it is now. Would you be willing to give up some of your privacy and to be targeted much more directly by advertisers if it made content distribution on the web more profitable, and more viable?

The SyFy network’s announced that they won’t be moving forward with Blood and Chrome, a prequel to their critically acclaimed hit Battlestar Galactica, which would have flashed back to the first war between humans and their robot creations, the Cylons. For Battlestar Galactica fans who have missed the space opera, which drew parallels to everything from the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan to student protests in the 1960s, since it went off the air in 2009, and the show’s prequel Caprica, which finished its run in 2010, this may be bad news. But it’s a good decision by the network. Battlestar Galactica was terrific, but it’s time for SyFy to stop milking the same concept, and to find a new great science fiction show worthy of the network’s name.

In recent years, one of SyFy’s most pronounced trends has been towards fantasy programming rather than science fiction. Alphas, its flawed-superheroes show, is wonderfully fun, but its characters’ abilities are of the X-Men-style, Children of the Atom mumbo-jumbo variety. The biological explanations are for the most part (Gary, who appears to be somewhere on the autism spectrum, is a notable exception) more hand-waving than serious exploration of the human body. Eureka, the network’s show about a town inhabited by the descendants of America’s greatest scientists and their cantankerous creations, is entering its final seasons. The artifacts that are stored in Warehouse 13 and hunted down by FBI agents gone steampunk are decidedly the stuff of literature and legend, rather than scientific discoveries that are key to American hegemony. Haven is about a town with supernatural troubles. Sanctuary is about a monster scientist. The network has no fewer than four shows about ghosts. And its latest mini-phenomenon, a syndication of the Canadian show Lost Girl, is delightful, but that doesn’t make it any less about a succubus making her way in the fairy community.

This seems like a real missed opportunity. There’s nothing wrong with fantasy, and fantasy can set up moral dilemmas as well as science fiction: power is power, and decisions about how to use it can be fascinating whether it’s a new scientific discovery or a newly discovered supernatural ability. But, to go all Southland Tales on it, the future is going to be more futuristic than we imagined, and it’s getting here awfully fast. There are so many pressing questions that would also make for fabulous entertainment. What will it mean for space travel, something we once thought of as a scientific frontier and an escape hatch for humanity, to become a luxury tourism industry? What will it mean to be human as we’re increasingly integrated with our technology, perhaps to the point of having smart implants, like Ender Wiggin in Speaker for the Dead, or a bunch of the characters in Kim Stanley Robinson’s forthcoming 2312? How will technology, medical advances, and the ability to augment ourselves exacerbate our class divides?

These questions are imminent, not theoretical. And they all lend themselves beautifully to television devices. You could do an office comedy about running a space tourism company, or a drama about corruption in the industry and an interstellar land grab. You can have chatty, snarky AIs as characters, or show humans growing overly invested in their technology—Apple clearly means for us to attach to Siri, and as she works better, I can see that happening. When there’s this much potential available, there’s something kind of unfortunate about turning away from the possible and the probable to the purely fantastical. Fiction doesn’t have an absolute responsibility to help us work out our problems, but it’s an incredible tool for helping us think through them. For a network with the motto “Imagine Greater,” that ought to be an exciting prospect.

The bridge is yours.

-Stock sitcom plots that no one makes anymore.

-Angela Bassett as Storm in an X-Men movie directed by Kathryn Bigelow would have been the greatest of all things.

-Is this the next huge dystopian YA series?

-Because Battleship didn’t make little enough sense already.

-Can we all agree the Emmys miniseries category has no plausible definition for what qualifies to compete in it?

-Morgan Spurlock goes to Comic Con:

Alli Thresher, a video game designer at Harmonix, has a fantastic meditation up at XOJane on how booth babes change the dynamics at conventions. She argues that the presence of women who are hired purely to be attractive—even in cases where they’re knowledgeable about the products and franchises they’re selling—underrates women’s expertise and passion for gaming and sets up situations where women who are conventions for other purposes are at greater risk for sexual harassment because they’re assumed to be booth babes and therefore sexually available:

At last year’s PAX East I spoke to TWO women whose companies were using them as “booth babes” (literally advertising, “take photos with our booth babes”). One of them told me that she was actually the company’s office manager and she had been invited to the convention specifically to dress up and help the company subvert the policy.**

To PAX’s credit, they have been known to reprimand companies who do this sort of thing and have even, in some cases, escorted groups of babes and their product from the con. But still, how uncool to be asked, by your boss, to wear a tube top and miniskirt and pose for pictures with strangers? (The booth in question was run by a community outlet and not a development studio). I certainly don’t blame the women hired to work as booth babes for the bad behavior of a few select assholes I’ve encountered.*** I do, however, blame the culture and attitudes that promote their use.

As Lesley pointed out in her GDC diaries, when the bulk of the women one sees in a male dominated space are there as nothing more than human props or marketing tools, it’s easy to make the leap that all women staffing booths are there for the same purpose. For women like me, who are present to discuss the games we’ve worked on, this provides several challenges and also makes the convention floor an unwelcome space for us.

Thresher also makes what I think is a critically important point, and one that I’ve reiterated in other contexts: that treating men as if they’re dumb creatures who can’t process anything besides boobs and couldn’t possibly enjoy talking to an actual woman is awfully condescending. Thresher writes that for a number of male commentators, interactions with women who are presented to them strictly for visual consumption have been disappointing because they’re at conventions to talk about games and gaming. Seeing awesome cosplayers, or getting your picture taken with an attractive woman, may be part of the convention experience. But it’s a promotional device that doesn’t actually get to the core of why people come to conventions, which is to get more information about products that they love and to have conversations with other people who are as invested as they are in those products and experiences. The lowest common denominator, whether you’re setting up a stall at a convention, or marketing a movie like John Carter as if its core demographic still thinks girls have cooties, is not always actually the most profitable and engaged one.

Maybe I am just an Old, but do kids these days listen to Perez Hilton? Who knew!

I have to say, though, if Rock the Vote had access to the stars from Glee (Darren Criss shows up in this video), it would have been fun to see them knock out some renditions of Schoolhouse Rock’s best songs about voting rights and civic involvement. I want to see Naya Rivera sing “Suffering ‘Til Suffrage”:

I haven’t yet decided if we’ll be doing a regular Mad Men open thread—the response here may help determine that. And this post contains spoilers through the March 25 season 5 premiere of the show.

Several weeks ago, Tanner Colby wrote in response to manifold charges that Mad Men has done poorly in addressing the role of race and the lives of black Americans during the period it chronicles, “Mad Men isn’t cowardly for avoiding race. Quite the opposite. It’s brave for being honest about Madison Avenue’s cowardice.” I don’t know if that’s quite true. It might be more accurate to say that Mad Men is best understood as a show about the sixties told through the stories of the people whose lives were among the last reached by change in that tumultuous decade. The limitations of those characters, by necessity, become the show’s—there are no meaningful black characters with sustained story arcs in Mad Men because none of the show’s main characters have meaningful and sustained relationships with black people that recognize the full humanity of African-Americans.

It appears that could change in Mad Men’s fifth season, though not because the show’s characters are any less solipsistic or any more inclined to reach out beyond the limits of their own experience (unless it’s to add new power dynamics to their sex lives). Rather, it’s because the African-Americans who live in New York and Connecticut, and whose communities and worldviews have been evolving beyond the notice of the people at Sterling Cooper Draper Pryce, have decided to finally take these powerful men in their gorgeous buildings at their stated words.

That change begins when SCDP’s rivals at Y&R decide that it’s hilarious to taunt a group of, as they describe them, “cops and negroes and kids” demonstrating to ask the Office of Economic Opportunity, founded in 1965 as part of President Johnson’s War on Poverty, to fulfill its promise. The advertising executives, who have already put up hand-lettered “Goldwater ’68″ signs and hollered at the demonstrators to get jobs, pelt them with paper bags filled with water. But they find the tables are turned on them when a number of women and children, accompanied by a white, male reporter march up to Y&R.

There’s something fitting about the fact that they confront an aging secretary first—the most vulnerable person in the firm has to turn away the vulnerable people calling the firm to explain its conduct. God forbid an executive actually have to account for himself when he can pit members of disadvantaged groups against each other. It’s entirely too on the nose when one of the women tells the secretary “Don’t call us ridiculous! Is this what Madison Avenue represents?” and then spotting the guilty parties remarks, “And they call us savages.” The point isn’t that they’re savages, it’s that they’re raging children, afraid of anything they find unfamiliar or threatening. They’re pathetic, but no less dangerous for it.

The men of SCDP get that their rivals are in a fix, but they don’t understand why their behavior is shameful rather than simply unstrategic. And that misunderstanding is why they trip themselves up when Roger insists it’ll be a delightful joke to take space in the advertising section of the Times announcing the their firm, unlike Y&R, is an equal opportunity employer.

First, it sets off Joan, who marches into the office with her son to make sure her job is safe—once again, it’s women and people of color who feel pitted against each other by men who are certain their positions are secure. And then, it welcomes in a flood of black job applicants who have decided to take the advertisement at its stated word, and ignoring what Roger believed to be its archness and sophistication, have decided to come after the jobs SCDP thought it didn’t actually have to offer to gain points. This isn’t Don’s letter swearing off cigarette company business. It’s not a game, and it’s not another act of branding. And you can’t joke, as Roger and Don earlier joked about not hiring Jews, when the people you aren’t hiring show up at your door and put the question to you directly so your answer won’t stay private, and confined to the realms of people small enough to find it funny. The rapid-fire conversation when the partners see the neatly-dressed, patient applicants is revealing. “I don’t know why we can’t just hire one.” “Because we’re not hiring.” “Fire that receptionist.” “We can’t have one out there.”

And an inability to refer to black people directly isn’t the only way the partners don’t know how to talk to or about people who were previously so far distant that they have no language or conversational experience to draw on, no sense of what’s appropriate or respectful. When Lane tries to at least halve their problem by announcing that they’re only hiring secretaries (oh, the conflicts that are past, and passing, and are yet to come), he struggles to find the words to address the men, saying: “You are free to leave. I mean, you are welcome to leave. You may go.” It’s a funny, uncomfortable moment, and one where the show sees Lane in a way he can’t possibly clearly see himself.

Would it have been nice for Mad Men to move race to the center of its narrative sooner? Absolutely. But I’m not entirely convinced it would have been realistic for these people, who even as they sell the world of tomorrow to their clients cling resolutely to the privileges awarded by the past, to have been quick to understand and explore the way racism shapes their lives, decisions, and reactions. That’s a flaw of Don Draper and his peers, and yet another signal of how far they may be left behind and the things their backwardness will deny them. “We’re going to the Statue of Liberty,” Don tells Sally, Bobby and Eugene during their weekend with him and Megan. “You always say that,” Bobby reminds him, “but we never do.”