There’s no publication in America that does more with its cover and interstitial art than The New Yorker, whether it’s Art Spiegelman’s lovely, heartbroken commemoration of the September 11 attacks, his commentary on the Crown Heights riots in 1993 or Barry Blitt’s wicked satire on the so-called “terrorist fist bump.” So it’s a pleasure to see them do it again this week with a series of illustrations interrogating Geraldo Rivera’s idiotic declaration that wearing a hoodie made Trayvon Martin seem more legitimately suspicious to George Zimmerman.

The magazine’s hoodie-wearing figures include an older man with a cane, a woman in elegant heels, a child, a vigil attendee. In their quiet way, they illustrate how irrelevant the piece of clothing is—a hoodie can be a tool for a playful peekaboo or a shy glance out at the world, a solemn frame, or a simple convenience. And you can look beyond the hoodie, and still fail to see the full humanity of the person underneath it.

Alan Sepinwall takes on a little-discussed kind of token casting: putting random, poorly-developed teenaged characters in shows in the hopes they’ll lure teenagers into watching:

Shawn Ryan was going on a Twitter run about all the ways “Smash” had gone awry, and suggested that at least some of the problems had to be coming from network notes. I asked whether we could blame networks for all the obnoxious teenage characters — not just Leo, but Tyler on “V,” Jack Linden on “The Killing” and Josh from “Terra Nova,” to name three recent examples — and he said yes, then tweeted, “Think a lot of writers/networks mistakingly think the mere presence of a teenager is show (however annoying) will lure teens into watching.”

And that’s not a new phenomenon, nor one that’s confined to adult programs. I remember when I was a kid, a lot of the cartoons I watched had kid characters — often, in the case of something like “Superfriends,” adding them to pre-existing source material where they didn’t exist — who were elevated to a position of prominence that never made sense to me at the time. With the benefit of hindsight, I have to agree with Shawn’s theory, and say they were there because an executive or producer assumed kids wouldn’t want to watch a bunch of grown-ups have adventures unless there was someone close to their own age to relate to. And it always seemed like a fundamental misunderstanding of the audience. Though some of the kids were non-terrible, I was tuning in to watch Superman or Batman or the guys from M.A.S.K. do something cool, not Wendy and Marvin, the Wonder Twins or Scott Trakker and his pet robot T-Bob. Or, to use a live-action example from when I was slightly older, think of Wesley Crusher, who was there as young audience bait, and yet is someone whom Wil Wheaton is still apologizing for 25 years later.

It’s particularly weird that television would continue to treat teenage characters as a way to pander, because not as if it’s impossible to tell specific stories about what it’s like to be a teenager, or to find quality metaphors for the pain of adolescence, be they Spider-Man‘s web-slinging, the revelation of wizarding abilities in the Harry Potter franchise, or The Hunger Games‘ vicious battles in the arena. And there seems to be ample proof that grown-ups will watch or read intelligent fiction about teenagers that comes with a larger message. Just saying.

In his Today show appearance with Matt Lauer last week, Charlie Sheen revealed something interesting about the terms of his new show, Anger Management, which is in development for FX. Apparently, his contract includes what Deadline is calling a “standard morals clause” because, as Sheen put it “There’s so much money at stake, I don’t blame them.”

If that’s the case, it means that FX is holding Sheen to a higher standard of behavior as a condition of his continued employment than CBS may have. When Sheen was fired from his network hit Two and a Half Men, one of the major issues in negotiating the terms of his dismissal was the unusual morals clause in his contract that stipulated he could only be terminated if Warner Brothers television believed he’d committed a felony. A standard morals clause normally gives a network much more latitude, saying that an actor can be fired if they behave in a way that brings negative attention to a show.

Given Sheen’s behavior, it seems appropriate that, even given his status as a big draw, he’d be held to the same standards as his fellow actors. FX president John Landgraf may not be able to define what sort of actions or behavior would make him consider an actor unemployable. But at least he’s giving himself wide latitude to fire this one.

Ladies and gentlemen, your sexist of the day, perhaps your idiot of the year, and winner of the I’m Terrified of the Female Body and Grossed Out By Its Processes Award, Two and a Half Men creator Lee Aronsohn! Who told the Hollywood Reporter that he’s sick of female-centered comedies because “Enough ladies. I get it. You have periods,” and declared that “we’re approaching peak vagina on television, the point of labia saturation.”

Because talking about Michael Fassbender’s penis is endlessly entertaining, but having to hear that ladies have menstrual cycles, take birth control pills, and enjoy sex is just unbearable, right? Because even though the number of female characters on television tends to hover in the low 40 percent range, we’re just saturated with vaginas, because god forbid stories about men and their ish don’t absolutely dominate the media? Because even though those shows Aronsohn’s complaining about have actually created more writing and directing jobs for men than women, and resulted in some really awful portrayals as a result, we couldn’t possibly let women come to expect that they’ll have access to stories both about them and by them, could we? Because where would that leave poor, suffering, disadvantaged American men?

Maybe I shouldn’t be shocked that the creator of a show as middlebrow, as worshipping of lotharios, as willing to give a leading man like Charlie Sheen a pass on his behavior with a morals clause that could only punish him for a felony, as Two and a Half Men apparently has a ten-year-old boy’s attitudes towards women and their genitalia. But that Aronsohn is dumb and woman-fearing enough not just to believe this, to blithely admit he believes it to a major publication tells you everything about how cosseted Hollywood’s disgusting sexists are. You want to know why we get what we get on movie and television screens? Why, as Vulture asked after their drama derby assessing the last 25 years of television honored almost no performances by or stories about women, there are a dearth of great women’s dramas? Because there are, apparently, no consequences in Hollywood for being perfectly open about how much you despise women’s bodies and the contours of women’s lives. But hopefully that won’t be the case forever, so Aronsohn and his ilk can get acquainted with what it actually feels like to be marginalized.

The bridge is yours.

-More on what makes certain bloggers journalists.

-Dorkitechture.

-Betting is open on how long Oprah’s OWN network lasts.

-Much happier about Philip Seymour Hoffman coming to FX than Charlie Sheen.

-The Avengers cannot possibly get here fast enough:

When I heard the news last week that North Korea’s National Symphony might mount an American tour if the governments of both countries sign off the trip, I was reminded of the first terrific novel I read this year, Adam Johnson’s The Orphan Master’s Son. A story about Jun Do, the son of the administrator of a North Korean orphanage who becomes a signal operator on a ship, then a national hero, before facing a spectacular downfall, it’s a profound meditation on the uncertainty of identity in a totalitarian state. But in an extended sequence of the novel, Jun Do visits Texas as part of a North Korean diplomatic mission, where he’s assumed to be a high-ranking member of the North Korean government. What’s fascinating about his experiences there is the mutual inability to understand. It’s not just a portrait of naive North Koreans introduced to a land of plenty, but of American inability to fathom the wants and constraints of life in North Korea, what American interactions with North Korea mean for their sense of their own country.

It’s absolutely true that there are things in Texas that are a revelation to Jun Do. Seeing the Senator who’s hosting the visit give his dog a treat, “Jun Do understood that in communism, you’d threaten a dog into compliance, while in capitalism, obedience is obtained through bribes.” The things he’s profoundly moved by have less to do with plenty, than with information. When he finds a phone book in the room where he’s staying, “It took him a while to understand that everyone in central Texas was listed here, with their full names and addresses. He couldn’t believe that you could look up anyone and seek them out, that all you had to do to prove you weren’t an orphan was to open a book and point to your parents.” And he’s entranced by the Senator’s family photo wall, wondering “Was this what a family was, how it grew—straight as the children’s teeth? Sure, there was an arm in a sling and over time the grandparents disappeared from the photos. The occasions changed, as did the dogs. But this was a family, start to finish, without wars or famines or political prisons, without a stranger coming to town to drown your daughter.”

These aren’t the kinds of things that the Americans who meet Jun Do think must be new to him. A PhD candidate wants to know if Jun Do knows that South Korea won the war. The Senator’s wife assumes he might have issues receiving medical treatment from a woman, manages to miss why Jun Do stitches might be made of non-Western medical establishment-approved monofilament material, and can’t seem to understand why burning international minutes isn’t the only reason it might be wildly inadvisable to ring up the woman Jun Do claims is his wife. Wanda, “the shadowy intelligence figure” at the gathering approaches Jun Do’s ignorance more as a matter of anthropology and less as a matter of deprivation. “You’re looking at me like maybe I never saw a black person before,” Juno Do tells her. “It’s possible,” Wanda tells him. “I met the U.S. Navy before,” Jun Do says. “Lots of those guys are black. And my English teacher was from Angola. The only black man in the DPRK. He said it wasn’t so lonely as long as he gave us all African accents.” Jun Do’s North Korea is both poorer and experientially richer than Wanda or the Senator’s wife can possibly imagine:

Wanda turned to him. “Do you feel free?” she asked. She cocked her head. “Do you know what free feels like?” How to explain his country to her, he wondered. How to explain that leaving its confines to sail upon the Sea of Japan—that was being free. Or that as a boy, sneaking from the smelter floor for an hour to run with other boys in the slag heaps, even though there were guards everywhere, because there were guards everywhere—that was the purest freedom. How to make someone understand that the scorch-water they made from the rice burned to the bottom of the pot tasted better than any Texas lemonade? “Are there labor camps here?” he asked. “No,” she said. “Mandatory marriages, forced-criticism sessions, loudspeakers?” She shook her head. “Then I’m not sure I could ever feel free here,” he said. “What am I supposed to do with that?” Wanda asked. She seemed almost mad at him. “That doesn’t help me understand anything.” “When you’re in my country,” he said, “everything makes simple, clear sense. It’s the most straightforward place on earth.”

It is, and it isn’t. As Dr. Song explains to Jun Do, “Where we are from. stories are factual…For us, the story is more important than the person. If a man and his story are in conflict, it is the man who must change. But in America, people’s stories change all the time. In America, it is the man who matters.” Both the North Koreans and the Americans are straightforward, but their entirely different interpretive rules mean they’re doomed to misunderstand each other. It’s true for both of them, for a few days in Texas, that Jun Do is a powerful man. But what that means to each side is so different as to be unbridgeable.

Of all the times he’s been fired from television jobs, Keith Olbermann literally could have not picked a more fortuitous time than this to get the axe from Current TV, the small liberal network co-founded by Vice President Al Gore, where he fled last year after he was let go from MSNBC. It may not seem immediately clear why that’s the case. Current and Olbermann almost immediately proved to be a bad fit, with the relationship deteriorating over everything from the state of Olbermann’s studio infrastructure to Olbermann’s missed work days and fussiness over the car service. His firing is certain to be the start of a nasty battle. Olbermann has vowed to sue Current, an action unlikely to endear him to his dwindling pool of future employers. And Current has retained a crisis PR company to help it manage the fallout of its largest star’s dramatic defenestration from an already vulnerable structure.

But Olbermann has one thing going for him—the weekend after he was fired, HBO rolled out the first trailers for The Newsroom, Aaron Sorkin’s show based on an extremely Olbermann-like commentator (who, in an interesting shift for Sorkin, happens to be a moderate Republican), played by Jeff Daniels:

As crisis PR goes for Olbermann, it’s a dream. He gets painted as a truth teller stifled by the expectations of his network and the people around him, never mind that flinging Blackberries at your camera operators is utterly un-charming behavior. Aaron Sorkin does love him a principled truth-teller, and in an age when the presidency is on tighter verbal lockdown than ever before, it makes a certain amount of sense that he’d give up on the hope of a Commander in Chief telling it like it is in the White House briefing room and downgrade his fantasies to cable television instead.

But there’s something odd about pretending that the prominent cable networks are cracking down on opinionated anchors. MSNBC may not be as aggressive as Fox News, but it’s hardly an opinion-free space, as the elevation of Rachel Maddow (once an Olbermann protege) or Al Sharpton’s passionate coverage of the killing of Trayvon Martin would indicate. And Olbermann’s on-camera personality is the reason he keeps finding work. It’s been the struggle to get him in front of the camera, and to get him to behave collegially off it that’s plagued him. That’s a much less heroic, and much less Sorkin-ite, narrative.

This post contains spoilers through the April 1 episode of Game of Thrones. If you want to discuss events beyond the ones depicted here, please flag your comment for spoilers.

This episode begins with Sansa Stark uttering the words she needs to stay alive, a bitter, hollow mantra: “I am loyal to my beloved Joffrey.” It may be obvious to Tyrion, who tells her tenderly, “Of course you are,” what she’s doing, but to everyone else in his family, this sick pantomime of consent is enough to keep her at their tables, as Joffrey’s fiancee. That disparity says everything about the divide between the way the Lannisters approach governance. Cersei and Joffrey don’t care if there’s contempt behind a facade of compliance, as long as that compliance holds. “Peasants should be in the fields,” she says, in ordering the City Watch to bar the poor from King’s Landing as they seek shelter from winter. But Tyrion wants the feeling behind the words.

There are, however, some truths that matter beyond the name to even the most mendacious of the Lannisters. “I heard a disgusting lie about Uncle Jamie. And you,” Joffrey asks his mother, as he redecorates his throne room. “Father had other children, besides me and Tommen and Myrcella…I’m asking if he fucked other women when he grew tired of you? How many other bastards does he have running around?” Once he finds the answers in his mother’s silence, Joffrey may not be able to rewrite the facts of his birth, but he will have others kill to remake the world closer to the image he’d prefer to have.
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