I am utterly charmed by the video for tUnE-yArDs’ “My Country”:

The thing that’s fascinating though is that this super-adorable video is for a song about the failure of American promise. It’s a song that begins “My country, ’tis of thee / Sweet land of liberty / How come I cannot see my future within your arms / Your love it turns me down / Into the underground / My country bleeding me; I will not stay in your arms” and goes on to talk about getting clothes from the Salvation Army, and not out of a sense of hipster thriftiness. I wonder how many people will actually hear that.

In a bit of genius framing and smart re-appropriation of what’s already proven to be one of their most commercially-viable properties, the folks at Archie Comics have announced that they’re going to make a live-action Sabrina the Teenage Witch movie. And rather than the close-to-the-comics format of the cartoon show which debuted in 1970 and ran for four seasons, or the sweetly comic movie and seven-season live action series that starred Melissa Joan Hart, they’re doing something just as smart as their Archie Gets Married series or the introduction of gay character Kevin Keller. They’re turning Sabrina into a superhero, and giving her an origin story that’s meant to function like a Spider-Man Story. Even if you’re not into Archie Comics, you should be excited about this development.

The thing that’s fascinating about Sabrina is that, like My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic, or to a lesser extent, HBO’s Girls, which premieres this weekend, it’s a world in which women are central and men, to a certain extent, just don’t matter very much. Sure, there’s Sabrina’s non-magical boyfriend, and she has male and female friends in the form of the Archie gang, but the absolute core of the franchise and the thing that’s most fun about is Sabrina hanging around with her wacky aunts and figure out what it means to be a witch. It’s almost a total inversion from superhero movies in which talented young men are mentored by skillful older men, where women serve as consciences before hanging from things or get burned to death by villains. Even when we see extremely powerful women in pop culture, they get mentored by men: Buffy has Giles, Katniss has Haymitch, The Bride has Pai Mei. The idea of a superheroine who gets to be mentored by other women is essentially unprecedented in the last decade of cinema, and it lends an entirely new dynamic to the trope, one that’s less about the transfer of power possessed by men to a lone women and more about the idea that there are specifically feminine means of power.

This is particularly important given that becoming a teenager, and discovering you have power, do tend to mean different things for boys and girls. It’s easy, for example, to make jokes about Peter Parker and his uncontrollable webs in his early days as Spider-Man. But ultimately, the narrative for dorky dudes who acquire super-powers is pretty simple: the weakling acquires a compensatory strength or skill, whether it’s web-slinging or a U.S. Government-issue physique, takes up a man’s work, and is rewarded with the girl. If you’re a woman, things are more complicated: getting power means not just using it but managing it, and the way people respond to your possession of it. And if you get that power as a teenage girl, you get it at a time when you have to manage a whole host of other things that are not unique to boys but are intensified for girls—your looks, your clothes, your brain, and the way people treat whatever combination of them you’re manifesting. That’s complicated, but that complexity is precisely what makes it unfortunate that Marvel or DC hasn’t tried to tell these stories. No matter what you may think of their core content, the folks at Archie are fast proving themselves hugely nimble, creative, and forward-looking.

Over at Ars Technica, Tim Lee brings news of a disturbing lawsuit, now supported by the Motion Picture Association of America, that could set a legal precedent that embedding copyright video, rather than hosting it, counts as copyright infringement:

“Although there is nothing inherently insidious about embedded links, this technique is very commonly used to operate infringing internet video sites,” the organization writes. “Pirate sites can offer extensive libraries of popular copyrighted content without any hosting costs to store content, bandwidth costs to deliver the content, and of course licensing costs to legitimately acquire the content.” The MPAA also notes that embedding can enable sites to monetize infringing content by surrounding it with ads…

Numerous websites embed content from third parties they have not personally inspected. Under the theory articulated by Grady, and supported by the MPAA, these websites would be responsible for this content, exactly as if they had stored it on their own servers. This could create a serious disincentive for sites to allow users to post embedded content, hampering the convenience and user-friendliness of the Web

I, and the rest of my colleagues at ThinkProgress (not to mention our peers elsewhere on the internet), would have to dramatically reassess the way we do business, were this precedent to become law. Embedding is an elegant tool for journalists, and a great convenience for readers. It lets us write posts and stories that have a neat flow to them, framing a piece of content, letting the reader consume that content, and then move on to our analysis all without forcing them to click away, perhaps never to return. Sure, it keeps people on our site and lets us make money, but it’s also a convenience for the reader that provides a coherent consumption experience.

If this legal precedent is established, it would create a hugely complex situation. There’s a lot of content that the copyright holders would like to see widely embedded and distributed, whether it’s move trailers, music videos, campaign ads that no one actually intends to spend money to air but they would like to be seen, speeches, etc. That desire isn’t going to disappear if a new legal regime governing embeds comes in place. And that creates a terrific problem for both people who want their content embedded and those of us who need to embed a wide variety of content to do our jobs. Given the huge amount of content out there, and the large number of vectors through which it’s made available, it’ll be extremely difficult to comply with a new regime if there’s no clear way to tell if the content’s licit or not. And without that clarity, media outlets might be less willing to distribute even licit content if they can’t clearly document its provenance. That skittishness could prevent transmedia campaigns like the Peter Weyland TED Talk that’s being used to promote Ridley Scott’s Prometheus, where video is meant to appear sui generis rather than clearly coming from a studio, from taking off, which would be a loss both for the content producers themselves, and for the people who would enjoy that content if it was distributed to them.

Given the fuzzy, burdensome precedent this lawsuit could set, I’d like to see the clear numbers that explain why the potential use of embedding for intentional copyright violation is so harmful that it justifies upending the legitimate use of embedding for the rest of us.

Little Brown’s released a basic plot summary for J.K. Rowling’s first book aimed at adults rather than younger readers, The General Vacancy, which sounds like a combination of Hot Fuzz and Harry Potter’s summers home with the Dursleys:

When Barry Fairweather dies unexpectedly in his early forties, the little town of Pagford is left in shock. Pagford is, seemingly, an English idyll, with a cobbled market square and an ancient abbey, but what lies behind the pretty façade is a town at war. Rich at war with poor, teenagers at war with their parents, wives at war with their husbands, teachers at war with their pupils…Pagford is not what it first seems. And the empty seat left by Barry on the parish council soon becomes the catalyst for the biggest war the town has yet seen. Who will triumph in an election fraught with passion, duplicity and unexpected revelations?

This strikes me as a terrific match for Rowling’s talents. The bits at the Dursleys are a frame device for the real action, which happens at Hogwarts, but they’re brilliant none the less. I’ve always appreciated how Rowling’s been able to communicate that the Dursleys are profoundly fearful people, whether they’re terrified of being seen as less than ordinary by their neighbors or subordinate to the whims of the marvelously monstrous Aunt Marge. In the early novels, Petunia and Vernon are held hostage by their own son, whose tantrums over gifts and diets and school uniforms have them almost entirely cowed. The entire family’s treatment of Harry is hideous, and an illustration of the moral rot that can lie behind manicured facade. Even suburban dream houses have basements.

Beyond the walls of Number 4 Privet Drive, she imbues the rest of Little Whinging and the world around it with a certain amount of unease, too. The zoo Harry and Dudley visit is a bit depressing until Harry’s accidental acts of magic transform it. The England the Dursleys flee through is drab, the island where they finally end up is the setting for a horror movie before Hagrid’s arrival transforms it into something else entirely. Even before the Dementors show up, the playground where Harry waits for Dudley and his friends, spoiling for a fight later in the series, has a sour, outgrown air to it. I think Rowling’ll do just fine, even if she doesn’t bring magic to Pagford.

And she’s always been very good at the pettiness of politics. “The Other Minister,” in which the recently-deposed Wizarding Prime Minister Cornelius Fudge pays a visit to Number Ten Downing Street is an excellent stand-alone piece of writing about a politician confronted by something entirely beyond his pay grade. Arthur Weasley is a charmingly dedicated bureaucrat, and Percy Weasley’s careerism and return to his principles and his family is one of the great small arcs of the Harry Potter novels. The grandioseness and failings of the other powerful politicians in the Ministry is both farce and ultimately tragedy. The General Vacancy may not be magical, but that doesn’t mean that the Harry Potter series wasn’t the perfect preparation for it.

Margaret Lyons has a nice appreciation of what she’s calling TV’s new crop of “sweatshirt boyfriends,” the laid-back guys who are populating a wide range of shows:

Despite their relaxed attitude toward personal grooming, sweatshirt boyfriends aren’t necessarily Apatowian man-children — Jack (Nick Wechsler) on Revenge owns his own bar and takes care of his annoying teenage brother, Pete (David Walton) on Bent is a successful enough contractor, Chris (Chris D’Elia) on Whitney is an entrepreneur, and Joe (Luka Jones) on Best Friends Forever is a video game designer. Pete (Mark Duplass) on The League just seems sort of low energy, more depressed than inept, while Nick (Jake M. Johnson) on New Girl and Max (Adam Palley) on Happy Endings fall more in the goofy-slacker camp, though both have started confronting their fears of adulthood, Nick by finally seeing a doctor and Max by learning to enjoy frittatas. Did you know those are like egg pizzas? The newest edition to the SBC (that’s the sweatshirt boyfriend club) is Best Friends Forever’s Joe.

What she doesn’t mention, and what I think is somewhat important about this development, is that this subset of characters contain a fair number of guys who work blue-collar jobs. Sure, there are the video game designers and Whitney’s tech millionaire. But Jack and Nick are bartenders, Pete is a contractor, and Max drives a limo. There are disconnects between these characters jobs and their lifestyles, of course, from the palatial apartment on New Girl to the Chicago loft on Happy Endings—television has a hard time with the visuals of limited incomes, even when they’re acknowledging that people have job titles other than banker or party planner. But it is, frankly, nice to see characters of different incomes be friends, date, occasionally deal with the fact that they’re at different places in their careers and at different levels of financial security, given that’s the way that actual people conduct their actual lives.

The bridge is yours.

-Gaming consoles apparently amount for 1 percent of American residential energy use.

-A history of gunshots in music.

-This is…quite a review.

-Did Alec Baldwin inadvertently reveal 30 Rock‘s cancellation?

-Can it please just be Avengers time already?

Go see the film Bully. All of the controversy about its MPAA rating was warranted, because it presents a powerful glimpse into the painful realities young people face in schools across the country. It’s a documentary that everybody needs to see, because we are long overdue for a serious conversation about bullying.

“‘Kids will be kids,’ ‘boys will be boys,’ ‘bullying is a rite of passage’ — these are myths.” Both AFT President Randi Weingarten and NEA President Dennis Van Roekel emphasized this point repeatedly in the panel discussion after Tuesday night’s screening. And it’s true: young people are demeaning, harassing, sexually harassing, and assaulting their peers on a daily basis and there is no excuse for it. Bully‘s most important take-away is surely the brutal wake-up call for just how bad things have gotten: it’s impossible to watch 12-year-old Alex get cursed, beaten, and strangled — and take it — without your heart absolutely breaking for him. Add to that the complete lack of accountability for school administrators to intervene (and the negligence they demonstrate as a result) and you leave the film with a sense of anger and alarm that bullying was ever treated like it wasn’t a big deal.

One concern that has been raised is the film’s portrayal of suicide through the lens of two families who recently lost their sons. Emily Bazelon suggests that the lack of context about Tyler Long’s mental health is conspicuous and misleadingly implies that bullying was the only factor that led to his suicide. This apparent misrepresentation is disconcerting, and Bazelon is right that mental health concerns should always be included in conversations about suicide. Still, she neglected to mention that when Tyler’s parents hosted a town hall about bullying after his death, no school administrators could be bothered to show up. This isn’t a film about suicide — it’s a film about how little we are doing to protect kids from peer abuse. Clearly this was a school that did not see bullying as a problem but that had a lot of parents and students who did. The Long family felt that bullying had significantly impacted Tyler’s life and sought to rectify that lack of accountability to protect other children, and none of the additional context of his story takes away from that reality.

So ultimately, I don’t feel like this discrepancy takes away from the film in the same way Bazelon does. Yes, suicide contagion is a real concern, particularly if suicide is portrayed as a direct or inevitable result of bullying, a point I’m not going to debate. But conservatives who wish to maintain anti-gay climates in schools also emphasize this point to downplay the impact of bullying, so it shouldn’t be treated as an either/or question. Two years ago, a 14-year-old boy named Brandon Bitner committed suicide two towns away from where I grew up in rural central Pennsylvania. He had been bullied for his perceived sexual orientation, but at his funeral, the eulogizing religious leader absolved the community of any accountability for how Brandon was treated, choosing to blame only his depression. The way I felt on that day is the same way I felt leaving Bully — not that bullying causes suicide, but that given bullying can be a trigger for a young person to take his own life, it shouldn’t take such a death for a community to address the problem.

In this way, Bully is a call to action, busting down a closet door of apathy about an issue that intersects all of our lives. There is much we still need to learn about the impact and extent of bullying, but we now have an incredible launching point for the revolution our schools deserve.

The internet was buzzing this week with the news that Secretary of State Hillary Clinton had gotten word of a Tumblr called Texts From Hillary that painted her as a world-dominating, sunglasses-swiping badass—and made her own contribution to it. It was a delightful moment of self-awareness and unexpected hipness from a woman who’s rebounded from a tough loss in the 2008 presidential campaign to become one of the most powerful people in the world. But it’s been part of a long process, one by which Hillary Clinton’s become cool by embracing the very things that used to mark her as a dork.

It’s a process that begin in 2007, when Clinton dressed up the decidedly gimmicky process of having supporters vote on a campaign song by turning the big reveal into a spoof of the ending of The Sopranos:

What’s great about the spot is not just its piggy-backing on the cultural capital of one of America’s most iconic shows, but the way it played with popular conceptions about the Clintons themselves, the idea that Bill has a weakness for junk food, that Hillary can be a nag and possess an epic side-eye.

She displayed the same kind of self-awareness in her speech at the Democratic National Convention in Denver the next summer, when she thanked “the Sisterhood of the Traveling Pantsuit” for supporting her during the campaign. This time, the cultural artifact wasn’t as universally applicable—it was gender specific, and itself considered a little dorky and sentimental. And rather than using it to transform herself, Hillary used it to double down on something about her that had been widely remarked on, her preference for blocky, brightly-colored coordinating ensembles.

She owned her dorkiness, the way she seems to be owning the scrunchies her staff reportedly wants to take away from her today. It’s easy to forget how hysterical people were about Hillary’s hair during the first Clinton campaign and during the Clinton presidency. But she couldn’t do anything right, and now she seems rather determined to do what she wants whether it’s au courant or not. I saw her rocking a particularly elaborate scrunchie with a tweedy coat at a screening at the MPAA earlier this week, where she spoke about watching Luc Besson’s Aung San Suu Kyi biopic The Lady on the plane on her recent trip to Burma.

Maybe it’s just that Clinton is finally legitimately powerful enough, and powerful in her own right, not to have to care one whit about whether anyone thinks she’s cool. But after so many years of trying to please everyone, Clinton appears to be trying mostly to please herself when it comes to her personal style and presentation. And the rest of the world’s caught on to the idea that Hillary is someone whose approval they should want, rather than the other way around.

I’d take this news of study with a large grain of salt—or maybe some well-buttered crumpets, because it’s English, and I do adore me some crumpets—because the authors only interviewed 77 people involved in television and film production. But it’s interesting to see the extent to which a new report reveals that people who work in those industries in the UK feel that class still plays a major role in determining who’s able to gain entry to jobs and to influence:

A survey of professionals in the industry has found that working-class people are discriminated against because they do not have the “right accents, hairstyles, clothes or backgrounds.”

Presenting the study yesterday at the British Sociological Association’s annual conference, researchers said people from working-class backgrounds, women and those from ethnic minorities did form networks within the industry, but they were not as powerful and were “discriminated against because they were not trusted insiders.”

“Most jobs were gained through friends and friends of friends,” the researchers from Durham University and the University of St Andrews said. “Openings were rarely advertised and producers tended to rely on the grapevine.”

It’s not that this is totally different from the American entertainment industry. But I was struck by the sense that class is so legible in the UK. Perhaps this is only my experience, but I’ve always read accents as regional markers and grammar as a class marker: what shows Boyd Crowder is a Kentuckian as his accent, and his syntax and use of words like “ain’t” show that he’s less educated than other characters. It’s got to be incredibly frustrated to be judged by something that’s hardwired into you before you have a chance to know that it might be important. And it’s a worthwhile reminder that there’s no perfect, bias-free entertainment industry out there in another country for us to emulate. We’re all stuck replicating our prejudices and class systems.