I’m excited to read all three of the finalists for drama: the winner, Quiara Alegría Hudes’ “Water By the Spoonfull,” about an Iraq war veteran working in a sandwich shop, and Stephen Karam’s “Sons of the Prophet,” about Lebanese-American family sound particularly entertaining. And I’m working on Manning Marable’s Malcolm X biography, about which more to come when I finish. But I’m sorry not to see a winner in the fiction category.

I think most people will assume that there isn’t a winner because the panel couldn’t get their minds around David Foster Wallace’s posthumously published and unfinished novel The Pale King. My regret is that Karen Russell’s Swamplandia! didn’t get the prize, and on a more personal note, I thought that book went down unusually earlier in the Morning News’ Tournament of Books. Swamplandia! is one of the most outstanding books I’ve read recently, a searing story about man’s attempt to reshape the land to his own desires, a family’s attempt to create and hold on to a grand mythology in the face of reality, and one of the most original young female protagonists in fiction in a long time, Ava Bigtree, who is half an orphan and possessed of a wild dream to succeed her dead mother as Florida’s most impressive alligator wrestler.

Swamplandia! is a magical realist novel. It features ghosts and spirits, and a miraculous voyage through the Florida Everglades. It’s also a picaresque, a novel that features a faux-Native American water park, a competing amusement park designed to replicate the experience of being in hell, casinos, miraculous rescues, and an enormous amount of teenage drama. But Karen Russell marshals all of those elements to tell stories about poverty, alienation from society, sexual maturity and sexual assault. Ava’s upbringing is decidedly unconventional: she’s grown up in a family that presents themselves as Native Americans even though they’re not, and that lives apart from mainland society. Ava, her sister Osceola, and her brother, Kiwi have never attended school. Their father is wildly unrealistic about their prospects of resurrecting the park after Ava’s mother dies, denying them their star attraction in a business that was ill-equipped to compete with modern entertainment anyway.

When their father abandons his children in promise of restoring their former glory, it’s meant to be a heroic quest that ends up revealing the rotten pillars that propped up a dream. Osceola takes up with a ghost who died as part of a quixotic government scheme to tame Florida’s swamps, conflating sexual and spiritual possession in a brilliant metaphor for the all-consuming nature of first love. And when Ava goes looking for her sister in the company of a mysterious man in whom she invests trust he proves to be manifestly unworthy of, her journey beyond civilization and to the gates of Hell are a powerful meditation on what it means to venture out into a world that refuses to abide by the rules you’ve been promised, and what it means to summon up the courage to survive trauma.

Pulitzer Prize-winning books are supposed to illuminate some aspect of American life. It would have been nice to see the committee give Russell some recognition for the kinds of American lives she chose to shine Everglades light on, and the mastery she brings to the task.

Kickstarter, the company that allows entrepreneurs (often artists) to raise the funding they need to support their projects through small donations, has achieved a lot of positive press for the things it’s given life to, from the second season of Jane Espenson’s web series Husbands to Womanthology, the collection of comics by women. While it’s great to see donors embrace daring, progressive projects, it seems that Kickstarter may not have policies that match up to its promise.

Artist Rachel Marone reports that, after a project she created was spammed by her long-term cyberstalker and she let her other donors know what the spammer’s motivations were, Kickstarter suspended the project, and banned and then unbanned her on the grounds that the notification was a violation of Kickstarter rules. When Marone’s manager wrote in to the company to ask for an explanation, Kickstarter’s Daniella Jaeger wrote this less than charming response: “If there is any chance that Rachel will receive spam from a stalker on her project, she should not create one. We simply cannot allow a project to become a forum for rampant spam, as her past project became. If this happens again, we will need to discard the project and permanently suspend Rachel’s account.” Because clearly this is happening as a result of Rachel’s carelessness, or negligence, or lack of respect for the system.

One of the reasons that Kickstarter ought to be so special is that it offers people who have been excluded from conventional funding, whether because their projects aren’t the kind of thing that studios and networks are interested in airing because they’re too daring and unconventional a la Husbands, or because artists themselves have trouble cracking conventional funding sources. Stalking victims can, through no fault of their own, end up in the latter category. Stalkers harass their victims by contacting them directly, but they can also make life harder for them in general. Stalkers spread rumors about their victims. They contact their victim’s employers and try to discredit them, suggesting that their victims are crazy, unreliable, unprofessional, disloyal. If the stalker is more powerful than the victim, or more established, it can work. In an industry like entertainment, where employment is project-based rather than long-term, that kind of thing can be devastating.

Now, one of the risks of Kickstarter, of course, is that people will end up providing funding to unreliable donees or projects that aren’t actually viable. And providing a method of feedback for donors is important. But if Kickstarter’s brand is all about helping small donors fund worthy projects that major donors are dumb enough to miss out on, they should be concerned with making sure that their own system doesn’t replicate the pitfalls of conventional funders, and empower the same old abusable hierarchies.

Next week, I’ll start a new regular feature where I discuss Veep, HBO’s new comedy about a bumbling female vice president, and Girls, Lena Dunham’s sly deconstruction of Sex and the City, together, because I’m struck by their riffs on the same themes. But I did want to talk a little bit about last night’s premiere of Girls.

You all, by this point, know that I love the show—it’s all over the top of this blog. But I know not all of you did. Twitterer Rhiannan Root told me she expected “more attitude from the lead. She put up with a lot of BS in the pilot. I expected her to have more respect for herself.” MsCareerGirl said that she “was really disappointed and kinda grossed out by the characters.” I don’t think those reactions are wrong—how much you like Girls entirely depends on how much tolerance you have for the deep well of humor that can be found in grating and pathetic behavior, and how much you enjoy recognizing that in yourself (the answer for me is a whole bunch). But I do think they say something interesting about male and female anti-heroes, and why we have a bunch of the former and almost none of the latter.

The male anti-heroes that we have tend to employ what we understand to be traditionally male traits, just in excess. Walter White’s first step down the road to perdition comes out of a sense that his family will have no means of supporting themselves after he’s gone (an interesting, inherently arrogant assumption that the show’s never convincingly examined, turning Skyler’s attempt at running a business into black comedy). Tony Soprano is excessively decisive. Seth Bullock is preoccupied with honor and justice and defending both. Stringer Bell is engaged in the quitoxic project of turning a drug gang into a legitimate business. All of these are active rather than passive traits, and the characters tend to err when they take action rather than when they delay it.

Hannah Hovarth, by contrast, is an anti-heroine precisely because she doesn’t act, and when she steps, wrong-foots herself dramatically. She puts up with absolutely ridiculous treatment from Adam, who she’s sleeping with but is definitely not her boyfriend. When her boss at the publishing house where she interns dismisses her smugly, she has precisely no response for anything he’s saying (even though she could probably put the Labor Department on his ass). She can confront her parents only when she’s high, and then not with anything close to efficacy.

Passivity, and dependence are all traits that we find humiliating, no matter the proportions they come in, while decisiveness, activity, and standing on principal are all traits we have positive associations with, and so we’re attracted to the people who exhibit them, even when they’re wildly misapplied. The former set of traits is coded as female, the latter as masculine. It’s one thing to respond to a female anti-heroine who is defined as such by her masculinized behavior, whether it’s Sarah Linden’s single-minded focus on her career and bad mothering in pursuit thereof, or Cersei Lannister’s impressive cruelty. Whether a mass audience is ready to embrace a female anti-hero whose anti-heroicness is defined by an overabundence of negatively-coded feminine traits is another question entirely. And it suggests that maybe we’d be better off if we found Tony Soprano’s murderousness less endearing as well.

Well, this is kind of a bummer. Apparently Joss Whedon was going to have Captain America give a speech in The Avengers that would have been partially about the loss of the social safety net, but he decided to cut the scene:

One of the best scenes that I wrote was the beautiful and poignant scene between Steve and Peggy [Carter] that takes place in the present. And I was the one who was like, ‘Guys, we need to lose this.’ It was killing the rhythm of the thing. And we did have a lot of Cap, because he really was the in for me. I really do feel a sense of loss about what’s happening in our culture, loss of the idea of community, loss of health care and welfare and all sorts of things. I was spending a lot of time having him say it, and then I cut that.

The timing and the platform would have been amazing, the purest representative of American power in the superhero pantheon standing in for Solicitor General Donald Verrilli in the biggest tentpole of the summer, a month and a half before the Supreme Court’s likely to issue its ruling that will determine the future of the Affordable Care Act. It also would have also created a political firestorm around the movie, something the cheerful blandness of Captain America was careful to avoid. Whedon may have been entirely right that the scene would have interrupted the flow of the movie. But with The Avengers tracking for an absolutely ginormous opening, he also may not have wanted to futz with the prospects of an enormously high-profile opening.

The bridge is yours.

-This is a great essay about last night’s Mad Men.

-Thank goodness M. Night Shyamalan wasn’t the final word on the Avatar universe.

-Love this.

-Baby Wookiees win Monday.

-Pretty darn excited for Hysteria:

Last week, I noted Glenn Greenwald’s piece on the ongoing troubles that Laura Poitras, a documentarian who’s chronicled the lives of people impacted by the American War on Terror, has had with Homeland Security, which has repeatedly detained her and confiscated her equipment on her return to the U.S. after reporting trips. But she’s not alone. Indian actor Shah Rukh Khan was just detained for the second time by immigration officials on his way into the United States, this time to give a lecture at Yale:

Khan’s arrival for his Yale lecture – preceded by a brief press conference – was delayed by over three hours. The actor did not comment as to why he was detained but before he began his Yale address, Khan smiled and took a witty dig at the incident, “It was nice, as it always happens… Whenever I start feeling too arrogant about myself I always take a trip to America. The immigration guys kick the star out of stardom.” Known for his characteristic humor, Khan further added, “They (immigration officials) always ask me how tall I am and I always lie and say 5 feet 10 inches. Next time I am going to get more adventurous. (If they ask me) what colour are you, I am going to say white.”

You might think that one of the advantages of integrating all of the government’s security functions into a single bureaucracy with unified databases might be that, when you wrongly detain and question someone, you could put a note in their file to so immigration officials who deal with this person in the future know to be polite and careful, and try not to repeat those same mistakes. Hassling artists because they’re brown, or because they question the outcomes of U.S. policy is not an efficient and effective way to ensure the security of America, or to win supporters for American policy.

BlackBook has a fantastic look at gay stand-up comedians that gets at a point that I think is a challenge both for gay comics and Muslim comedy in general: how do you make the vernacular that’s part of your community conversation legible to a wider audience so they can participate in the jokes with you? And how do you create jokes that are a base that you can build your comedy on, rather than define you on terms that may not precisely be your own? As one of the comedians BlackBook talked to put it:

Part of this is because of the constraints of gay comedy. “There’s a condescending attitude that gay entertainment has to involve drag shows or men being effeminate,” says Brent Sullivan, a New York-based comedian. “I did a show in Chelsea the other day where there was this screaming queen who did a lot better than I did. Even homophobes could enjoy that because you are putting yourself into this box that they’ve created for you. But I think we haven’t challenged the gay-friendly straight men of this world to actually enjoy a gay character or enjoy gay entertainment because we haven’t given them anything to enjoy.”

Watching Marc Maron interview Jeffrey Tambor at SXSW, one of the things that fun about watching them riff off each other was the total lack of need to clarify any of the Jewish humor. Even a moment when they may have crossed the line with a Holocaust joke was immediately apparent to everyone in the room, even though it’s hardly a setting that guarantees a majority-Jewish audience. Jewish humor’s just so deeply-integrated into the American humor tradition—Christopher Hitchens believed the only kind of women who could be funny were Jewish ones and lesbians—that while it registers as particular, it doesn’t register as foreign. Everyone can participate in it, and Jews own it, it’s a tool we get to turn on anti-Semites.

That’s true for a small portion of gay humor, and for essentially no Muslim humor whatsoever. Things like the Allah Made Me Funny tour, The Infidel, Four Lions, and Max on Happy Endings will help. But we have so much work to do to make that language feel automatic and accessible to broad audiences.

This post contains spoilers through the April 15 episode of Game of Thrones.

I said on Twitter before this episode of Game of Thrones aired that “What Is Dead May Never Die” is my favorite episode of Game of Thrones to air this season, and it may be my favorite of the show so far. Both on a plot and meta level, there’s a great deal going on here—the first genuinely significant departure from the novels in Margaery Tyrell’s emergence as a major character with independent and clear motivations; the Greyjoys’ commitment to invading mainland Westeros; Catelyn’s attempt to forge an alliance between her son’s forces and Renly Baratheon’s; Jon Snow’s reckoning with the true nature of the world beyond the Wall; Tyrion’s consolidation of his base of power in King’s Landing. But all of these elements explore a single theme: fealty to lovers, lords, and ideals, in a world where disloyalty can be fatal.

We begin with Jon’s discovery that Craster is giving his sons to the woods. He’s shocked—despite the fact that he hasn’t always been treated particularly kindly by the family that raised him—that Craster, a man who takes his daughters as wives and rules his squalid compound with terror and manipulation, would give his children to the cold. “Wildlings serve crueler gods than you or I. Those boys are his offerings,” the Lord Commander explains, with understanding and resignation. It’s one thing to worship the Gods when the greatest token demanded of you is a bent knee before a great tree. And if you don’t believe in powerfully active Gods, it stands to reason great sacrifice might read as abomination rather than devotional. “What boy doesn’t secretly wish for hidden powers to lift him out of his dull life into a special one? But at the end of it, for all my efforts, I got nothing more out of it than a thousand boys before me,” Maester Luwin tells Bran, who is dreaming of wolves, and the possibility of running again. “Maybe magic once was a mighty force in the world, but not anymore. The dragons are gone. The giants are dead. And the children of the forest forgotten.”

We move from divine fealty to a more fleshly—but no less emotionally engaged—variety when the show moves to Renly Baratheon’s encampment. Brienne’s introduction to the show is striking, both for the men and his company and for us, both for the intensity of her attachment to the king, and the shape of it. Brienne isn’t like Margaery, the comely young queen cheering for her brother and serving as an ornament to her king. And she’s not Loras, the comely knight whose dedication to the King is supposed to be read as chaste, a sublimation and transmutation of sexual desire into martial energy. Instead, Brienne’s devotion to Renly is the reverse of pleasure-seeking, it’s self-abnegation, even annihilation. “I fought for my king. Soon, I’ll fight for him on the battlefield. Die for him, if I must. And if it please you, Brienne’s enough. I’m no lady,” she tells Catelyn, removing herself from the company of knights and of women, defining herself by her willingness to die.

Loras, by contrast, has sexual access to the king, but not, as it turns out, his ultimate loyalty. “Brienne is a very great warrior. She’s devoted to me,” Renly tells Loras, who is pouting over his bruises, and is shocked to discover that “You’re jealous.” Unable to restore order, expel Brienne from the Kingsguard, and regain his place as Renly’s most impressive warrior, Loras settles for denying Renly what Renly does still want from him, shaming him with the reminder that “There’s another Tyrell that requires your attention…Shall I bring her to you?”
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