I’ve been watching The Lizzie Bennet Diaries, a cute little web series that imagines Jane Austen’s best heroine as a graduate student living at home with her parents to save money and avoid taking out further loans:

It’s clearly being shot on a low budget, so the show is unfortunately a bit limited. But I’m struck by the way it’s managed to gracefully make the old text more diverse and more modern. Lizzie’s best friend Charlotte Lucas has become Charlotte Lu, who edits Lizzie’s videos and occasionally stars (quite funnily) as Lizzie’s father. And Mr. Bingley has been turned into Bing Lee, a successful Asian doctor who’s recently bought a nice house in the neighborhood, and has been targeted with laser-like precision by Lizzie’s mother, who is desperate to find prospects for her single daughters in the suburbs. It’s smart, if a little punny, and nod to the demographics of suburbia (I think Suburbia does this okay, too, though it could use some Asian teenagers as well as its gay Asian principal).

The one thing that strikes me as a little off, though, is the way modern Lizzie ribs Lydia about being a slut. Lydia’s character is unpleasant, but the relish the novel takes in packing her off to a miserable marriage is pretty nasty, and a reminder that, no matter how enduring Lizzie Bennet is, Jane Austen was a woman of her time. One of the things that I liked so much about David Liss’s The Thirteenth Enchantment was its compassionate, but not entirely unrealistic, look at the prospects for a woman like Lydia who would have been considered “ruined.” It may be easy to get romantic about Mr. Darcy’s reform. But I have zero nostalgia for the era’s overall sexual politics.

I wrote about the news that a Jackie Robinson biopic was in the works last year, and expressed some concern that the movie had found its Branch Rickey—initially Robert Redford, now, apparently, Harrison Ford—before its Jackie Robinson, who rightfully should be at the center of the movie. But I am glad to hear that the movie is starting production, and that it’s supposed to reach theaters on April 12, 2013.

It seems like some of the other cast is shaping up nicely. Sensitive hardasses are Christopher Meloni’s wheelhouse, so he should be dandy as Leo Durocher, the manager who laid down a clear line in support of Robinson. T.R. Knight, who knows a thing or two himself about hostile workplaces and coworker solidarity, will play Ralph Branca, the first Dodger player who stood with Robinson in public. And Nicole Beharie, who was just smashing as Michael Fassbender’s coworker and potential girlfriend in Shame will play Rachel Isum, Robinson’s wife. I just am not that familiar with Chadwick Boseman, who is playing Robinson, and I do worry that the movie who will marginalize him in favor of exploring the reactions of white people to a key moment in Civil Rights history. But it is nice for a younger, less-famous black actor to get a shot at stardom through a big sports biopic.

ESPN has an interesting, if somewhat general, piece about whether the NFL could use more female scouts to avoid groupthink in the draft, and to help teams avoid players who might end up making a team atmosphere toxic, rather than helping a squad cohere:

Women, on the other hand, are much less likely to have blinders when it comes to big moves. They also do a better job placing choices in context. In football terms, female scouts might have seen that Vince Young, for all his awesome talent, was not a good fit with the team, coaching staff or scheme in Tennessee.

Another place where the NFL could really use a woman’s touch is with the impossible task of predicting how a newly minted 21-year-old millionaire will behave once he hits the league. Most teams use personal interviews to gauge a potential player’s intangibles — work ethic, leadership, motivation, teamwork — but the results would likely be more reliable if women were leading this process. Shrira says studies show that women are intuitively better at discerning and exploring a candidate’s character. Adds Spencer, “This is the unique dimension women would add to the draft: getting to the absolute heart and soul of a player.”

A lot of the piece is based in general business psychology, rather than in the track records of the very few women (like Linda Bogdan, pictured here) who have gotten a say in NFL. But that research and the evidence of other successful businesses do make a compelling case that any organization might want to consider diversity not simply for its public image, but for its bottom line. Different perspectives can bring not just different ways of making decisions, but different costs and potential problems to light. Myra Kraft famously convinced the Patriots to release Christian Peter after the team drafted the man even though he had a horrible record of violence against women. A scouting corps that included more women might be more likely to weigh past records of such allegations more seriously, not just because abusing women is bad, but because players who get in trouble outside of the stadium lose playing time and mental focus.

There’s no question that it won’t be easy to get more women in the scouting and executive ranks. It’s not like there are no women who are substantially interested in football, but it is a specialization beyond general business acumen. And if, as the article points out, women tend to get powerful positions in NFL teams only if they’re related to the owner, even if they perform well, that’ll likely be a hurdle to convincing other teams that they got their on their own abilities, no matter how sterling those abilities are. Allegations of nepotism tend to stick, even if they’re utterly unfounded. I’m not sure what the way in will turn out to be. But, rooting interests aside, I’d applaud whatever team decided to seek new insight and get some women in the mix. Neither men nor women are collectively perfect decision-makers. But new eyes and new perspectives are rarely a bad idea, and it would be interesting to see how female scouts challenge the existing consensus about what’s valuable in the NFL, and in other sports.

I think MPAA Chairman Chris Dodd is right to say, in the wake of the controversy over the initial R rating given to the documentary Bully (it was lowered to PG-13 after cuts), that the association’s ratings system, which carries great power, should be more transparent to the public. There’s a perception, fair or not, that the ratings weight certain content—like sexual content between gay couples—more heavily in moving towards an R rating, and that the system fails to acknowledge how context mitigates content. That last perception was at issue in Bully: the R rating depended on incidences of profanity deemed inappropriate for teenagers, despite the fact that those profanities were uttered by teenagers and directed at teenagers. More data about how the ratings panels make their decisions would help outside observers determine whether these perceptions of inconsistency and failure to contextualize were true, or to debunk them.

Discussing whether transparency might be a good idea is not the same thing as committing to it, of course. Releasing the exact counts of words that trigger ratings might be one place to start. And while making it clear who’s in the ratings panels might open up the possibility of bribery, it would also let outsiders look for patterns in raters’ behavior the same way political analysts score the leanings of judges. Any other thoughts on what data it would help to have in the open? It’d be nice to have this be the kind of thing that doesn’t just float into conversation and disappear.

The bridge is yours.

-You should be allowed to review The Avengers without being attacked for not showing fealty to it.

-Beyonce really is the world’s most beautiful woman.

-io9 is more confident than I am about SyFy bringing the sci-fi back.

-Yes, Denis Leary. Emma Stone is awesome.

-Shia LeBoeuf and Tom Hardy would like to see you some corn whiskey:

I tend to agree with Amanda Marcotte that torture’s become a dangerous cliche in popular culture, though I think we come at it from rather different directions:

More importantly, torture scenes violate the audience’s trust that the characters onscreen, no matter how outlandish their surroundings, will behave like human beings. On TV, torture almost always works. The victim usually knows the information, and gives it up immediately. In rarer cases, they know nothing but are able to stop to torture by stating this fact. Either way, they respond positively to torture, and somehow the tormentor magically knows when their victim is speaking the truth.

I agree that it’s a problem that torture is shown as being effective in popular culture. But I think that should actually be a second-level objection to torture: the point that’s important to win, and the line it’s important to draw, is that torture is wrong. What actually scares me about torture and violence against prisoners and interrogators in pop culture is that there are settings in which it’s presented as at least somewhat justified. Almost all cop shows involve an officer of the law snapping and doing violence to a suspect at some point. But those actions are generally presented as failures of control, as was the case with Elliot Stabler’s beatings of suspects on Law & Order: Special Victims Unit, or of desperation, as was the case with the beatings of Bubbles on The Wire. When that’s not the case, torture can be an opportunity for a victim to prove their fortitude—specifically, their manhood. In the Casino Royale remake, Le Chiffre’s torture of bond provides an opportunity for him to prove his imperviousness to pain, and to make a joke that emasculates Le Chiffre.

What was interesting to me about the torture in this week’s episode of Game of Thrones, which Amanda focuses on, is the extent to which those scenes were about neither of those things. Joffrey and Harrenhal’s interrogators are torturing people not out of fits of temper, and not because they think there’s information for them to get out of the people they’re targeting. Joffrey doesn’t have questions that he wants to ask Ros and Daisy. The Harrenhal interrogators ask the same set of questions to every person they talk to, no matter where that person comes from or their likelihood of knowing any relevant information. These people are torturing their victims because they enjoy doing so. These scenes are all about giving us information about the torturers, to draw a line between the characters who behave like human beings and those who exist and act beyond the laws that govern the rest of us.

Following up on yesterday’s conversation about the odd tendency of some hipsters to cling to racism as proof that they are edgy, fearless truthtellers, reader BC sends along Lester Bangs’ “The White Noise Supremacists,” (NB: the link leads to a PDF download) published in the Village Voice in 1979. It’s quite the piece of writing, in which Bangs tries to square up honestly to his own past as someone who used racist language and sentiments to project what he saw as a certain kind of coolness, and to examine the persistence of racism in some of the music scenes that he loves. Bangs isn’t perfect here, or elsewhere, but his assertion of empathy as a radical value that transcends accusations of corniness is important to the debates that we’ve been having over the past few weeks.

It’s also an amazing illustration of how, even if there’s less tolerance for outright assertions of white power in scenes that like to style themselves cutting edge, certain kinds of behavior still get mined for the theoretical currency they convey. Bangs writes, and I hope you’ll forgive me for quoting at length from a very long piece:

You don’t have to try at all to be a racist. It’s a little coiled clot of venom lurking there in all of us, white and black, goy and Jew, ready to strike out when we feel embattled, belittled, brutalized. Which is why it has to be monitored, made taboo and restrained, by society and the individual….

I figured all this was in the Lenny Bruce spirit of let’s-defuse-them-epithets-byslinging-’em-out in Detroit I thought absolutely nothing of going to parties with people like David Ruffin and Bobby Womack where I’d get drunk, maul the women, and improvise blues songs along the lines of “Sho’ wish ah wuz a nigger / Then mah dick’d be bigger,” and of course they all laughed. It took years before I realized what an asshole I’d been, not to mention how lucky I was to get out of there with my white hide intact.

I’m sure a lot of those guys were very happy to see this white kid drunk on his ass making a complete fool if not a human TV set out of himself, but to this day I wonder how many of them hated my guts right then. Because Lenny Bruce was wrong—maybe in a better world than this such parlor games would amount to cleansing jet offtakes, and between friends, where a certain bond of mutual trust has been firmly established, good natured racial tradeoffs can be part of the vocabulary of understood affections. But beyond that trouble begins—when you fail to realize that no matter how harmless your intentions are, there is no reason to think that any shit that comes out of your mouth is going to be understood or happily received. Took me a long time to find it out, but those words are lethal, man, and you shouldn’t just go slinging them around for effect. This seems almost too simple and obvious to say, but maybe it’s good to have some-thing simple and obvious stated once in a while, especially in this citadel of journalistic overthink. If you’re black or Jewish or Latin or gay those little vernacular epithets are bullets that riddle your guts and then fester and burn there, like torture- flak hailing on you wherever you go. Ivan Julian told me that whenever he hears the word “nigger,” no matter who says it, black or white, he wants to kill. Once when I was drunk I told Hell that the only reason hippies ever existed in the first place was because of niggers, and when I mentioned it to Ivan while doing this article I said, “You probably don’t even remember-” “Oh yeah, I remember,” he cut me off…

Things like the Creem articles and partydown exhibitionism represented a reaction against the hippie counterculture and what a lot of us regarded as its pious pussyfooting around questions of racial and sexual identity, questions we were quite prepared to drive over with bulldozers. We believed nothing could be worse, more pretentious and hypocritical, than the hippies and the liberal masochism in whose sidecar they Coked along, so we embraced an indiscriminate, half-joking and half-hostile mind-lessness which seemed to represent, as Mark Jacobson pointed out in his Voice piece on Legs McNeil, a new kind of cool…

I can go just so far with affectations of kneejerk cretinism before I puke. I remember the guy in the American Nazi Party being asked, “What about the six million?” in PBS’s California Reich, and answering “Well, the way I heard it it was only really four-and-a-half million, but I wish it was six,” and I imagine you’d find that pretty hilarious too [the you is Miriam Linna of the Cramps]. I probably would have at one time. If that makes me a wimp now, good, that means you and anybody else who wants to get their random vicarious kicks off White Power can stay the fuck away from me.

Just go read the whole thing and then come back so we can talk about it.

President Obama appeared on Late Night With Jimmy Fallon, which was broadcasting from the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, last night to explain his call to halt a pending hike in student loan interest rates—with the help of The Roots and the host himself:

I can’t decide what I like most about this: the suggestion that Congress should get bipartisan “like Kim and Kanye”? The description of Obama as “the POTUS with the Mostest”? Jimmy Fallon shouting out golden-era Jackson 5 by telling the audience “Stop—the loan you save may be your own”? Obama’s total nerd-dad version of the mic drop, the most delightfully decisive move in hip-hop? Actually, I think it may have been the revelation that the Obamas didn’t pay off their student loans until 2004:

The idea that student loans can follow you throughout your life is not an exaggeration. That they can chase you all the way to the U.S. Senate (or the White House), and could stick around for longer if you don’t get a job out of school ought to be frightening, and to inspire compassion, no matter what side of the aisle you sit on.