By Melissa Boteach and Katie Wright

These days it seems like everyone is talking about the latest book-to-movie sensation, The Hunger Games. Set in a dystopian future America, two teenagers are selected from each of the poor 12 districts surrounding a wealthy city known as the Capitol to fight to the death on reality television. One of the highest-grossing movies of 2012, millions have flocked to theaters and bookstores to see the movie and purchase the book.

In The Hunger Games, the wealthy people of the Capitol leverage their power to create a game only they can win. Unfortunately, this is a storyline similar to one that many Americans know all too well. Lionsgate, the studio behind The Hunger Games, seemed to recognize that—they partnered with a number of anti-hunger charities as part of the movie’s rollout, though they cracked down on other advocates who were riffing off the franchise’s themes.

And while The Hunger Games may have surrendered its place atop the box office to The Avengers, the fight against hunger remains a real and pressing issue in Washington. Time and time again, conservatives in our nation’s capital choose to preserve the “invisible benefits”— the tax breaks, loopholes, and subsidies that benefit the wealthy—at the expense of programs that create jobs and help low-income families feed their children and boost our economy.

This week the House of Representatives is expected to vote on a package that would cut more than a shocking $33 billion from the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program. Cuts of this magnitude will impact every household seeking nutrition assistance, the overwhelming majority of which have a member who is elderly, disabled, a child, or working poor. Two million people would lose all of their benefits, and 44 million others would see their benefits reduced; 280,000 schoolchildren would lose automatic access to their free school breakfasts and lunches.
The Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program has helped millions of Americans such as Tara, a working mother who once went hungry for a whole weekend to feed her son, put food on the table. Without it more than 5 million Americans would have slipped into poverty in 2010.

It’s time to tell conservatives in Congress that we’re done playing these hunger games. We don’t need to cut food assistance for families struggling against hunger in order to finance more tax breaks for millionaires and to bolster our bloated military budget.

If Congress is hoping that you don’t know about these cuts or that you won’t contact their offices to push back, they’re going to be wrong. Help us spread the word about these cuts—share our Hunger Games trailer and weigh in with your members of Congress now.

Nearly 45 million Americans are counting on you. May the odds be ever in your favor!

Melissa Boteach is the Director of the Half in Ten Campaign and Katie Wright is a Research Associate with the Half in Ten campaign at the Center for American Progress Action Fund.

There are a lot of folks who think that copyright terms are too long, locking up works long past the point when the people who created them can benefit from their sale. But when Congress passed the extension of copyright, it also wrote in the requirement that after 35 years, artists who gave up their copyrights to the companies they were signed with, often when they were in unfavorable negotiating positions, to get them back. And now a federal court has upheld that ability to reclaim copyrights, despite industry objections that producers should be given a share of rights or that individuals can’t reclaim their copyrights on works with multiple authors, which means that Victor Willis can get his copyright to some of the Village People’s most famous songs back. From Eriq Gardner at the Hollywood Reporter:

It’s a ticking time bomb for the music industry, and thus, the lawsuit by Scorpio and Can’t Stop to prevent Willis from making his own termination became one of the industry’s first and most important legal battles on this front.
In the case, the publishers made the argument that Willis’ copyright pullback should be deemed improper because the songs were created by several authors — not just Willis. They argued he couldn’t terminate a share; that he needed all of the co-authors on board.

On Monday, Judge Moskowitz rejected that assessment. “The Court concludes that a joint author who separately transfers his copyright interest may unilaterally terminate the grant,” writes the judge in the opinion.

The judge adds that the law doesn’t require a joint author to enter into a joint grant with one of his co-authors, nor does the statute provide that “where two or more joint authors enter into separate grants, a majority of those authors is needed to terminate any one of those grants.”

This is copyright working as it’s intended, to help non-corporation people benefit from the work they’ve created. I’d imagine the music industry will continue to fight this and do its best to hold on to as much copyright as possible. But I’ll be curious to see how the business model responds. Record companies are already confronting the fact that artists don’t have to rely on them for distribution. It’s not a good look to be the folks who are fighting artists’ attempts to profit off their own work, as if 35 years isn’t enough.

Veep, HBO’s half-hour comedy about a flailing Vice President starring Julia Louis-Dreyfus, has been on the air for three weeks, but it’s only the beginning of what promises to be a glut of Washington-based and politically-themed television shows. Shonda Rhimes’ Scandal, about a DC PR fixer based on Judy Smith, seems likely to be back for a second season. USA has a stacked cast behind its show Political Animals, in which Sigourney Weaver will play a former First Lady who’s now Secretary of State. And NBC just picked up 1600 Penn, a family comedy in which father had better know best because the fate of the free world depends on it. Despite being set in Washington, it’s not clear how much these shows actually have to say about contemporary American politics—I tend to agree with critics who say that Veep is more an office comedy where the employees happen to work for the Vice President than an examination of the specific and hilarious cravenness of our current political system. If you want to get at that, though, you might have to move beyond the White House and the Old Executive Office Building. Here are five Washington locations that would be perfect settings for television shows that would actually get at what it’s like to work—and fight for what you believe—in the Nation’s Capitol.

1. Congressional Offices: Most of the time, Hollywood loves to portray Congressmen as minor figures who get in the way of the President’s agenda, and who can be dismissed or shamed with a single big speech. It would be much more interesting to flip the script and focus on a Senator or Representative who often serves as a swing vote. You could have legislative fights that come down to the wire in a realistic way, told from the perspective of people who are getting lobbied rather than doing the lobbying, and decisions that are either genuinely heroic or transparently self-interested. And if it’s a Representative, you get a big reelection subplot every two years.

2. Agencies: Pop culture forgets almost all the time that the executive branch isn’t limited to the White House, though it makes an exception for the FBI and national security agencies. You could set an awesome drama in the Justice Department’s Civil Rights, or Treasury’s Terrorist Financing and Financial Crimes division, or a hilarious Parks and Recreation-like comedy at a minor agency like the Office of Personnel Management, whose preternaturally cheery director John Berry is essentially a real-life Leslie Knope.

3. Political Publications: The hell with the noble, Watergate journalistic tradition of the Washington Post, or the kind of supposed truth-telling Aaron Sorkin’s The Newsroom will try to celebrate. If you want a sense of how stories blow up in Washington and minor gaffes become huge stories only to be forgotten again, set a show at a political tabloid like Politico or a website like Huffington Post. Young reporters party hard, scrap hard for stories, and have hilarious stories from the campaign trail. And it’s a setting that lets a show tackle everything from elections, to sex scandals, to legislative fights.

4. Advocacy Groups and Trade associations: Has no one learned the lessons of Thank You For Smoking? If, God forbid, Parks and Recreation comes to an end, someone really should snap Rob Lowe up, make use of his surprisingly excellent comic timing, and write a show where his character is the head of some hilarious or malevolent advocacy group or trade association. Want to know why Washington is messed up? It’s not because of a lack of rhetorical force by the president. It’s about money and distractions, some of them provided by
these kinds of organizations.

5. Think Tanks: Friend of the Blog Chris Marcil actually got me thinking about this list when he tweeted “Has anyone pitched a Washington show set at a think tank? They seem like places where people do nothing but have B-stories and go on NPR.” Some of that’s true, but if you want episodes about where political ideas come from, you could do worse than think tanks. Plus, there’s the hilarity of think tank softball.

The bridge is yours.

-I hope this showcase for women director results in some pickups. I’d really like to see these movies in theaters.

-Spencer Ackerman figures out why the military was reluctant to get in on The Avengers.

-And where The Avengers go next.

-Hollywood: less than thrilled with President Obama’s equal marriage rights waffling.

-Every move Political Animals makes has me more excited for the show.

In the wake of last week’s dust-up over Glee, and a long conversation with me and others, Friend of the Blog S.E. Smith has written a post with an important reminder: there are a lot of people who hit their breaking point with that show much earlier than I did, and for whom pop culture is much, much less attentive to their needs:

Arturo and I both discussed the fact that it’s been heavily criticised since the start for the depiction of people with disabilities and people of colour, but this hasn’t gotten much traction. Glee has also done fairly terribly with domestic violence and sexual assault since close to the beginning, and while it may have been lauded for its depiction of queer youth, as Alyssa points out, even those depictions are sinking into a mire…As often happens, when an issue doesn’t directly affect you or a cause you’re close to, you tend to ignore it. Hence, most people ignoring criticisms from the disability community and people of colour when it came to the show’s depictions of our lived identities.

In the mixed-up world of television hierarchies, gay people are a lot better off than many other minorities. The fights against bullying and homophobia are no longer entirely lonely or isolated battles: participating in them can be a way of gaining social capital in a way that, for instance, the fight for accessibility or standing with poor single mothers of color tend not to be. Gay people are a long way from full equality here in the U.S. and elsewhere, but gay characters appear more frequently and with greater nuance than disabled ones, and Hollywood has more powerful gay men than, say, women of color. There’s nothing wrong with wanting, and pushing for, more and more representative storytelling about LGBT people, a fight I’m fully in support of.

But when, relative to other folks who may be your allies, or who may be members of your community (it’s not like being gay means you can’t be disabled, or that you’re necessarily white), you’re in a position of power, it’s important to be gracious and thoughtful about the needs of other people who feel underrepresented and misrepresented. There are a lot of people who say that Glee has been powerful and life-affirming for a lot of young gay people, and I’m absolutely sure that it’s true. Whatever my objections to the many other facets of the show, its treatment of young gay couples is rich, nuanced, and equalizing. But Kurt Hummel’s story comes packaged with other storylines that marginalize and make small the lives of other people who have less hope of changing their station and less family support than he does.

As progressives, we should want better. Not every cultural artifact has to be about every oppression. That’s impossible, and a lot of subjects would benefit from a tight, stand-alone focus that elevate them as issues rather than using them as a spice in an Overcoming Difficulties Potpourri. The Surrogate, an exceedingly warm, funny romantic comedy about sex and disability that will be huge Oscar bait later this year does precisely that. Girls may not capture all of New York, but it does well on reproductive rights and sexual health issues without—and your mileage may vary—regularly taking a hammer to people who face challenges that its main characters do not.

Things aren’t perfect, by any means. But we shouldn’t feel so desperate for any representation of people who aren’t straight, white, gender-conforming and able-bodied that we champion those that do gravely wrong by other people in the frame. If Hollywood products want credit for being progressive, and they want the awards and accolades and social approbation that comes along with being groundbreaking*, we should have the confidence to demand of them that at minimum they try to avoid doing harm.

*Which is, of course, different from critical acclaim, as it should be. If folks want to be treated as if they have a special category of impact, I see nothing wrong with holding them to a higher standard.

I was incredibly sad to read this morning of the death of Maurice Sendak at 83. It’s hard to imagine that anyone here hasn’t encountered Where The Wild Things Are, whether as the object of a reading of Sendak’s most enduring classic, a reader of it to a child in your life, or even only through the strange, wonderful in its own right, movie adaptation of the book. But Where The Wild Things Are was only part of Sendak’s legacy: as both a writer of his own work and an illustrator for others, he brought new worlds to life and made our own seem a marvelous, even miraculous place.

One of the reasons Sendak’s work is so enduring is that it treats children like children rather than turning them into tiny adults, and captures the real sense of fear and smallness that children often experience. Max enjoys his time with the Wild Things because it lets him flout his mother’s rules, but the intensity of their emotions and the thought of being responsible for them is intimidating. The supper his mother’s kept waiting for him seems a feeble light to drive back the darkness, but it’s enough. Small certainties, which children are still sussing out even if their parents think they’ve been clear, can defeat amorphous terrors. Outside Over There, in which a girl rescues the baby sister she’s been caring for from goblins, is also about being overwhelmed by responsibility and a sense of parental abandonment. In The Night Kitchen may be a perpetual subject of controversy, but it also captures how unsettling our dreams can be, particularly at a time when we aren’t yet experts in our waking world.

Sendak lent his skills as an illustrator to other authors as well, among them Dutch children’s author Meindert De Jong, poet Randall Jarrell, and Ruth Krauss. Whether he was illustrating a young girl’s effort to lure a stork to her village or helping Krauss bring the natural world to life, Sendak made huge contributions to creating the visual world of children’s literature. Whether they know it or not, Sendak is the first artist many children are repeatedly exposed to.

And as a gay man and a Jew, Sendak was particularly aware of how frightening the world could be, even after children grow up and grow into adult power and responsibility. Though it’s a later work, I’ve always particularly loved Sendak and Tony Kushner’s collaboration on Brundibar, an adaptation of a children’s opera first performed in the Theresienstadt concentration camp. The story, about children who team up to chase a wicked organ grinder out of the town square so they can sing to raise the money to pay a doctor to attend to their sick father, is both an anti-Hitler allegory and in keeping with Sendak’s view of children as confronters of a large and sometimes frightening world. The opera’s survival is also a testament to the power of art in arming children for that fight, as fitting a summary of Sendak’s work as I could imagine.

Nielsen’s latest figures are out, and 1.5 million households gave up their cable subscriptions in 2011. That’s not a tiny figure—it’s a 1.5 percent decline—but it’s also probably not enough to convince the cable companies that they should be running scared of alternatives, or that they should reexamine their pricing or anything else about their business model.

In fact, this is a case where the recession seems to me to be the enemy of innovation. As cutbacks go, cable is an easy and obvious thing to eliminate from your budget if times get hard. It’s a non-minor chunk of change, and you can make up a fair bit of the value around the margins or with a Netflix streaming subscription. Even if you buy a single season of a show on iTunes and parcel it out, it’s less money than a month’s subscription, and may feel like you’re spending your money in a more targeted way than you were if you splashing out for a whole cable package. Cable may be less expensive than, say, a family trip to the movies, but it is a fixed cost you can eliminate, rather than a periodic and discretionary one you can save up for as a treat.

Given all of these things, I’d imagine the cable companies view the threat to their business model as circumstantial rather than existential. If cord cutting doesn’t just continue but accelerates once the economy starts to improve dramatically rather than incrementally, and if that trend continues over several years, then they might reassess. But companies tend to feel pain that’s a spur to innovation in a lag after individual consumers feel a pinch that causes them to change their behavior.