Rightly or wrongly, there is a perception that President Obama voiced his belief that gay and lesbian couples deserve equal marriage rights today in part because Vice President Joe Biden said as much over the weekend before the administration tried to take back his comments, suggesting they were some sort of gaffe. “Shirtless, drunk-with-power Joe Biden spotted on roof of Naval Observatory, shouting commands at pedestrians below,” Washington observer Delrayser joked on Twitter.

When Biden was tapped as President Obama’s vice presidential candidate in 2008, the reasons were obvious: he was an older, blindingly white Senator with a strong, long list of credentials including helping to torpedo Robert Bork’s nomination to the Supreme Court, an event that took place the year before Obama entered Harvard Law School. His penchant for gaffes—he had previously described Obama as “articulate and bright and clean and a nice-looking guy”—was acknowledged and considered a worthwhile risk given the other qualities he brought to the ticket.

And instead of being an enormous liability, Biden’s volubility became something of a meme. He made the rounds at Inaugural Balls quoting Seamus Heaney. To The Onion, he was a gold mine. The fake newspaper churned out stories about Biden washing a Trans Am shirtless, or getting banned from Dave and Buster’s, or fleeing to Mexico. Biden was apparently aware and appreciative of the stories. The Vice President was a perfect subject of cultural jokes, a tendency that couldn’t have been predicted (ditto for the sudden coolness of Hillary Clinton), but that in retrospect is very, very useful for taking heat off a president accused of being a celebrity and a lightweight. The Vice President is never supposed to overshadow the President, but in matters light and weighty alike, Biden does seem to have created space for Obama.

And so there’s something fitting and hilarious about the fact that Biden is headed to Jeopardy, off to be his likable self for a generation of viewers who weren’t going to be impressed by President Obama Slow Jamming the News with Jimmy Fallon and the roots. Part of this administration’s appeal has been its ability to bridge generations, but whether your thing is trivia games or mic drops, Biden and Obama’s collective arrival at this point is a reminder that we don’t, and shouldn’t, have to wait for generational turnover to see stances, policies, and lives change.

If you’ll pardon me some personal reflections…

In the spring of 2003, a group of friends and I went down to City Hall in New Haven for a hearing on a bill that would have created a domestic partnership for the city. I was eighteen, and I was young, and I thought we would win, easily. Surely this tiny step forward was a non-issue in a Northeastern city. I was wrong. I felt tiny and alone in a sea of the bill’s opponents, who ranged from Latino church congregants to Orthodox Jewish students.

I went home, and we started organizing. Students and city residents got together to start an organization called Project Orange: in New Haven, Orange Street lies between Church and State Streets. We flooded City Hall’s steps with emergency vest-colored t-shirts. We made so many signs. When the vote came on the bill, we made our presence felt on the news. It turns out not to be enough. We lost again. There’s news footage of me crying and holding a homemade sign as the decision comes down, sitting next to my dear friend Josh Eidelson, who grew up to be an awesome Salon and In These Times labor reporter.

That summer, I went home to Boston to alternate between interning at Freedom to Marry Massachusetts and working at Barnes & Noble. Evan Wolfson, who will someday be enshrined in the pantheon of America’s great civil rights leaders, taught me why “marriage equality” was a better term than “gay marriage.” I was at my shift at Barnes & Noble when the decision in Lawrence v. Texas came down, and celebrated with customers there, and at City Hall Plaza in Boston later.

Nine years ago, the big victory was finally decriminalizing sex between people of the same gender. Nine years ago, a Board of Alderman in Connecticut couldn’t pass a domestic partnership bill. Gay couples have the right to marry in Connecticut now. The president of the United States has spoken aloud that he supports marriage equality. We could have a marriage equality plank in the Democratic platform this year. It’s not enough. This is so far from done. But this is so much more than I believed was possible in 2003. And it’s a lot of why I believe in the power of stories to change things. Whether it’s Joe Biden’s conversion via Will & Grace, or the courage of everyone who’s told their personal story to family, friends, or their boss, the President of the United States, the lives of gay Americans are undeniably real, and loving, and worth honoring.

I couldn’t make ROFLCon this year, but frequent resident of this comments section Saul Tannenbaum filed a report on the proceedings that I wanted to make sure everyone saw, particularly for its discussion of how to elevate some of the silliest, most fun parts of internet culture, and to take a more sophisticated approach to misogyny:

As part of a panel discussing academic study of Internet culture, Whitney Phillips of the University of Oregon talks about her work understanding troll culture. Trolls are people who post inflammatory messages in an online community for the purposes of disrupting them or provoking extreme emotional responses. Phillips is careful to say that the trolls she’s studies “perform misogyny,” as discerning their actual motivation is difficult. And she describes the personal struggle that comes from being a woman studying an overwhelmingly male subculture in which rape jokes are common. Yet, as she’s interviewed individual trolls via Facebook, she’s been treated respectfully. She notes that transgressive behavior has a long history and that, except that there wasn’t a defined subculture with which he could identify, Socrates was a troll. Or, as Christopher Poole, creator of 4chan, the web board that’s ground zero of trolling, said in an interview: “People have always been assholes.”

Saturday night, the crowd is entertained by Memefactory, a performance group that consists of 3 guys, 3 projectors and 5 computers. They deconstruct memes using multimedia techniques all leavened with not a little bit of humor. But they turn serious for a discussion of misogyny and rape culture on Reddit…Reddit’s influence comes from the perception of the site as one that organizes random acts of kindness, a massive “Secret Santa” effort and, most recently, as the core force that defeated legislation they felt would harm the Internet. And, of course, Reddit is fountain of memes. But there are portions of Reddit that revel in misogyny, that viciously mock concerns about rape culture, and that assert that men are the oppressed gender. Memefactory suggests it’s time for the Internet to grow up. But their greatest scorn is reserved for Reddit itself. Since self-policing is a core Reddit value, it had no acceptable content policies until, just recently, it was forced to consider what to do about child pornography. Reddit, after long deliberation, decided to ban it, but not because it’s despicably evil, but because its criminality would threaten Reddit’s existence. If that’s your reason for banning child pornography, says Memefactory, you’re doing something wrong.

Sessions like this are encouraging because they suggest a certain geeky self-confidence that’s a necessary basis for growth. If nerds can stop thinking of themselves as an oppressed minority instead of the drivers of some of the most profitable cultural phenomena on the planet, maybe we can do self-examination and self-critique that will open up nerddom to even more people. You don’t have to stop having fun when you start growing up, and evolving beyond stupid default biases can only mean reaching a more sophisticated, more clever level of humor.

The bridge is yours.

-You should read Mere Smith’s diary of approaching pilot staffing season, and everything she’s done to her looks this year in an experiment to see if it matters.

-Law & Order: Special Victims Unit should totally give Fin a backstory.

-Rats. Prometheus may have been the reason we didn’t get At the Mountains of Madness.

-FX might give us a series about a lady serial killer.

-Tom Hiddleston is just ridiculously attractive. Er, I mean, good at Shakespeare:

In college, a good friend introduced me to Against Me! through their very funny song “Baby, I’m an Anarchist“—he meant it as a poke in the ribs about my liberal, rather unradical politics, but I mostly took it as an introduction to a great new band. So I read with interest the news in Rolling Stone that Against Me! singer Tom Gabel is going to begin the process of transitioning from male to female, and will take the name Laura Jane Grace.

It doesn’t feel quite right for me to say I’m excited about this—Grace’s life is her own, and I don’t want to reduce it to an instrument by which the rock and punk communities can prove themselves enlightened or regressive. But I am glad to see someone whose music has been important to me move closer to her share of happiness. I hope this announcement both is greeted with support and starts new conversations about gender and rock. And I am unambiguously excited by the prospect that Grace’s announcement could bring Against Me!’s music to new fans who might not have seen a home for themselves in punk before.

What initially drew me to Against Me! was the way the band explored both the identities we chose, and the ones we feel are imposed upon us, and not in a cookie-cutter “I hate my Mom and Dad” way. “Baby I’m an Anarchist” was one of the first love songs I heard about why a couple shouldn’t be together, that argued that political differences were enough to convince the main character “No, I won’t take your hand / And marry the State.” That was an exciting proposition, even if, like my friend Spencer Ackerman, I was more sympathetic to the put-upon liberal than the singer. In “I Was a Teenage Anarchist,” Grace looked wryly back to a time when “I had the style, I had the ambition. / I read all the authors, I knew the right slogans. / There was no war but the class war. / I was ready to set the world on fire.” And “Walking Is Still Honest” is one of the clearest explanations I know of what it’s like to feel radically out of place, with its chorus that begs “Can anybody tell me why God won’t speak to me? / Why Jesus never called on me to part the fucking seas? / Why death is easier than living / You can be almost anything / When you’re on your fucking knees.”

If these songs were more general, others took on gender identity in more pointed ways. As others have pointed out, Grace’s announcement might not be a surprise to close listeners to Against Me!’s lyrics. In the 2007 track “The Ocean,” Grace sang “If I could have chosen, I would have been born a woman / My mother once told me she would have named me Laura / I would grow up to be strong and beautiful like her,” but that’s hardly the only Against Me! song to allude to gender identity and the desire for transformation. In 2009′s “White Crosses,” the song’s protagonist is “Eye-balled with suspicion by a pencil skirt in high heels, you realize that you’re talking to yourself.” “Spanish Moss,” released the same year, promised “You can always change who you are. / You just need to find some place to get away. / You can forget your name. / And there’s no need to apologize. / 
I caught a glimpse of this life, it could be such a very good life.” I hope Grace finds that the real thing is as good as the glimpse of it:

And maybe Rolling Stone’s handling of the story, which so far seems relatively sensitive in its positive portrayal of Laura Jane Grace and uses the appropriate pronouns to refer to her, is proof that the rock community’s made progress. In 2006, when Rolling Stone published a long look at Lana Wachowski’s decision to identify as female, the magazine portrayed her grappling with her gender identity less as a sensitive process to be treated with respect than as an extension of a sexual relationship between Lana and a dominatrix. Because the Wachowkis don’t speak to the press, Rolling Stone didn’t have the same access to Lana Wachowski as they appear to have had to Grace. But the story was still rooted in basic misunderstanding, obsessively and misguidedly focused on what gossip columnist Liz Smith put it in her discussion of the piece, “the world of transgender sex and kink to the max.” It’s nice to know that Rolling Stone’s become, in the intervening years, a place where Laura Jane Grace would feel comfortable coming out. Hopefully the rock and punk worlds follow suit.

I’ve felt for a while like Ben Affleck’s real promise was going to end up in directing rather than acting, and the first trailer for Argo, his movie about a C.I.A. operation to free some of the people being held hostage in Iran by pretending to film a science-fiction flick, confirms that suspicion:

I do wish Affleck had been able to resist playing the lead role, and not only because, as Arturo Garcia pointed out, the point man on the real Argo operation was Latino, not a white dude from Boston. But the rest of the cast is stacked, whether it’s Bryan Cranston playing a similar government honcho role to the one he had in Contagion, Alan Arkin and John Goodman as mischievous Hollywood players, or Tate Donovan and Clea Duvall as hostages. And a story that’s about the importance of narrative to real-world success is just catnip for me.

But I’m curious to see how Argo will portray ordinary Iranians. Will the movie acknowledge the U.S.’s role in restoring the Shah to power? What about the spectrum of public opinion in Iran at the time? One of the real virtues of a movie like Persepolis, the adaptation of Marjane Satrapi’s memoirs about growing up inside and beyond the borders of Iran, is that it’s a reminder that there’s a difference between a nation’s leadership and it’s people. Given that Argo‘s coming out at a time when American policy rhetoric around Iran has gotten heated, that’s a worthwhile thing to emphasize, and I hope the movie is smart enough to do that.

Well, this makes American politics look positively sober-minded and feminist:

Julia Orayen has posed nude for Playboy and appeared barely dressed in other media, but she made her mark on Mexican minds Sunday night by carrying an urn filled with bits of paper determining the order that candidates would speak. Not that viewers were looking at the urn. She wore a tight, white dress with a wide, tear-drop cutout that revealed her ample decolletage. The image was splashed across newspaper front pages and websites by Monday.

“The best was the girl in white with the cleavage at the beginning,” tweeted former Mexican Foreign Minister Jorge Castaneda, who is also a New York University professor.

Orayen’s name jockeyed for third and fourth place throughout the day under Twitter’s Mexico City trends, where a click revealed her previous work, including an almost-nude spread commemorating Mexican Independence Day in which she appears in minimal garb modeled on images of Mexican founding father Jose Maria Morelos.

Alfredo Figueroa, director of the Federal Electoral Institute responsible for organizing the debate, blamed the incident on a production associate hired by the institute to help with the debate. The institute later issued an apology to Mexican citizens and the candidates for the woman’s dress.

The problem here isn’t really the dress, or the fact that Julia Orayen has posed nude. It’s that the debate organizers thought that what the event really needed was a hot female presenter to kick things off. I can’t imagine it ever crossed their minds to hire a man for this position—because of course we need reminders that often in politics, men are supposed to be the main characters while women are their pretty supporting players—or that they specified professional attire for the presenter. I’d be curious as to what candidate Josefina Eugenia Vázquez Mota, the lone female candidate in the race, thought of the fact that some of her rivals apparently went all goggly-eyed when Orayen came on stage. They, and Figueroa shouldn’t apologize for Orayen’s dress. They should apologize for turning a serious process into a stupid, sexist spectacle.